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So Amazon Go is rolling out its first location. For those of you not aware, Go is a supermarket that is designed to work without employees, simply walk out with your items and it gets billed automatically to your phone. I think it's fair to say that most of us have been expecting this for quite a while, and besides the /sec issues, there's a whole host of problems surrounding how such technologies will inevitably damage national economies. How do you feel about this development Lain? Within what time frame can we expect to see this crop up worldwide, and what implications does it suggest? Share your thoughts.

Next development of supermarket saving money by having less employees, I see it as the natural progression for businesses following the utility function of profits. I hope it drives a further interest in the idea voting with wallets and people deciding to prioritise other competitors as it offers no real advantage to consumer except that it is a little faster, though the costs might drop significantly due to the low staffing. I wonder if we will anyone will step out critiquing it. Maybe people will get itchy when they see this many cameras too...

>>3787 I don't think they can get rid of all employees. Sooner or later you'll need at least one person to restock the shelves or clean the floors. Which is exactly what german retail chain 'Schlecker' did: one employee per store. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlecker To make it short: they are broke. Not sure the missing service (e.g. I remember the stores being somewhat unclean...) in the stores was the main point that killed them but it certainly was a contributing factor.

I think it's a neat fuarrrking experiment, being completely honest. Do the stores have security? Like, anything to check that you're actually carrying your phone or tag or whatever they use to bill you later? No matter the privacy concerns, we all will learn something from this.

Honestly, the convenience is pretty cool.

>>3791 i think everything is RFID chipped, and you basically have some card/phone that is tied to your account to use the service, and motion tracking biometrics detect time in isles, interest, and mood around products and adverts, in addition to the status of items (in shelf/in cart/ out for purchase etc to gather data on customers preference and shooping habits and the store "to better the shopping experience and assign coupons". at least that's what I recall from the proof of concept years ago. think of the possibilities >wearing a mask and no tech will allow you to rob the store because they cannot tie a person to the item being stolen (until they have police kill bots to apprehend thieves) >walk next to someone and have items charged to them >use a jammer and steal things invisibly its definitely a work in progress. the other part of the system is if I am remembering correctly, there were only a few stores (like in Seattle and one in California and maybe one on the east coast where they beta tested it with amazon employees only (citation needed)

"supermarket" my ass. This is a convenience store for rich people. Its no different than a CVS or a Walgreens with the exception that it sells a brand experience and not a product and you'll never run into a single mother with a WIC card and food stamps. Trader Joes made itself famous with this model. Open a high-end convenience store for upper middle class people who enjoy being positively associated with a niche brand, sell a limited selection of overpackaged goods (plastic sheet wrapped apples anyone?) and convert 1/3rd of the stores footprint to liquor and wine. stores like Amazon Go are not grocery stores, more like stores that sell prepared foods people can then brandish as evidence theyre 'a cook.' Box noodles, precooked meals sauces and bagged snackfoods with high dollar names and claims all serve to deliver a mediocre shopping experience that absolutely no regular human being can relate to. Stopping even for a minute to consider what you would cook from any of these stores if it didnt come in a bag, bottle, or packet of powder leaves you immediately aware of just how little these places actually sell. Amazon Go is predatory, but i cant see how i should care. credit card only is just another way of saying 'no poor people' which isnt practical in this case, as anyone who isnt branded Amazon cattle will simply walk in, buy things, and walk out. Amazon is delusional if they think any major metropolitan police department is going to turn into their personal crimefighting superheroes after 30 years of avoiding the very taxes that fund them. Anyone who actually cooks will see this for what it is: an apple store for people who like canned curry sauce to throw on their minute rice.

>>3799 >the convenience is pretty cool A few years from now why do we need privacy when there is convenience.

>>3803 >be 2020 >amazon has collaborated with WIC to give discounts to all card holders >WIC is now a privatized program using amazon brand RFID chips >information is sold to government to "prevent food stamp fraud" >amazon has a merger with DOW-MONSANTO >AMAZON-DOW-MONSANTO now controls all food from farm to your tummy using their special convenient stores >their only competition is WALMART-CVS-FACEBOOK >your only choices are now yellow packaging or blue packaging you also seem to not see how much free money amazon and friends are getting while cities whore themselves out to get the best and brightest in the tech industry to move their secondary headquarters to them. the amount of free stuff the companies get because "they will generate income" should be a crime, since that money could be reinvested in infrastructure to actually help people instead of trying to get a company to do it for them (when the company is just going to to take all the benefits and move them offshore) t. happening in my city right now

>>3805 I hate this picture. RMS speaks righteousness from the heart. His message does not change based on the fickleness of his audience. If droves of people were to finally come around, he will continue to tell them the same things he always has.

