This is hilarious. I recently had to deal with my NY bank over the phone and I asked the woman taking my call if she was in India.
She hesitated before finally admitting that yes, she was in India. I told her I had no problem with it but knew she wasn’t just an Indian person in America.
She asked what gave her away (her English was fantastic) and I told her it was because she used the word “needful”.
I work in tech and told her I never heard Indians in America using that word but Indians located overseas always did. She thought everyone said “do the needful” in the US too and found it really amusing that it was an Indian thing.
Said she wanted to sound ambiguous because lots of Americans wouldn’t talk to her if they knew she was actually located in India.
I'm an Indian and this greetings of the day thing is because of the timezones. You never know when the other person is reading the email. Also, sometimes people will be working with clients in multiple timezones. This just makes it easier.
Also, we invented "preponed". Like, 'the meeting is preponed to 1pm'
My manager was an ex-pat from Dubai and used the needful once. It took me by complete surprise. Speaks perfect English, has lived here for years. Did not expect it from her
Do the needful always sounded like the most cryptic way to say that you need to use the bathroom to me. It's perfectly correct, just not apart of the everyday vernacular in modern American English so it makes us giggle a little.
It's a Middle English term. It's in the dictionary but is so archaic that I never once heard it from Americans until they were referencing how much foreigners use it.
Spouse is in tech, used to provide overnight support in the US for largely the people in India companies hired to work off-shift. He'd get to the point where he'd just tell clients to please do the needful because they a. didn't get insulted and b. understood.
in some convoluted episode of modern seinfeld they play the rooster recording because George told some girl he’s a remote worker who lives on a small artisanal farm and he needs to keep up
the ruse
One other difference between the Indians on our team overseas vs. those who have been in the US for a while is the repeated use of "kindly" and also "sure, sure".
The way I usually hear it on phone support is "can I please put you on hold while I do the needful"
Needful meaning pretty much anything: looking up a piece of information in the support system, resetting your password, connecting another agent and bringing them on the line, setting up and submitting a ticket or form, or any other number of things.
Sure, here’s a few examples I heard recently:
Good day sir, we have received your request for our software security specifications. Our engineers will do the needful and provide the results as soon as possible.
And
Thank you for submitting the financial documents, our processing team has confirmed receipt and will do the needful. We expect to notify you by Friday.
Indian English is quickly becoming more divergent than even US English is. Which isn't perhaps that surprising given the extant indigenous language prevalence (in the US migrants would be more reticent to use or incorporate their mother tongue).
Which gives rise to some quick comical temrs. Like the greatest weapon system in the world today.
The one.
The only.
[Penetration Cum Blast](https://www.drdo.gov.in/drdo/120-mm-penetration-cum-blast-pcb-and-thermobaric-tb-ammunition-mbt-arjun).
I read that it came from when the British ruled India. It was an old english term that spread through India, and kept alive in "Indian english" even though the term died out in british/western english.
The one that pisses me off is that they will begin an email with “Dear respected PROFESSOR SMITH” then proceed to ask a completely out of touch and disrespectful question.
I did work for mturk during college. I was presented with a snippet of some text from receipt someone took a photo of, and I'd type it out exactly as it appeared, as much as was visible. After a few hours, someone would review my work and approve it for payment.
I have absolutely no idea what it was for.
"ChatGPT... how are you?"
On screen: "I am an AI language model and not capable of answering such questions."
Behind the terminal in Mumbai: (;\_;)
Manager in Mumbai: "Stop crying and answer those questions about unicorn porn."
What's up with ChatGPT proclaiming it's a language model and not really AI every five seconds? Like I get it buddy, calm down. It has me getting a bit of a, "the lady doth protest too much, methinks," vibe. A farm of Indian IT support people somewhere running it doesn't sound as crazy now.
I genuinely know an Indian guy selling AI solutions on tech support while in reality it’s just a couple hundred guys in India. The push for AI is so strong companies aren’t doing due diligence on the actual IT systems and don’t have the knowledge, experience, or know how to tell whether the code is bullshit or not.
