Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with “Just Walk Out” technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday. The company’s senior vice president of grocery stores says they’re moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with.
Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
Maxwell Zeff
Behind every Silicon Valley innovation are underpaid poor people.
What’s your job? I’m a remote checkout.
I think the main issue I have with this is Amazon intentionally misled people to think this was Technology driven. Either AI or some clever barcoding. The fact that at the end of the day they (under)paid a person to follow you round the shop so you didn’t have to use the checkout is exploitative and not the social revolution it was made out to be.
They probably thought they could fully implement it in AI later, but like Full Self Driving AI, anyone that understands the real capabilities of current AI knows it was never going to happen.
dark2,
Or, they just bet on the wrong horse and their advantage may not have been as strong as they anticipated. Consider their competition: it’s not just humans cashiers anymore. Their competitors were probably saving even more money with far simpler technology: self checkout. Once the “futuristic cool factor” fades, the winner is likely to be decided by basic economics: which is cheapest and most profitable. It’s possible that both humans and AI lost this round.
Can you believe the audacity, stealing AI jobs like that.
Sarcasm aside, that store was simply a scheme to offshore domestic cashier jobs to India. And to think they got reporters and youtubers to cover that and promote it. It’s not surprising for companies to offshore jobs like this, but doing so under the guise of automation…it caught me off guard too.
I was talking to my brother about the Waymo automated taxis. I’ve never seen one but apparently they’ve become very common in parts of California. Some people may not realize they have remote drivers that can take over. He said remote operators spoke to him once, but doesn’t know how often they watch/intervene in general. It makes me wonder about things like Waymo’s driver to car ratios. I’ve been rattling on about how AI doesn’t have to be able to do 100% of the job to be effective, it can still displace massive numbers of workers by multiplying the productivity of fewer workers. 1 employee with AI offloading might replace dozens of other employees.
@Alfman
Yes, the deception is the real issue not the outsourcing of jobs.
But, it’s no different to Meta, Youtube or Google loading up on low cost labour in the Philippines or similar and then claiming they have “Smart Systems”, actually they do have smart systems they just leave out a critical description “human powered smart systems!”
It’s probably my fault. Shopping is my get away. I’ll spend an hour and a half walking through the store to buy 4 items. I was probably driving the watchers insane, and Amazon couldn’t afford the therapy bill. If they would have just changed their strategy to “gambling on wether I actually bought the item or not”, they could have had a successful business plan.
Yeah, thinking about that too. Like the time I spent maybe an hour picking out 4 items, then dropped my bag destroying the pasta sauce and everything else in it, and I had to start over again. Or the many times I took the timing as a challenge and raced through the store and tried to get the system to mess up. I didn’t know I was making other peoples lives miserable. Sorry anyone reading this that had to put up with my Amazon fresh shenanigans.
Also, it kind of makes sense if you went through the first Amazon Go stores and then the Amazon fresh stores. The newer Fresh stores had *less* sensors than the older Go ones. Which I thought was crazy, now I understand why.
Thom, you have become very cynical. While, yes, there are tons of shit out there, it’s important to also remember that not everything is should be assumed to be. It’s just a very sad way of looking at the world.
In this case, I don’t know anything about these just-walk-out stores, but I would not be surprised the human labelers were used to verify the software, which is entirely legit.
As for the poor people comment, would you rather have these people not have jobs at all? It’s just free markets.
@drstorm
It’s not really a free market, because those people do not hold the same freedoms and rights as others around the globe.
What is the suicide cost of buying the latest Apple iPhone, or of Meta policing FB paedophilia, all processes sold to us at a premium as “Smart” and “Advanced” but really using low cost labour?
The cost of labor is also dictated by the market. It is the conditions and policies of foreign countries that set the prices for services. Buying those services does not set the policies or conditions.