>>3808 He is autist who gets mad at people who ask him a basic question and shouts when his tea got a bit too hot.

>>3808 He is a legend that we don't deserve imo

>>3787 No real surprise that this is happening given how commonplace selfcheckouts have become (at least in my area). I'm not even against the idea of an automated store. When you think about it it's basically just a huge vending machine you can walk into. I know they're gonna botnet the soykaf out of those stores, but if you could pay anonymously with cash and if it were not run by Amazon I'd be fine with shopping there.

I hope this idea won't spread out throughout the world because it's basically a giant botnet: 1. In order to shop there you have to have a phone 2. In order to shop there you have to have a fuarrrking Google account 3. Surveliance is tighter than ever before because now amazon knows that you buy in "real" supermarkets, they can map your purchases to your real identity and most of all they can map your "behaviour pattern" to the things you buy (which is useful to Amazon, because now they can use this information to improve their advertising software) 4. You have to use internet wallets to store your money in order to buy there (i.e no more anonymous cash exchange) Like I said earlier, it's a terrible idea for people who care about their privacy and I hope this thing will die out before spreading.

>>3802 > until they have police kill bots to apprehend thieves The introduction of this kind of retail outlet is sure to hasten and "justify" the introduction of those police robots. Actually it's the same concept in a way, applied to law enforcement instead of retail.

>>3789 wow, welcome to the botnet

I wonder if they are opening it in black majority neighbourhood

>>3812 my boss is hardcore old school, never used social media, does not even have an email, barely maintains a cell phone (and bricked a few trying to remove default spyware), and he came to work ranting about how he decided to go to Starbucks (the only real coffee shop around us) and treat himself to a nice coffee and was pissed that they no longer took cash. I wonder if this will open up a niche "shopper courier service" employment, where people have others enter the botnet on their behalf. >>3822 this would actually be economically feasible, chip food stamps users or give them a collar/bracelet that auto buys things for them, and as an added plus allows you to track their movements around town. absolute surveillance state established. you would be able to automate surveillance and law enforcement to a point to where criminals could be almost instantly dealt with at the clock of the button or without human involvement, all because social systems come with the price of submission to absolute surveillance... and guess how many people would care? on another note, I went to get my hair cut,m and they tried datamining me (asking for my social media, email, name, zip code, phone number, etc.) I think they were actually shocked that i told them i just wanted a hair cut and wanted to pay with cash.

>>3789 >I hope it drives a further interest in the idea voting with wallets and people deciding to prioritise other competitors as it offers no real advantage to consumer except that it is a little faster, though the costs might drop significantly due to the low staffing. I really dislike this sentiment that automation is somehow morally wrong because humans are losing jobs. The morally wrong part is the society which views people as worthless without jobs, and thinks that if their job becomes unnecessary through no action of their own they no longer deserve things like food and shelter. More efficient automation can be a net benefit for society as a whole, which is all the more reason to encourage it by subsidizing and alleviating the negative affects on the displaced workers. If we create robots to do everything for us, we ought to have a cheesy sci-fi luxury utopia, but the way things are going we're more likely to have a gritty sci-fi rich-0.1%-vs-filthy-plebians cyberbunk situation. I don't know if this would be through some special government retraining program, universal basic income, or just full communism now!, but something needs to be done.

>>3825 >The morally wrong part is the society which views people as worthless without jobs THIS

>>3825 I agree with the basic sentiment here but we all know it has never worked this way (so far). Freeing up people from dangerous or dreary work should mean more liesure time but it really means different dreary work is created for us. I don't think automation will ever result in mass unemployment either, not as long as they still need a mass of people to pay for the goods and services generated by that automation. Regional unemployment, yes, but this mobile global economy just means people have to move around and chase the next job. Blah.

