Do you really think Amazon wants to pay humans to be cashiers?
No but if they spend a bunch of money and time designing it, spend a bunch of time and money retrofitting stores, and then a bunch of time and money marketing it and the technology doesn’t actually work when it’s ‘showtime,’ I can easily see a company with deep pockets like Amazon faking it all by hiring dirt cheap labor to make it seem like it works rather than the alternative.
Exactly. The people watching videos were doing QC, not actually operating the entire thing. Closer scrutiny with the first few stores makes a ton of sense (i.e. watching every interaction) because there will be a bunch of bugs. But as they scale out, I would expect a much smaller portion of videos to be actually watched live.
No but if they spend a bunch of money and time designing it, spend a bunch of time and money retrofitting stores, and then a bunch of time and money marketing it and the technology doesn’t actually work when it’s ‘showtime,’ I can easily see a company with deep pockets like Amazon faking it all by hiring dirt cheap labor to make it seem like it works rather than the alternative.
But the technology does actually work.
You don’t come up with an idea, announce it to the world, and then start figuring out how to implement it.
Exactly. The people watching videos were doing QC, not actually operating the entire thing. Closer scrutiny with the first few stores makes a ton of sense (i.e. watching every interaction) because there will be a bunch of bugs. But as they scale out, I would expect a much smaller portion of videos to be actually watched live.
Maybe in an ideal world but that’s not the world we live in.
I worked at Amazon for 8 years. That’s not how it works.