Silicon Valley wants us to believe that their autonomous products are a kind of self-guided magic, but the technology is clearly not there yet. A quick peak behind the curtain has consistently revealed a product base that, at a minimum, is still deeply reliant on human workforces.
I’m starting to get a bit annoyed by takes like this.
Of course people had to check the automated system. that’s how they are debugged and trained.
The newsworthy part is just that they missed their target goal of reviewed sales. In the end of the trial they still needed 70% review rate instead of their goal of 5%.
The system was still fully automated. But some needed checks after the sales happened. That’s what trials are there for
Or you could, you know, pay a person a living wage to be physically present at the store to assist shoppers and review the sales.
Or, hear me out. Maybe a 70% review requirement is not automation at all. Just saying.
You could, yes. And that should be the criticism.
If you attack them on bullshit terms, you do exactly what they want and they can go “well, those idiots don’t even know what they are talking about”.
And amazon agrees. which is why they closed the experiment down
70% instead of 5% is so far away that it’s pretty clear their system isn’t working. I would understand your criticism if we were talking about 10% vs. 5% but not with these numbers it’s clear this system never worked, even in a testing environment
While you aren’t wrong that every automated system needs human oversight and occasional intervention, when the average person hears “fully automated” or any of the many marketing terms used for these things lately they are going to take it pretty close to face value.
It also doesn’t help that it was largely marketed and reported on as if it wasn’t an experiment, but a solved and working “product”.
Every system will have its own requirements and acceptable margins for error and required interventions, but I think most people would feel that even the one in twenty (5%) goal is a lot for a project like the Amazon automated shops. It would be a lot for any of the automations I come into contact with (and have built) at my job, but admittedly I’m not doing anything as remotely novel or as complicated as an unattended shop.
Beyond that, people have a lot more reasons to dislike these systems than just the amount of human intervention and I think they’re just going to jump on whichever one is currently being discussed in order to express it. Like displeasure that the teleoperation positions are outsourced the way they are, taking even more jobs away from the local population.