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Amazon Go

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Re: Amazon Go

#591

Post by hodgesrm »

crazypyro wrote: post #429
delegate wrote: post #387

Look, I know this might not be a popular view here on HN, but I think this is useless. And bad. I'm not talking about the technology behind it (I think it's an amazing achievement).. I live in Barcelona and I have at least 5 medium-sized supermarkets within 5 minutes walking distance from my home. Plus there are several smaller shops that sell fruits and vegetables. I know all the people who work in these supermarket…

Trying to save jobs that are no longer the most efficient way of solving a problem is not the way to promote the value of humanity, in my opinion. People want groceries as cheap and fast as possible. They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction and forcing the majority of people to pay extra for something that only the minority get value out of is not a competitive strategy. If humanity were to take your…

Looking purely at local transaction costs neglects externalities and can lead to very bad outcomes.

I don't see a huge difference between valuing interactions vs. having workplace safety standards or requiring that employers provide health insurance. Both of them raise transaction costs and eliminate at least some economic models because we as a society have decided we don't like the outcome. The sticking point is usually how to do it fairly.

Edit: clarification of point

Re: Amazon Go

#593

Post by JimDabell »

delegate wrote: post #387

Look, I know this might not be a popular view here on HN, but I think this is useless. And bad. I'm not talking about the technology behind it (I think it's an amazing achievement).. I live in Barcelona and I have at least 5 medium-sized supermarkets within 5 minutes walking distance from my home. Plus there are several smaller shops that sell fruits and vegetables. I know all the people who work in these supermarket…

And textile workers were put out of work in the 19th century because new machines rendered their jobs obsolete. But would you really argue that we should roll back back 200 years of progress in the textile industry just to employ more people? What about the fact that textiles would be vastly more expensive and of limited quantity? Do you choose to have all of your clothes hand-woven or do you let technology take those jobs?

The only real difference here is that it's a technology you didn't grow up with that is putting people out of work, so it's seen as unusual to you. We make this choice of technology over manual labour in virtually every industry every single day. But it's normal because we grew up with it. And the kids that grow up with this technology today will see this as normal too. Eliminating cashier jobs in supermarkets isn't fundamentally any different to eliminating textile worker jobs in the 18th century.

Re: Amazon Go

#594

Post by TulliusCicero »

joezydeco wrote: post #322
TulliusCicero wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you walk out, the items are recognized and tallied by a large RFID sweep. But the video clearly shows the items being recognized as someone takes them from a shelf (and puts them back). The items don't need to be recognized at the time you walk out, the store just needs to know that you've walked out.

You mean that floating list in the air? I think that's just visually giving you an idea of what's happening. Like I said earlier, I'm giving a simple naive presentation of how the system might work. Or, at the least, how I would design it without dealing with finicky shelf sensors. Ask anyone that has ever worked in a hotel with in-room minibars how well those things pan out in real life. Unless that store is just a…

> You mean that floating list in the air? I think that's just visually giving you an idea of what's happening.

A friend at Amazon said he tried to trick it by taking two items at a time and it got it right every time, so yeah it does appear to track when you take the items.

Re: Amazon Go

#595

Post by guntars »

CrLf wrote: post #500
Ph0X wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point isn't that we save 2 minutes, it's that there's now 10 less job we need. And that may seem as a negative at first, but the idea is that as more and more job get automated, prices should go down until the point where people will not have to work full weeks anymore, or rather, focus on learning and reaching higher education, rather than doing dummy work all day (aka just scanning items non stop for 8 hours).

The Earth's population isn't getting any lower, those 10 jobs lost mean 10 people that will need support from the rest of society, just to survive. It's utopian to think job losses mean everybody gets their workload reduced, as this has never happened before. Automation has never reduced anybody's workloads. In fact, every reduction has happened to either eliminate de-facto slaves (industrial revolution) or because e…

They already need the support of the rest of society. No one survives on their own anymore. Automating a job like this gives more time and money back to people who buy groceries, which is almost everyone. Some of that can be used to support the lost jobs while they find something else to do.

Re: Amazon Go

#596

Post by tspike »

slaveofallah93 wrote: post #541

Luddite fallacy.

