Edit: Sorry, I misread your comment, I understand what you mean now! Original comment maintained as a lesson for me to improve my reading comprehension.
Oh, didn’t you hear? Just Walk Out was pretty much vaporware, the system was powered by thousands of people in third world nations watching customers through cameras and remotely managing their virtual basket. Basically it was just offshoring of the cashier.
I wonder if the concept could still be useful. It fails if the goal is removing human workers, but the tech basically enables “cashiers” to work from home, and that’s a win for the cashiers who’d like that.
But no one is going to invest in a win for the cashiers, and if they did, then like we saw, it would be outsourcing the work to third world nations, rather than local people having the ability to work from home…
Considering the costs of implementing it (installing a billion cameras), it doesn’t really make a lot of sense - self checkout makes much more sense, but of course until we deal with the elephant in the room (capitalism), automation is more of a bad thing than a good thing.
At least the “just walk out” was a genuine attempt at the tech, created long before the AI craze. Still failed, but they weren’t following a fad.
Edit: Sorry, I misread your comment, I understand what you mean now! Original comment maintained as a lesson for me to improve my reading comprehension.
Oh, didn’t you hear? Just Walk Out was pretty much vaporware, the system was powered by thousands of people in third world nations watching customers through cameras and remotely managing their virtual basket. Basically it was just offshoring of the cashier.
I wonder if the concept could still be useful. It fails if the goal is removing human workers, but the tech basically enables “cashiers” to work from home, and that’s a win for the cashiers who’d like that.
But no one is going to invest in a win for the cashiers, and if they did, then like we saw, it would be outsourcing the work to third world nations, rather than local people having the ability to work from home…
Considering the costs of implementing it (installing a billion cameras), it doesn’t really make a lot of sense - self checkout makes much more sense, but of course until we deal with the elephant in the room (capitalism), automation is more of a bad thing than a good thing.