> 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.
Wow - I did not know this. This makes it all a whole lot less impressive and interesting that it was just people off shore watching you.
Apparently this news came out in May 2023. I also was bamboozled into thinking that sophisticated computer vision algos -- that worked -- were doing this.
I'm now picturing the remote workers constantly switching between cameras, studying: Did he put down the can of kidney beans or the can of corn there? Wait, the man picked up the bananas, but then he handed them to the woman in the white shirt. Let's charge them to her account. Wait, she handed them back at 14:42 in aisle 16. Going to switch them back to the man.
All day long, day in day out, for years. I am the last to criticize 'low wage jobs' paternalistically, because I know they may be much better than what the workers might otherwise be doing: perhaps just toiling in the fields for 16 hours a day (or worse: something like 'melting down discarded PCBs to recover trace metals'). But still, I do not think I would want to do this job nor that it was worth it. I get that they were supposedly trying to train an algorithm to do it. I'm glad that they aren't keeping at it any longer though now that it's proven so unworkable.
Edit: On thinking about this tangent, it seems that if global regulation is the only solution, it would make sense to enforce regulation from the ship building side (in western countries), rather than the wrecking side (in developing countries) which will only displace the bad practices to less scrupulous countries. A solution might be sizable amount of money that had to be paid to escrow that could not be released back to the owner until the ship has been disposed of in an environmentally sound manner, incentivizing and funding the proper scrapping of ships. Or perhaps a levy which funds safety practices and equipment for scrapping companies
Uh, really? I was certain that the aftermath of WWII was responsible for establishing a form of global governance (by consensus) via the UN, and then there’s the benefits of free trade agreements that drove economic globalization.
The free trade agreements came after the environmental movements. Claiming environmental movements caused this is too strong a claim. But it is not entirely a coincidence that one followed the other.
Specifically what movements and when? It’s a strange claim that globalization was caused (or even accelerated) by environmental movements. Certainly the UN came before the environmental movements of the 60s/70s. The World Bank and IMF were also established soon after the conclusion of WWII. The wiki article for globalization makes just a couple of off hand mentions of environmental issues. I’ve only ever heard of globalization in an economic context, and I think by convention this is the lens most people view it by
When Americans clamored for rivers that didn’t catch fire and for smog in LA to go away it became clear to corporations that it would be much cheaper and better for profits if they setup factories in poor countries that didn’t require them to stop egregiously polluting. Thus began the momentum for free trade agreements and breaking down of trade barriers.
I used the term “globalization” as a proxy for free trade. That was bad on my part.
I can see how environmental policy could accelerate this phenomena, but surely the asymmetry of labor costs and cheaper/faster shipping is reason enough to offshore labor? Economical shipping seems to be the enabler, and miserly humans, as ever, the cause
The ownership structure for ships used in international shipping is anything but straightforward. For instance, for the the MV Dali (the ship that crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge) you might think we can go after Maersk, but in reality they're only chartering it. It was actually built by Hyundai Heavy Industries in South Korea for a Greek company but later sold to a Singaporean company, operated by a different Singaporean company, and crewed by 20 Indians and 1 Sri Lankan. In this complex web of ownership/relationships how do you exactly "enforce regulation from the ship building side "?
Well as I (naively) suggested whoever owns the actual ship (and thus disposes of it) can claim on an escrow that isn't released until the ship has been verifiable disposed of in an environmentally sound fashion. So if the ship ever is sold to another party, that would be built into the purchase cost (that they could claim this money), even to the final purchaser (the wreckers). Probably some huge loophole or perverse incentive that I haven't thought of, but that's at least one suggestion.
Due to heavy regulations on the shipbreaking industry in Western countries, > 50% of ships worldwide are (or were, when the documentary was made) dismantled in Alang, India.
The industry is extremely polluting (to the environment and the workers) and the working conditions (incl. safety) are dire to put it nicely.
If you did some kind of shell game with 5 different people all passing around their items, then you don’t get charged correctly is it theft? Did anyone ever try that?
I worked for Amazon in Seattle when Amazon Go first launched. As you'd expect, lots of SDE teams made games out of trying to fool the thing in various ways.
A few attempts were successful early on (passing items back and forth, one person moving something to the wrong shelf and another person picking it up, people dressing in identical outfits, etc), but the success rate in fooling the system was very very low. No method of trying to trick it that I ever heard of worked consistently, and it definitely seemed to get harder to fool the longer the store was open.
At the time I thought that whatever algos were being run on the camera feeds were getting better. Knowing that it was basically all manual, I'm not sure what the explanation is for the store seemingly getting harder to fool over time. Possibly just placebo, or people lost interest in trying so hard to fool it.
