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).
I disagree - at a basic level if people are able to tell which products you're picking up the resolution is necessarily high enough that there's a huge creep factor. I am sometimes amazed at what companies will pursue without a glance towards common sense.
I'm a huge privacy advocate and don't think stores should track what you buy at all, so don't confuse what I say next with the is/ought fallacy.
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."
The scandal where Target data scientists bragged to reporters about knowing when teenage girls are pregnant before their fathers broke in 2012, and they said they were doing it since 2002. It was based entirely on data mining purchase histories with rewards cards at the register. No fancy AI or facial recognition needed.
That's fair as far as tracking purchases go, but high resolution cameras while You're in the store could also read your phone screen or other things on your person right? That seems more concerning than normal cashiers.
Yes very fair point. I just had a dystopic thought of dynamic prices (electronic price tags?) that update in real time based on information. Is the person undecided? Brand A bids to lower their price slightly. Is the person looking at the same item on Amazon? Read the price and beat it by 10 cents or whatever. Those are situations where it might benefit the shopper, but I could easily see it going the other direction also. not looking at the item on Amazon? Now you're gonna pay too much. And of course, store the complete history of what strategy works with which people so "the algorithm" can tune for your individual weaknesses.
One creepy thing existing doesn't mean that another thing can't also be creepy. Getting rid of one of many creepy things is still nice even if it's not the only one.
Except all these trillion dollar valuations in the AI bubble are based on the belief that AI is replacing humans, not just outsourcing to cheaper humans.
Of course outsourcing to cheaper humans can be great. But that's not what tech is shilling to the world as "AI" right now.
The grocery industry generally has pretty low margins. Wal-Mart's profit margin is 2.39%.
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.
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
What I mean is: If you're making 5 cents of profit per item, and your workers cost $10/hour then the difference between a profit and a loss is 18 employee seconds per item.
> 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).
Is this satire? It doesn't seem like a fantastic idea to allow someone to remotely pilot a car over a transoceanic Internet link.
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).