>>3828 >The grass is always greener on the other side Your observation that cages built for trapping the middle classes (e.g. debt) don't work for trapping the lowest of society (who don't have credit records) is correct but that doesn't mean they don't have traps of their own. Your conclusion that this means they are not only trying to fight social oppression but are showing signs of success is pathetically naive. >Be honest with yourself, this sort of store would never work in a majority black neighbourhood. It won't work in its current form but it's not hard to imagine how it might. Little jail cells at the entrance to stop thieves escaping for example. If the whole store goes into lockdown everytime a nigger tries to steal a loaf of bread the ghetto will starve until they respect the new system.

>>3790 > restock the shelves or clean the floors. Robots can do that. Bar codes and pre-set item locations will make restocking easy for them, and roombas have existed for a while.

>>3802 >everything is rfid chipped and everything is billed on your account I can see this becoming a chip on every person, everything on one chip. All the data your phone stored on that chip. Reminds me a lot of some cyberpunk novel.

>>3832 if you think roombas do as good of a job at cleaning as a human would you deserve what's coming to you

Linus Tech Tips made a good video on the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vorkmWa7He8

>>3844 so its literally all video cameras and machine learning... that makes it all the easier, you just need to spoof getting in and out... also camera dettering techniques may work quite effectively. I would like to see someone fuarrrk with the algorithm. even though its probably something like the AIsight program that uses systematic and recurrent behaviors to determine abnormal movements and actions

>>3827 >>Regional unemployment, yes, but this mobile global economy just means people have to move around and chase the next job. Kind of my feelings on it as well. The whole "automation will eventually lead to a widescale un-employable class which could enable the end of labour" idea is nice, but I can't imagine it ever working in our current global economy. Not when the global distribution of wealth is as uneven as it is. I believe the system of global capitalism is so fundamentally connected worldwide, that any such massive unemployment would cause financial collapse. We'd likely just see (as we are already seeing) a massive shift in economic power to different nations. A labour free society only really sounds possible without other existing markets. On the other hand, maybe a system of third world resource extraction could be realised to keep the first world afloat, beats me.

>>3848 That idea was the sentiment of H.G. Welles in "a world set free," in which the principle of nuclear power meant that the entire coal industry and financial industry were put out of business by nuclear engines that produced rare and precious metals like gold. in essence tanking the labour based economy. In this instance of sci-fi, the result was a global unemployment, and in order to give the people something to do, they went to war, and then scientists used nuclear weapons because of their "fuarrrk the establishment i don't care about politicians attitude" alternatively, you would get a world in which automation stagnates mankind who just become perpetual fat fuarrrks who sit around browsing the internet all day from the comfort of their homes, because mechanization eliminates the need for cooking, cleaning, or going anywhere or even interacting face to face. the latter of these two hypotheticals seems more unlikely, because most cultures now strive to live the American ideal which means that the overall consumption and cost of sustainment is actually getting worse as nations develop. a good example of this is the increasing desire for asians to eat meat as they have observed westerners do for decades. the disproportionate consumption of 1 cow vs hundreds of pounds of the equivalent soy protein is a great concern to scientists.

>>3787 >Replace the item you are buying with a copied RFID signature from a $1 item and buy everything for an absurdly low price. >Spoof RFID tags and or sell them on the black market for credit fraud >Use IR lights to jam the camers, use fake RF tags and pillage the store.

>>3856 confirmed not to be RFID based, even through the patent was for RFID based systems. they use camera based machine learning. spoofing the QR code system is more reasonable though. any Seattle lainons should go mess with it and report back

>>3849 The cattle thing is very, very worrying. Chinese beef markets scare me. Remember when we got all those glowing articles about the "gig economy" for a few years where some news outlets and bloggers tried to push freelancing as really cool? I think it's that again, but this time, they're not asking.

>>3787 It was the logical next step after automated cashiers (self-checkout kiosks). I think they underestimate how much money will be lost to theft though. Cameras/sensors detect when a product is missing from the shelf and bills the last person who interacted with it... great. So open a box of granola bars, stuff your pockets, put the empty box back on the shelf.

I can think of how you'd secure it: >The entrance is a metal spinny wheel >Deadbolt is down unless customer identifies themselves >Manned cctv room 8000 miles away spots a punk stealing granola bars >exit spinny wheels all lock themselves, security on their way >mom's spaghetti I can't really see a way to defeat this, apart from taking advantage of the CCTV station's lack of diligence