Probably fewer patrons and similar number of employees in the sweatshops. More eyes per patron leads to fewer errors. Or maybe they trained the best grocery cv model around from having a big high quality dataset, and you were fighting it. But then I'd think the tech would've been passed to whole foods instead of packing up shop, so final guess is sweatshop singularity theory.
> If you did some kind of shell game with 5 different people all passing around their items, then you don’t get charged correctly is it theft?
IANAL but I'm confident the legal answer is "yes", the same as if someone was using sleight-of-hand with objects at a cashier-and-conveyor-belt checkout station.
Whether charges are brought and how easily the case can be proved is another matter, but the intent is what makes it a crime.
It sounds different to me because each person can say they were just trying to buy the items they walked out with and didn’t get charged. Like if you scan an item at self checkout and the machine says it’s free, that’s not going to be theft. At least I sure hope not.
I thought one of the marketing lines was that Amazon was so confident/comfortable in their implementation was that they assumed all liability for mistakes (though as I type this I realise they may have worded it to encapsulate only honest mistakes rather than people trying deliberately to break the system).
To get a little pedantic, assuming such a promise existed, it actually doesn't mean as much as most people think.
A merchant saying "we won't sue you in civil court for the missing money" does not prevent the local government from criminally prosecuting that same person for theft.
American TV dramas often show the police asking people "Do you want to press charges?", but the idea that the question matters is a myth, since victims of crime don't get to decide that. At best, it's a terribly misleading shortening of: "Just for my own private curiosity, do you plan to lobby or press upon your local government officials into pressing charges?"
>though as I type this I realise they may have worded it to encapsulate only honest mistakes rather than people trying deliberately to break the system
Exactly. Retailers generally assume liability for honest mistakes made by their system/employees and sometimes even their customers. However, when people knowingly exploit a loophole for financial gain it becomes fraud. Here's a real example - https://www.wfmynews2.com/article/news/local/greensboro-woma...
> the workers might otherwise be doing: perhaps just toiling in the fields for 16 hours a day
That is robber barron propaganda to make you believe their enslavement of people (by creating the right situation where the people have no choice) is actual good for them.
I originally wrote a long reply, but I'll just say that I don't buy your framing, and I don't think the people who depend on that foreign money flowing in to pay them for their work at the prevailing wage where they live agree with you either.
Right... so the line goes. They're free to go to any neighbouring city that will do the same to them now that we've destroyed the village (by poaching young people in various ways. There are many ways to destroy a city if you are strategic and have financing.)
In these countries the cities are created around the factories etc and planned as part of the development.
You're not free once your subsistence relies on this corporation. It's slavery but because some tokens are being transferred (the food supply is probably also corp. owned--especially in the early stages of the development) it is possible to fool the naive / stupid into think this is not slavery.
What if the alternative to these jobs is not other jobs, but no jobs? If working in such a job is considered slavery, then most of the west also employs slaves in the form of "simple, low skilled" jobs, such as cashiers. Many people don't have many options, and losing even such a job could mean unemployment.
Pratchett really got technology, imo. Sometimes it really is high energy magic, but most of the time it's just labourers you can't see being exploited. I especially enjoyed the line "money dangled is far more effective than money given" or something like that... it's true.
> 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.
Reminds me of the "delivery robots" that weren't really automated after all, they were remotely navigated by cheaper workers on playstation controllers in Brazil and the Philippines driving them on the streets through cameras.
It's just a tech-illiterate journalist who can't seem to understand the difference between "annotators watching and labeling videos to validate the model" vs "people watching the videos live to remotely decide the cost of every user's purchase".
Or maybe they do know the difference, but wanted to bait audience.
If you required a high accuracy like 99.9% to charge a customer, you could have a system that was mostly automatic but still needed human review when the model isn’t confident enough. It’s hard to know exactly what this means without a lot more details, which Amazon is unlikely to provide.
Wonder if that 30% include the cases where someone walks in, strolls around, and walks out without buying something? Which I see people do all the time, interested in the concept.
If it was just a matter of building up a large enough training set and corresponding model do you really think Amazon would be abandoning a technology they spent so much time, money and resources on, in a somewhat embarassing manner?
Sounds like fake-it-till-you-make-it stuff right? This is exactly how I would bootstrap a startup that wanted to do this. Kind of impressed with their scrappiness to be honest.
What I think is funny is that circa 2008 I had a manager who used to work at Amazon who told me that "a surprising amount of Amazon artificial intelligence is artificial artificial intelligence, low paid workers".
I heard this was behind mechanical turk. Sounds like the playbook remained the same.
I'm pretty sure this idea has been kicked around, and is generally seen as not-super-useful because it requires a perfectly reliable low-latency connection.
Phantom Auto did this. They had cars ferrying people around CES 2018 in Vegas driven by remote drivers in LA. Apparently the company folded just a few weeks ago.
Wow - I did not know this. This makes it all a whole lot less impressive and interesting that it was just people off shore watching you.