That line was unintentionally hilarious to me. Like looking inside a TV and finding a bunch of fast-working little people drawing images.
Yup.
I got the chance to go shopping at one in 2018 (so it's been a while). You could tell there was some "reconciliation" happening, because your receipt didn't show up until 20-30 minutes after you left. My guess is that this was some person via mechanical turk crawling thru the data and indexing what you -really- bought.
Of course, my colleague and I (who were working on computer vision at the time) did stuff like take our bags off, put them in the middle of the floor, and roll a can of soda into the bag, just to see what would happen.
I'm many jurisdictions this could be enough to get you prosecuted for shoplifting if it evaded payment.
There have been some cases of self checkout prosecution too. They don't need any proof of intent. Even regular errors can be prosecuted.
Volunteer to work for free, with bonus legal liability, as a self-service cashier.
So convenient!
In Common Law jurisdictions, there's no intent required for prosecution of alleged theft, but there absolutely is intent required for conviction! Anything else is a miscarriage of justice.
So yeah, there's a lot of miscarriage of justice, or at least potential for it. Nobody really cares until it happens to them.
(This article is not the AWS service by the same name, though by the time you conclude reading the Wikipedia page, it should be obvious where the AWS service got its name, and what it does.)
Imagine that next time you are drunk, you can hire a driver who will drive you back home remotely (along with some AI to stop the car in case connection goes away).
They already have perfect resolution and data retention of everything you buy at checkout time when it's scanned, plus they can verify your identity rather than have to rely on facial recognition or other things. I don't think this is any creepier than what they already do so from their perspective it is "common sense."
Imho more like an anecdote than a sourced story, but a good one nonetheless.
Maybe not a bad idea - it is a step towards autonomous driving, and will probably ensure drivers have less unintentional down time.
Of course outsourcing to cheaper humans can be great. But that's not what tech is shilling to the world as "AI" right now.
Is this satire? It doesn't seem like a fantastic idea to allow someone to remotely pilot a car over a transoceanic Internet link.
If you go into a grocery shop to grab lunch, spending $8 on 4 items, and they make 5 cents of profit per item? They need to run an extremely lean operation.
Or target price-insensitive customers, I suppose.
they simply need to run a good ordering/inventory system. If they sell every item (on average) in each store every week, that's 2.39% return on the value of the inventory investment each week, or 52*.0239 or over 100% annual return on money they borrow for free because the store pays its grocery bills to suppliers in arrears, net 10 days, etc
Which is not much.
That’s what it’s actually like. It’s just strictly more work than simply having a cashier.
> 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. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
But who knows, tech articles are so inaccurate that it might as well have been some misunderstanding regarding how the labeling/training was done.
I work in the CV industry and this was a very badly kept secret. There is absolutely no financially feasible way to run something like this with current CV
Of course, costs change with time, but right now I don't see how this sort of application could approach being financially feasible.