Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/03/amazons-ai-powered-just-walk-outcheckout-option-turns-out-to-be-1000-workers-watching-you-shop.html
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I’m starting to think that the capitalist system never really moved past the old PT Barnum / carnie days? Like, we keep paying to peak behind the curtain, thinking we’ll finally see a real, live mermaid, only to be foiled again by a doll clumsily hammered to a dead fish…
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AI, the new mythology.
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Can’t we just go back to like comics being our modern mythologies? I liked that much better.
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I wonder if they got preferential rates on Mechanical Turk?
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Rather men, women and children (prob).
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It’s a little frightening to know that Amazon, with almost limitless budget, couldn’t develop AI good enough to do this, while knowing that many US companies are tossing out workers for AI because the c-suite thinks it can do anything.
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When we said it was AI-powered to protect your privacy we actually meant that humans would be covertly surveilling your every move.
yeah, there have been more than a few recent instances of “And s’all cunningly automated!” which turned out to be ‘patched’ by banks of (likely underpaid) humans fixing all the edge cases; and leaving some of us to wonder if the edge cases weren’t the ones that didn’t require ‘fixing’. Here’s gizmodo attempting to summarize these. fair warning: it’s one of their @#$ slide shows. plus there’s the irony that gizmodo is probably using human/mechanical-turk patched A.I. themselves.
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and lo’ : “Vay” [linky]
German firm starts remote-driving car service in Las Vegas
January 17, 2024
The startup Vay has launched its first commercial service in the city of Las Vegas. The company’s “teledriving” involves a human driver controlling the vehicle remotely from a physical steering station miles away.
(really gotta wonder what occurs when the internet link is lost in the middle of a tricky left-turn)
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But why, tho? Well, obviously, to be ‘disruptive’, and have people running 2-3 vehicles at a time, cos there’s no fucking way it’s cost effective to build out a remote driving system unless you do that. It’s still stupid and they need punching in the nuts.
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It’s shenanigans when they call something AI powered while they are still training the models.
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I admit to being somewhat suspicious of this claim. It seems to come from a single source (GIzmodo) with no evidence given. I mean, it’s certainly possible…but I’m not willing to believe it immediately.
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From 2017 by the way.
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I’m not even sure why you need AI to do this. Building a smart cart with an integrated bar code scanner could have been a thing more than a decade ago. Now you could it all through the Amazon app on your smart phone. And honestly I want to see the cost somewhere that isn’t on my virtual receipt. Real brick and mortar stores screw up pricing enough as it is that I either need a way to make the decision not to buy it or have someone I can argue with. Amazon isn’t going to be any better than the grocery stores who have been doing it for +50 years.
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Wait, aside from the fact that three of those terms are essentially synonyms, what the hell are they using AI to generate? Trust?
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Amazing how techies can take something straightforward - buying groceries, getting a cab, and turning it into an “AI automated” experience that requires a bunch of tech, infrastructure and a remote team replacing a single worker, at greater cost. I suppose the intent with both was that the human workers would train themselves into obsolescence, but then that doesn’t happen…
Currently the Waymo taxis in SF require 1.5 remote workers per vehicle…
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