If I’m remembering correctly, Julian Barnes’s novel Staring at the Sun imagines a future (already in our past by now, I think) in which people can ask for the Absolute Truth from some computer in a building, but it turns out there are really humans typing away behind the scenes. 
When it gets to this point, I'm going to be begging @krankykanuck.bsky.social to mentor me in grocery shopping from home.
He's a master. He can give drivers 20% tip and STILL get his grocery bill less expensive than ours!
There was a really good SNL skit/fake commercial for stores like this a few years ago -- essentially it was people of color too scared to trust that they could walk out safely -- one guy left some cash on the gate as he exited.
This is very common in the semi/autonomous industry. Delivery bots are piloted manually as well.
The process helps to normalize and inform a business practice in front of users before the tech gets to a fully autonomous stage that can mostly error-handle itself.
Not as bad a gig as when Pringles shifted their chips to Olestra several decades ago and testing involved checking underwear for sharts by participants. Yeah, verify that.
I'm pretty sure this is how Google was processing Google Assistant voice commands in the past as well. Suddenly as AI got better, their results got worse as they flipped that switch too soon and suddenly real computer voice analysis took over.
AI is a Trojan horse for bringing exploited foreign labor into the United States. Everyone involved in pushing AI watched the movie Sleep Dealers and decided "we should do this, actually"
sorry I just noticed that they're instead shifting to having a scanner on your cart so you can "checkout while you shop", a thing that has been in Stop n Shops since at least 2015 and that, I can tell you from experience, sucks and takes longer than being checked out
Every alternatives to getting checked out takes longer. I can’t even pack the items in a bag while my husband uses the self checkout machines because the whole thing locks down if you pick an item up from the counter. Idk why he insists on making us go thru the self checkout every time 😑
Also it costs the store more and people hate doing unpaid work and they still need a cashier there because inevitably something goes wrong or someone wants alcohol etc.
My cousins, who worked at Target, said they can check out faster at a till because they don't have to wait.
I can't get to the article Gizmodo links to, because it's behind a $50/month paywall, but if they're labeling videos they're not doing the checkout live, they're building training data for the model that does the automated checkout.
I think the video feed was live.
"It often took hours for customers to receive receipts after leaving the store, largely because offshore cashiers were rewatching videos and assigning items to different customers. The system of scanners and video cameras in each store is also incredibly expensive
If they're rewatching videos, that's probably live, although we're parsing a lot of meaning from a Gizmodo article.
My guess is they had a model, it would flag any activity it was confused by for a human to look at, and that turned out to be more activity than they'd like.
Perhaps. There's also only 40-50 of these stores total so 1,000 people seems like a lot if they're only watching videos the machine throws up an error on. Thanks to paywalls we'll just never know
Yeah, I'm guessing given that it's Amazon they did not go to market without a plan to fully automate this, it just turned out to be a lot harder than they expected.
i agree in principle, but don't you think your revelation is a little ivory tower? why did the indian folks accept the job in the first place? simply wanting everyone to get paid as much as you do, doesn't change the fact that some people get paid way less than you do. 8bil is a massive distribution
For years, the advice from VCs has boiled down to "fake it until you make it" as far as tech goes. Rather than spend a lot of time and money up front building new things, pay someone to do it.
you're trying to tell me that the company who invented Mechanical Turk, and had the audacity to *call* it Mechanical Turk, may have in fact been paying people behind the scenes to fake their "AI"? inconceivable
Wow I remember the first implementation of this tech 10ish years ago. It generated some extraordinary amount of data that was pumped into recognition tech. Cameras everywhere and it was touted as advanced CV and ML. So the algorithms failed and couldn’t work better than a building of humans.
Ain’t it the stupidest thing ever? Every goddamned thing is a stupid grift by lazy assholes who got lucky on a prior grift, and now have influence over moronic executives who don’t know anything about anything except they somehow are revered for “business acumen” and get to shape civilization.
I know ppl who beta tested this in Seattle. They had to go in the shop wearing a big cowboy hat or other weird accessories and do random stuff like shake another shopper's hand to see if the operators could still ID the products
i seriously don't get it. like at Uniqlo everything has a little RFID in it and you just dump it all into the bin at the end and the little screen shows everything in the bin and the price. why didn't they just do something like that?
Yes and no. There are bots here, but they have to be invoked manually. They're unreliable at best these days--my understanding is that their creators are somewhat overwhelmed and that performance is compromised as a result. The "Alt4Me" keyword summons human volunteers for help.
You know what? That is probably the stupidest way to do offshore cashiers. Too much complexity. The way you do it is so much simpler. You have a register where the belt goes through a box that handles scanning stuff. It has its own little belt section so it can work as a scale.
The box is filled with barcode scanners and cameras. The customer is forced to feed the items through one at a time, especially anything that needs to be weighed. While the register is in use, there is a call center somewhere that has a cashier watching what goes through the box.
If you are using a cart or a handheld basket, you are forced to leave the old one at the start and pack everything into a new one at the end (this sort of thing would reduce theft by a butt ton in current self checkouts, there just isn't room for it).
There's a guy on site for every so many of the machines. Their job is to collect carts from the input side and move them to the output, as well as go tell people they need to put things on the belt spaced out so only one is going through the box at a time.
The problem is it isn't scifi enough and still requires people. It is basically self checkout with extra employees, even if those employees are being paid pennies.
It is entirely possible to automate the checkout process. It has not been done because it is cheaper to have a dude do it.
I tried to tell my parents so many times that it's not AI that will be taking my job it's off shore tech centers. The news outlets keep telling them otherwise.
Comments
He's a master. He can give drivers 20% tip and STILL get his grocery bill less expensive than ours!
40 stores in America
=
~25 people per store, which is more than it would take to staff checkout
If this was truly automated, you would see the tech behind it implemented *everywhere*, like you see with other fad tech trends.
In this case, the biases of Indian surveyors will dictate how this goes.
This is a super interesting pulling back of the curtain. It makes it so much more complicated of a process.
The process helps to normalize and inform a business practice in front of users before the tech gets to a fully autonomous stage that can mostly error-handle itself.
https://www.mturk.com
My cousins, who worked at Target, said they can check out faster at a till because they don't have to wait.
Probably for comically low wages.
"It often took hours for customers to receive receipts after leaving the store, largely because offshore cashiers were rewatching videos and assigning items to different customers. The system of scanners and video cameras in each store is also incredibly expensive
My guess is they had a model, it would flag any activity it was confused by for a human to look at, and that turned out to be more activity than they'd like.
It was one of the keys to Theranos' success.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/
Ah. We're all gonna get run over.
MacTurk, my brain went
Le Mec Turk, my brain associated later.
I had issues but I kept silent.
Does bsky have these bots/accounts that automazically do the alt text thing 🤔
nofeed
It is entirely possible to automate the checkout process. It has not been done because it is cheaper to have a dude do it.
Please remove item from bagging area
Kindly do the needful and remove item from bagging area
Well, I guess if they let cashiers actually sit down in the US it would be different. Self checkout lets me walk around.
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/cruise-driverless-human-assistance-nyt-18467527.php