Shopping: The human eyes inside Amazon’s machine
Amazon has been shortchanging us with its cashier-less store story, said Parmy Olson in Bloomberg. Amazon’s innovative “Just Walk Out” technology was once billed as the “future of retail,” because it allowed consumers to buy items and exit its grocery stores without checking out. The company said hundreds of AI-powered cameras armed with “computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning” were monitoring shoppers’ actions. But Amazon didn’t mention that “it partially relied on more than 1,000 people in India who were watching and labeling videos to make sure the checkouts were accurate.” The cost of all those “human babysitters” apparently got the better of Amazon, which announced last week it is going to phase out Just Walk Out and rely on tech-laden “Dash Carts” instead. Amazon crossed the “fine line between faking it till you make it” with some human assistance and merely “exploiting the hype and fuzzy definitions around AI.”
AI still has a long way to go, said Scott Rosenberg in Axios. The hype around the technology masks the reality that, behind the scenes, the industry relies on humans to “rate AI responses, and those ratings are fed back to the system so it can ‘improve.’” AI experts say that the machines will eventually “no longer need human feedback,” but that’s still a long way off. AI is nowhere near “ready to operate on its own in complex physical environments full of people, like grocery stores or roads.”
Retail also requires a human touch, said Brooke Masters in the Financial Times. It’s no coincidence that most of the “stores that reported unexpected jumps” in retail theft “had ramped up use of self-checkout and sensors during the pandemic.” All those “empty aisles and unmanned registers proved vulnerable” to pilfering. Twenty-one percent of self-checkout users told LendingTree “they have mistakenly failed to pay for an item.” Fifteen percent admitted “stealing deliberately,” and the stores who tried to cut costs by eliminating cashiers have themselves to blame.
And yet, Amazon is far from finished foisting unready new technology on shoppers, said Christine Kilpatrick in the San Jose Mercury News. Those new Dash Carts? They are shopping carts “loaded with sensors and scanners and touch screens” to pay as you go. Really, though, they are “another tech minefield of errors.” First, you have to download an app just to use it. I also found that the in-cart scale was “hypersensitive, which makes it a fussy companion.” The cart “insisted I’d removed a bag of carrot chips” when I’d simply taken my phone out of my purse. Is this supposed to make our lives better?