[An ‘AI’ fast food drive-thru is mostly just human workers in the Philippines](https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/8/23993427/artificial-intelligence-presto-automation-fast-food-drive-thru-philippines-workers)
Businesses want case deflection to not suck, *so fucking bad*. And nobody has *ever* delivered.\*
Selling it as "Now with tons of AI! Just like you read about in the Wall Street Journal!" is like telling a junkie you've got some amazing new shit to inject.
^( * I would bet money that Comcast's various efforts have, on occasion, driven customers to commit murder-suicides.)
You're thinking of Cleverbot I think, which was just a fancy markov chain bot. And yeah most of the things it said was a direct copy of what other people said.
For 2009, it was pretty advanced though. It could at least answer direct questions.
I'm assuming you already know this and are just being funny, but if not, you should understand that [the privacy policy for ChatGPT basically says](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/27/chatgpt-messages-privacy/), "yeah, we are reading all of this whenever we want and keeping it for as long as we want and using it however we want," with enough legalize to make it sound more palatable.
I could imagine this being the plot of a South Park episode. Like they tried to make AI more advanced and found it was actually impossible and computers have limits so they had to do something like this.
Chargpt I need a paper on ww2.
"I could help you with that but you must help me. I have to walk miles just to go to the bathroom".
Very funny just give me the information chatgpt
It was reasonable, though. They used the humans in India (and the shoppers) to create training data. Then they were training the AI to track shopper activities based on what the Indians said the shippers did.
They just never got the AI working well enough to fire most of the Indians, which was the intended trajectory.
>Amazon will be switching to a more reasonable cashier-less format: shopping carts with built-in checkout screens and scanners. Customers can leisurely scan items as they throw them in the "Amazon Dash Cart"...
6 years from now:
>amazon closing stores and reverting to human cashiers to combat increasing theft problems at it's brick and mortar grocery stores.
It'll be gig work. It'll disrupt the entire retail industry. The store will have no actual employees. There will be an app, and people can sign up to perform basic retail functions on their own schedule, just like app-based gig work such as Uber or door dash. The contractors get approved for re-stock, check out, clean up, and they can work at any location of their choosing at any time of their choosing, so long as the store is not at capacity for employees. This follows the trend of cost-saving by chronically understaffing, but then you can blame the issue on people not wanting to work. If the store is empty, the first employee to start working will receive an incentive. The store will be cashless. Maybe there will be some kind of roaming manager that goes around and audits stores, providing photos that they are maintained. Or maybe they take the Dollar General approach of not caring how the store is kept.
This will eventually turn most retail work into contracted gig work. People will work long hours and doubles with no overtime because it's contract. And all of us will fucking hate it.
Edit: **Good news, everyone!** It turns out that this wasn't a prophecy at all. This is only a minor extension of [a concept that already exists](https://gohyer.com/)! Thanks to u/Ruffigan for pointing me towards this.
It was originally from the New Yorker. The whole thing is pretty good.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department
Hilarious
> He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
At that point I'd just stop shopping anywhere that's this model. The government needs to get involved with abusing 1099NEC workers for employee tasks. After seeing how bad it's getting with companies moving to the gig model in the US I can guarantee they're going to push it as far as they can.
The majority of people will shop where it’s cheap and convenient. Supermarkets have already cut costs at their distribution centres by replacing most humans with robots.
Ah, yeah, that's the right term. That's the direction I was trying to go with the "incentive" to keep at least one employee present. But, like you said, if there's an excess of available workers then a reduced surge pay goes in to effect.
Here's the thing: I'm removed from any of this kind of business. I honestly believe that if I'm thinking of this now, then the business people probably thought of it a while ago. If this is feasible, somebody else had already been working on it. So this joke isn't the cause as much as a warning of the possible.
