Amazon’s fancy “AI-powered” grocery stores have been hailed as “the future.” Now, I’m a big proponent of AI, and I think it’s an incredible tool in the right hands, but something about these stores just felt wrong.
Initially, I thought, “Maybe I’m just being old-fashioned and this is something I will need to adjust to. I’ll just give it a chance, make an adjustment to it, and make a tradition out of it.”
I have never seen one of these stores in real life, though. They’ve been a thing happening “somewhere” (probably Seattle), but I’ve never been to one. So I have never experienced Amazon’s “better way to grab & go.”
And I probably never will… because Soylent Green… is people.
You see, I was browsing and saw this headline:
It’s an article by Gizmodo, and to say it is burying the lede is to say that water makes one wet. In the article, it says:
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.
Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. 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.
WHAT? I had clicked on this article because of the weirdness of the stores themselves, but I did not expect to learn that they were not AI-powered, but were instead powered by Indian wage slaves. Also, if I had expected to learn that thing, I would have expected to learn it in the headline, the subheader, or the first paragraph.
You know, the first thing. “Amazon is closing its Go stores BECAUSE THEY ARE A TOTALLY INSANE LIE AND COVERUP!!!” The Amazon-owned Washington Post covered it worse though, NOT EVEN MENTIONING the Indian workers in its article.
I don’t normally write in all caps in my articles, so allow me to excuse my doing so. Further, I don’t have some revelation for you. I could say, “The media pretty obviously serves capitalist interests,” here, too, but that seems pretty obvious.
Instead, I want to leave you with a simple thought: things could be different if we got together. I am only stating hope, yes, but materially speaking, this is what drives history. A class recognizes its interests clash with the class in control.
Consider it.