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.
The Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was never a con. It’s been known for a very long time that it’s a way to outsource human tasks on a large scale cheaply. Like, a very long time. I think I first heard about it like 12 years ago?
Unless you mean the way it exploits poor countries for cheap labor. I wouldn’t call that a con, but it is fucked.
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Just because it was a failure doesn’t make it a con.
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No, what makes it a con is that it was purported to be automated, but the automation was a failure and had to be done by humans almost 3/4 of the time.
No, that makes it a failure.
Yep, thanks
The automated walk out service wasn’t a con. It was a shortsighted, honestly s***** idea, that was never able to be brought past the human oversight stage.
Con requires intent. I’m absolutely certain they fully intended to make it a completely humanless system. They failed and drug their feet trying and now they’ve shut it down.
If it’s a con, what’s their long game? What are they gain from having humans watch the store remotely? Is it tech just so neat that they’ll have a lot more shoppers than a regular store? Do they save so much in on-site staff that it’s cheaper to run than a conventional store? There’s no advantage here that would make it a worthwhile con. It’s a failed moonshot that they ended up manning with people to see if they could make it work that’s all.
That’s not what a con is. A con is a deliberate scam. Amazon’s automated checkout simply didn’t function as effectively as intended. They presumably lost money on the venture because the automation was unreliable. Nothing about this situation was a deliberate attempt to pay over 1,000 employees to check an automated system’s work.
The Mechanical Turk is an interesting story and I’m glad you linked it, but it’s not all that similar.
He means the namesake, not the web service from the last 20 years.
I wouldn’t go that far. They heavily implied that you could make a decent living doing it, not 20 cents per survey or whatever it is.