> In 2013, professor Nick Bloom of Stanford University stated there had recently been a major change of heart concerning technological unemployment among his fellow economists.[61] In 2014 the Financial Times reported that the impact of innovation on jobs has been a dominant theme in recent economic discussion.[62] According to the academic and former politician Michael Ignatieff writing in 2014, questions concerning the effects of technological change have been "haunting democratic politics everywhere".[63] Concerns have included evidence showing worldwide falls in employment across sectors such as manufacturing; falls in pay for low and medium skilled workers stretching back several decades even as productivity continues to rise; the increase in often precarious platform mediated employment; and the occurrence of "jobless recoveries" after recent recessions. The 21st century has seen a variety of skilled tasks partially taken over by machines, including translation, legal research and even low level journalism. Care work, entertainment, and other tasks requiring empathy, previously thought safe from automation, have also begun to be performed by robots

Technological unemployment is far from a settled matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment#21s...

Re: Amazon Go

#597

Post by btilly »

delegate wrote: post #387

Look, I know this might not be a popular view here on HN, but I think this is useless. And bad. I'm not talking about the technology behind it (I think it's an amazing achievement).. I live in Barcelona and I have at least 5 medium-sized supermarkets within 5 minutes walking distance from my home. Plus there are several smaller shops that sell fruits and vegetables. I know all the people who work in these supermarket…

When supermarkets came into existence a century ago, people were used to neighborhood grocers. You'd walk in, tell the grocer what items you wanted, the grocer would go back, get your bread, eggs, whatever, bring it up, and then ring you up. These people had worked hard, were well known in their towns, and were generally respected.

There was therefore a lot of resistance to self-supermarkets. Where people had to go and select their own items off of the shelves. The concerns expressed were the same as yours.

We don't miss the neighborhood grocers. People have come to expect and demand a variety and quality of goods that the old grocers could not hope to match, at prices that the grocers again could not match. The descendants of those grocers have new kinds of jobs, and on average a level of wealth that again grocers could not hope to match.

It has been the same story with every kind of automation. From the Luddites opposing weaving machines that brought cheap clothing to the loss of telephone operators to the development of self-service kiosks today.

I also live walking distance from supermarkets. I also joke with cashiers. But at busy times of day, waiting in line can take me longer than it takes to go to/from the store and select items. You don't mind the wait. I do. Amazon Go seems like a great idea to me.

Re: Amazon Go

#598

Post by deckar01 »

ncallaway wrote: post #330
deusofnull wrote: post #306

What happens if someone sneaks into the store without an amazon account and walks right the hell out with whatever they want? Not a criticism, just curious what we speculate the theft prevention systems used here might be.

> What happens if someone sneaks into the store without an amazon account and walks right the hell out with whatever they want? This is also a perennial concern at any tradition grocery store as well. Presumably, in a system that operates primary off of computer vision, you would: A) Be able to quickly detect an unrecognized person in the store and alert security, and B) Have very good video evidence of the person co…

"On the charges of shoplifting from Amazon Go, you have been found guilty. You are hereby sentenced to 3 years of Amazon Prime membership."

Re: Amazon Go

#599

Post by chongli »

delegate wrote: post #387

Look, I know this might not be a popular view here on HN, but I think this is useless. And bad. I'm not talking about the technology behind it (I think it's an amazing achievement).. I live in Barcelona and I have at least 5 medium-sized supermarkets within 5 minutes walking distance from my home. Plus there are several smaller shops that sell fruits and vegetables. I know all the people who work in these supermarket…

Please, please don't ever forget this: the people who work at your grocery store are nice because they would be fired if they were rude to you. You may think they are your friends but they really aren't. They would not be there if they weren't getting paid for it.

Re: Amazon Go

#600

Post by zenware »

stevenmays wrote: post #172
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wouldn't trust 'picked up off the shelf' detection, not without the whole thing looking like a giant vending machine. RFID tags on products probably works better.

I think RFID tags are too expensive to put on every product. I may be wrong on this.

Most libraries RFID all their books now so you can just drop them on a scanner that detects all the books you have, swipe your library card and go.

I don't think that's actually what Amazon Go is doing though.

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