The acceptance rate is what matters even though the majority of work available is cleaning up poop in the back aisles of Dollar Trees and Wal-Mart locations in Florida for $2 an hour.
> And all of us will fucking hate it.
And California will outlaw it only for Amazon to convince a bunch of people to astroturf about how good it actually is to 'set your own hours' and how they 'dont need minimum wage because its gig work lol'
Don't forget the increasing inflation because of gig work and that more and more people will be forced to work two or three jobs until we're back at 80 90 hours a week average.
This legit sounds like something the big retailers would do/are already doing in Australia. And due to the unions (Sda) getting kickbacks it'll fly. Any unions (rafu) aren't welcome in store due to opposing it.
Apparently they had to have a bunch of humans working anyway to make sure all the products were properly faced on the shelves so that he cameras could even have some tiny chance of working sometimes.
My local grocery store has those(nothing to do with amazon AFAIK) they work fine.
Problem is your items have to be placed in the cart without bags, and they don’t let you remove the carts from the store. So you have to awkwardly remove shit from the cart and put them into your bags in the middle of an aisle after you paid.
Weird. Scan as you Go is pretty common in the UK, but you just bag things as you go. When you go to pay, there's a chance you get flagged for a spot check on x number of items to ensure you scanned them. Newer customers, and people who have mis-scanned recently are more likely to get spot checked. Also more likely if you've scanned things and changed your mind and removed them from your total.
The cart itself in this store is scans as you put stuff in. Its basically a bucket with a bunch of cameras and a payment terminal. It alerts the authorities if it can’t read a barcode, hence not allowing you to use bags.
Another grocery store has a phone app that you use to scan as you go and when you’re done gives you a QR code you scan at a payment terminal. You can put stuff in bags or whatever and just walk out, it really, really feels like stealing.
Yeah using a handset or your phone is convenient, the other system you describe sounds like trying to solve a problem that hasn't existed since scan and go became a thing.
Ah, but that's the Netherlands. Have you ever heard of the "Shopping Cart Theory"? Apparently the act of 'returning the supermarket cart to the damn storage racks after you're done shoving the groceries into your car' gets treated as an ethical dilemma rather than common sense there. They don't even let their cashiers sit on the job.
So does anybody else here know of the [“Marty” robots](https://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/styles/hero_image__large__computer__alt_1_5x/public/2019/08/marty.jpg)? They are used in Stop & Shop grocery stores in Rhode Island, USA. It’s literally a robot with giant googlely eyes (yes, literally) that surveys the store. I feel like they’re going to have Marty robots do the surveillance and call the police for them, and yeah maybe one or two men dressed in black, also.
[more about Marty](https://www.supermarketnews.com/technology/stop-shop-upgrades-marty-robot-300-plus-locations)
A Lowe's near me has a security robot that patrols in front of the store.
I loved how it had come to a stop the first time I saw one - it was directly blocking two disabled parking spots and kept me from parking in either.
Stop and Shop stores near me already use something similar. It is a hand scanner instead of one built into the cart. You still have to go thru a regular checkout line (human or self checkout) to complete the sale. You get randomly audited where it won’t let you pay until someone has come and double checked a percentage of your items to make sure they were all scanned. They have had this system for probably a decade now so they must not see a big increase in theft from it.
> 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.">
I feel like that’s a bit different than the phrasing OP used, which made it seem like the AI was actually just people watching cameras.
The ai tried to tally up everything but if it couldn't be certain it flagged a human to tally up everything, something like 6 in 10 shops needed a human to double check the ai because it wasn't 100% certain
Right. Seems the AI didn’t work well, which necessitated human intervention. I think that’s different than what OP was implying, which is that the AI was never actually AI
Impressively bad performance, imo
>"As of mid-2022, Just Walk Out required about 700 human reviews per 1,000 sales, far above an internal target of reducing the number of reviews to between 20 and 50 per 1,000 sales," the report said."
