AI’s Dark Secret

Behind every freakishly algorithm is a group of often underpaid and overworked “digital serfs” busy labeling and reviewing the data streams that make the technology work. Expensify SmartScan for receipts? In 2017, someone discovered some of these receipts turned up on Mechanical Turk.

Amazon announced last week that it’s shutting down its “Just Walk Out” technology that powered the experimental Amazon Go shopping experience that removed the need for cash registers and cashiers in stores. When it was launched, Amazon claimed that an array of cameras was feeding which items which items were taken off the shelf so they could later be charged to the account of the person scanning their Amazon ID as they walked in.

As with any new technology, there was quite a bit of hesitancy to embrace this new way of shopping that didn’t quite “feel” right.

Saturday Night Live even spoofed the tech as skeptical New Yorkers were again confronted with “this will never work in reality” use cases dreamed up by big tech.

Now we learn, six years later, that the technology never got off the ground.

The Information revealed the myriad tech problems Amazon was still having with the idea six years after the initial announcement. The report said that “Amazon had more than 1,000 people in India working on Just Walk Out as of mid-2022 whose jobs included manually reviewing transactions and labeling images from videos to train Just Walk Out’s machine learning model.

Amazon Fresh kills “Just Walk Out” shopping tech—it never really worked

While it’s funny to poke fun at a “fake it ’til you make it” business ideas that never reach sustainability, there is a real cost associated with a deep-pocketed company leveraging their brand and technology to launch a new way of doing business that relies on low-cost offshore labor masked behind a shiny new AI. Think of the stores put out of business during the six years Amazon was paying offshore workers to ring up purchases for Amazon Go customers. What about the poor souls doing the mind-numbing work of tagging items by watching a livestream from a camera on their monitor in the middle of the night, totally removed from human interaction?

All of these are, separately, quite funny stories. But collectively they paint a picture of a society, and a culture, utterly unequipped to register the violence that is being done to it, merely because historical process is draped in the ribbons of “technology”. This violence is enacted simultaneously on the high street and the global stage. What makes me angry about how often we keep falling for it is not merely that we should know better, but what the costs of doing so actually are.

So, Amazon’s ‘AI-powered’ cashier-free shops use a lot of … humans. Here’s why that shouldn’t surprise you

Amazon has issued a statement on the news to clarify while they are shutting down the “Just Walk Out” platform, they will keep the stores cashierless but, instead, ask the shoppers to tag items as they put them in their tech-enabled Dash Cart grocery carts used in their Whole Foods stores.

So instead of someone in an offshore facility doing the work, we’ll be doing it for them instead.

UPDATE: offshore cashiers are still a thing