‘Amazon Fresh’ allowed customers to shop without going through a checkout. Now it is debated whether the secret of the formula was in the sophisticated technology of which it boasted or in the thousand Indians who monitored the remote purchases.
The history of innovation is made 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 reporter from The Wall Street Journal discovered the technology was unreliable. And even more grotesque. They were so aware of it that when night fell, company employees toured the shopping centers where their machines were installed to collect blood samples and analyze them using the traditional method. It was obvious that the company could not make a profit in this way. It was a flight forward in the hope that one day the technology would finally work (in the most well-intentioned hypothesis).
Amazon’s case with Just Walk Out technology is part of the mystery category. Thanks to this technology, which uses a large deployment 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 cashier. Once outside, the company sent them the receipt for the purchase made.
All this technology, according to Amazon, has been made possible thanks to artificial intelligence (A.I. for its acronym in English), computer vision and the application of deep learning techniques. To determine who buys what, Amazon has had to analyze millions of data in simulated realistic scenarios in different formats and lighting conditions…
But the surprise jumps the day when a medium specialized in technology and in the interiors of Silicon Valley, The Information, reveals that the key to the new technology does not reside in the model of artificial intelligence used, but in the thousand employees that Amazon has locked in a center in India that review what people remove from the shelves through video cameras. According to this medium, around 700 out of every thousand sales made in these stores during 2022 were reviewed by the Amazon team in India. A percentage too high for it to be considered a completely automated model.
When asked, Amazon has accepted that, like other artificial intelligence systems, the Just Walk Out system relies 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 to clarify how many there are.
This week, Amazon has emphasized the trust that the Just Walk Out technology deserves, to the point of assuring that it will increase sales to third-party customers. But the reality is that it is withdrawing it from its own Amazon Fresh stores and replacing it with other contactless technologies, which places the group in a strange reputational situation.
Do humans inhabit artificial intelligence environments that we believe are automated and operate with seemingly sophisticated technologies? There are precedents. Like that of Facebook’s assistant M, 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 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 dummy. By means of an ingenious system of mirrors, the automaton’s eyes sent the hidden chessmaster the positions of the pieces on the board. 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 into believing that he was an automaton.
Since its birth in 1994, Amazon has changed shopping habits and irreversibly transformed distribution markets. Its effect on labor relations has been profound. Working in an Amazon warehouse is tough. 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 and their replacement by cheaper employees in distant lands. Its relocation.
But the lesson of what has happened in Just Walk Out may make for an even more disturbing read when it comes to people’s privacy. Because it sounds really strange to think about the possibility that there is someone in India watching you when you shop. That is indeed strange.
