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.
It turns out that paying people to observe every second of a shopping trip is a lot more expensive than paying people just to check customers out.
It’s trivially obvious that that would be the case. Paying people to do the checkout costs maybe 5 minutes per customer, total. Paying them to constantly watch the customer is going to be 20–40 minutes per customer.
I’m guessing that they thought they could develop the technology to remove the need for people to observe constantly, and have just now decided that it’s impractical.
What they thought was that they had come up with a way to move the checkout cashier job to people in India so they wouldn’t have to pay minimum wage workers in the U.S.
Pretty stupid idea, but it seems to me that it was just Amazon trying to ship jobs overseas to cut labor costs. Perhaps they thought eventually they’d be able to use AI to screw over the Indian workers too.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with “Just Walk Out” technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday.
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.
However, the spokesperson acknowledged these associates validate “a small minority” of shopping visits when AI can’t determine a purchase.
Amazon Fresh, the e-commerce giant’s grocery store first launched in 2007, has just over 40 locations around the United States.
Amazon’s push away from expensive tests like Just Walk Out may be a sign the company is looking to further expand its presence as a supermarket.
The original article contains 512 words, the summary contains 126 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
So the AI wasn’t good enough and now they are going to do what? Self checkouts?
duplicate of: https://lemmy.ml/post/13989534
ISTG - Technology feels like a bunch of bots just spamming articles from all the tech rags. :(
Weird, that post doesn’t seem to have been federated to my instance properly.
Amazon has grocery stores?
Yes, in America they own grocery stores under the “Amazon Fresh” brand, some of which were famous for their “Just Walk Out” technology, where you scan on your way in, and then seemingly-magically got charged for everything you bought just by putting it in your trolley and walking out. When they first started out, there were news stories about how people even tried tricking it but still got charged correctly. It was never, until now, revealed how they actually did it, with people believing it was probably done via automated camera detection.
It’s sad, this could eventually be automated.
Now people have to waste their lives just manning checkouts.
You’re acting like the people who would be manning the checkouts would be able to live peacefully without a worry now that they don’t have a job as a cashier.
They should be able to get free education and training.
But more automation is always a good thing - more productivity and freedom.
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