‘Amazon Fresh’ allowed customers to shop without going through the checkout. Now it is being discussed whether the secret of the formula was in the sophisticated technology it boasted about or in the thousand Indians who monitored the purchases from a distance.
The history of innovation is made up of successes and failures. Of euphoria, of fiascos and also of unsolved mysteries.
One of the most successful fiascos, which ended up in court for fraud, was Theranos, a company that had created a revolutionary technology for blood analysis, cheaper and less invasive. The company founded by Elizabeth Holmes raised $700 million until 2015, the day a journalist from The Wall Street Journal discovered that the technology was unreliable. And even more grotesque. They were so aware of this that when night came, company employees went around the shopping centers where their machines were installed to collect blood samples and analyze them by the traditional method. It was obvious that the company could not make profits that way. It was a flight forward waiting for the technology to end up working one day (in the most well-intentioned hypothesis).
The case of Amazon with Just Walk Out technology is part of the category of mysteries. Thanks to this technology, which uses a large array of sensors, cameras and other tools that help track purchases, customers at Amazon Fresh stores have been able to buy what they need and leave the supermarket without going through the checkout. Once outside, the company sent them the receipt for the purchase made.
All this technology, according to Amazon, has been possible thanks to artificial intelligence (A.I.), computer vision and the application of deep learning techniques. To determine who buys what, Amazon has had to analyze millions of data in realistic scenarios simulated in different formats and lighting conditions…
But the surprise comes the day that a medium specialized in technology and the insides of Silicon Valley, The Information, reveals that the key to the new technology does not lie in the artificial intelligence model used, but in the thousand employees that Amazon has. locked in a center in India who review what people remove from the shelves through video cameras. According to this medium, around 700 of every thousand sales made in these stores during 2022 were reviewed by the Amazon team in India. A percentage that is too high to be considered a completely automated model.
Asked, Amazon has accepted that, like other artificial intelligence systems, the Just Walk Out system depends on the intervention of human supervisors (moderators) and data taggers, who review transactions and tag images to help train the A.I. models. that make it work. What Amazon has not wanted is to confirm that there are a thousand or clarify how many there are.
This week, Amazon has placed its emphasis on the trust that Just Walk Out technology deserves, to the point of ensuring that it will increase its sales to third-party customers. But the reality is that it is removing it from its Amazon Fresh stores and replacing it with other contactless technologies, which puts the group in a strange reputational situation.
Do humans inhabit artificial intelligence environments that we believe are automated and that operate with apparently sophisticated technologies? There are precedents. As in the case of assistant M, from Facebook, behind which there is constant human work. The trick in these cases would be as old as that of the automaton that played chess.
The Turk was a wooden chess-playing automaton that was designed in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen. Inside was a clockwork mechanism that when activated was capable of playing a game of chess against a human player at a high level. However, the cabin was an optical illusion that allowed a short chess master to hide inside and operate the mannequin. Using an ingenious system of mirrors, the automaton’s eyes sent the positions of the pieces on the board to the hidden chess master. They say that either of the two chess masters could win, but the one hiding under the Turk had the advantage of intimidating the opponent by making him believe that he was an automaton.
Since its birth in 1994, Amazon has changed purchasing habits and has irreversibly transformed distribution markets. Its effect on labor relations has been profound. Working in an Amazon warehouse is hard. Working in the cast imprints character and is an experience that those who have had it do not forget once they have managed to leave it behind. Amazon’s new technology would mean the disappearance of nearby jobs in supermarkets and their replacement by cheaper employees in distant lands. Its relocation.
But the moral of what happened in Just Walk Out can have an even more disturbing reading on people’s privacy. Because if there is something really strange, it is thinking about the possibility that there is someone in India who is watching you when you buy. That is really weird.
