- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.world
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.
By “original Mechanical Turk”, I am clearly referring to the chess player inside a box. It was a con because the system was presented as an automaton, when it is simply human labour.
And I am calling Amazon’s “just walk out” service also a con because it was touted as automatic, even if also being mostly human labour.
I am not calling “Amazon’s Mechanical Turk” a con. It is exploitative, as you said, but it is not a con. People know that it is human labour, and Amazon does not try to hide it.
Is this clear now?
Just because it was a failure doesn’t make it a con.
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.
On its own a failure is not a con. The con is to publicly pretend that the failure is not there.
And Amazon is clearly doing the later - read the quote from the spokesperson in the article, it boils down to “The system is automated! «Chrust us lol». The human labour there is just, for, uh… improvements!” Yeah, sure, and the 1770 machine is totally automated too, the chess player there is just the maintenance worker /s