- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- 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.
That immediately reminded me the story of the Mechanical Turk. Check the link for further info - to keep it short both are ways to hide human labour behind alleged automation.
You linked to the original Mechanical Turk. Perhaps you already know this but Amazon actually runs an Mechanical Turk service:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk
Yup, that’s intended. The original Mechanical Turk was a con, just like Amazon’s “just walk out” service.
The Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was never a con. It’s been known for a very long time that it’s a way to outsource human tasks on a large scale cheaply. Like, a very long time. I think I first heard about it like 12 years ago?
Unless you mean the way it exploits poor countries for cheap labor. I wouldn’t call that a con, but it is fucked.
I wouldn’t go that far. They heavily implied that you could make a decent living doing it, not 20 cents per survey or whatever it is.
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
He means the namesake, not the web service from the last 20 years.