I don’t remember Amazon claiming “near-full automation” by AI. They said that you can checkout automatically and that AI/computer vision is somehow involved.

Well that's because, again, it was indeed algorithms doing the work, and the people were only used to verify / train the system, after the fact. People keep, intentionally, conflating the two things, doing everything in their power to say (or strongly imply), that the people involved were managing the orders in real time, which is a lie. You are the one pushing misinformation here.

I think investors like Amazon taking shots like this? It was never a broad roll-out, 43 stores is micro-scale for Amazon.

Still, would love to see a breakdown of why it didn't improve. Regardless of the accuracy at launch, I'd think that advances in AI would have been massively to their advantage. I wonder if security degradation hit them hard.

The entire system depends on a level of social trust that doesn't exist in American cities today. Similarly, the "Dash Cart" seems like a cheaper and easier way to accomplish the same thing.

At the end of the day, there's also a mismatch in the use case. If I'm going to a smaller format store, like they had, I'm not buying a ton of stuff. Self checkout is great, and minimal friction.

I'd think that improving the UX of self-checkout gets 80% of the way there with way less fraud, way less theft, and way less technology.

Still, I think it's wicked cool they took a big shot.

I know someone that worked on the project in the early days. It was always incredibly difficult technology, they were always behind on their accuracy targets, and the solutions were increasingly kludgy as they layered more and more complex systems on top. An honorable failure.

A lot of smart people really tried to make it work.

Who cares how they monitor and validate transactions? That's Amazon's problem, not mine.

Indians, AI, whatever, meh.

Which hardly anybody ever gets prosecuted for.

People from Bangalore were telling me it was getting crazy expensive to live there (by Indian standards) circa 2013.

You're most likely correct; I originally started writing this comment to refute your statement, but found that my assumptions appear to be wrong.

Americans have the nearly the highest nominal and PPP income of OECD countries as of 2024, only behind Luxembourg, Iceland, and Switzerland [1].

India experiences substantially higher shelter and food insecurity and poverty rates than the United States.

However, tech workers in Bangalore are paid an order of magnitude higher than prevailing local wages in other sectors, at around ₹2M (₹20 lakh) [2]. Median annual rents for 2BHK (2 bedroom) apartments appear to be around 1/10th of that figure at ₹3 lahk in desirable neighborhoods [3].

It appears to be reasonable for a technology worker to be able to perform a sustained strike. I have never personally traveled to Bangalore, though I have lived in places where cost of living is under a tenth of median American income.

I invite correction by people with first hand knowledge about cost of living in Bangalore.

1. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/average-annual-wages...

2. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/median-te...

3. https://www.birlaevara.org.in/best-areas-in-bangalore-for-re...

No one (at a national scale) can afford to strike like that, except people who have an understanding of why they even more can't afford not to strike like that.

And Indians can?

When India "shut down" for Covid, day labourers suddenly had no income, and no government support - they had to walk all the way to their home province (can't remember if the trains were even running).

But oh well, Uberizing employment means the run-of-the-mill American worker can also live like that in the future... progress!

Can't afford not to.