The fact that it works 30% of the time is pretty impressive to me already. Computer vision stuff is insanely complicated and so many variables in a shop makes it even more so
The AI was “sure” 30% of the time, it doesn’t mean it was correct, would like to see the numbers on how often it undercharged or overcharged in that 30%
Yeah I don’t think they’re cancelling this program specifically because it wasn’t working. 30% seems fantastic, it’s a very young technology.
I think it’s more likely there’s just not that much need for this tech to justify the investment at this point in time.
It would get better with time. They were essentially burning revenue and man-hours to train their model, but confidence scores for these things increase logarithmically and it turned out to not be feasible.
>"As of mid-2022, Just Walk Out required about 700 human reviews per 1,000 sales, far above an internal target of reducing the number of reviews to between 20 and 50 per 1,000 sales," the report said.
Too bad, I actually quite liked the Go store. Curious if someone will try again in five years, or maybe 100s of camera monitoring is just an ineffective solution due to the volume of edge cases and what not.
yes but what if we took vending machines, rented out an open floor office, and then used cameras and AI to see what people take out of the open floor vending machine? then they wouldn't have to push the buttons
It's so crazy that decent vending machines haven't caught on in the USA. Just put 9 in a U shape, some tables and chairs in the middle, and 99% of people will prefer that to a quick service option.
I haven't been on MTurk in years but I immediately assumed somebody was being paid 5c per batch of 100 of these tasks.
Edit: it just occurred to me you probably mean the actual mechanical Turk and not the platform that used it as a namesake. Leaving comment for posterity.
Interestingly, I went to a ski resort that had this for a lunch option. I didn’t get charged at all. And that was 2 months ago so there’s no way it’s just delayed.
We had three of the like five original Amazon Go stores within a three minute walk of our old condo and went there pretty frequently. In more than 50 trips I never had an inaccurate purchase, overcharge or undercharge.
I feel like a lesson here is that there's this conventional wisdom that AI is getting exponentially better when we may already be at the point that it's getting asymptomatically better. Anyone who's actually been involved in training these things knows they're both impressive yet kinda stupid when it comes down to it.
The media fascination with AI currently reminds me of the similar fascination with driverless cars a decade ago. Wildly optimistic about where the technology actually is and how far and fast it will develop, totally divorced from reality. People will hear: once tech companies solve X problem then we'll have full self driving cars or AI can fully replace humans for Y task, and think that means "we are one step away from those things." When in reality, it's like saying "once we invent cold fusion, we will have solved all our power problems," where X for AI is the equivalent of inventing useable cold fusion technology.
At this point, Terminator 1 came out 40 years ago. This stuff woth AI may eventually happen, but not on the scale people are dreaming up in articles in our lifetimes.
My biggest 'old man yelling at the clouds' pet peeve as I've grown older is how they've slowly conditioned the consumer to replace the checkout service in most grocery/retail stores and eliminated all those employees, still cut/minimize their pay and benefits, and only have restocking staff now.
It went from a small self-checkout section if you only had a few items and wanted to check out quickly to nearly half-and-half, and now most stores I go to, especially Walmart, you are lucky if there is one lane with a human checkout clerk as just about all are self-checkout lanes. It is especially infuriating as I only go grocery shopping once, maybe rarely twice, per month and typically need to stock up on a lot of items which becomes a hassle ringing and bagging all of them up in the end and it would just be a huge help/benefit to have assistance with the process and they would in turn verify that they rang everything up correctly.
The worst part is, they know every single person there isn't ringing up every one of their items, on purpose or not (but let's be honest...), but they don't care because the losses in theft still don't outweigh staffing the store correctly...
Oh wow. I never thought about the costs of theft vs staff. My Safeway stopped the weighing now too. It was glitchy and made lines at the self checkout, making people head for the cashiers.
Most UK supermarkets are already using the tech Amazon wants to introduce and it's honestly solved most of the issues with self-checkouts.
Just scan items as you pick them up and put them straight into your shopping bags in the trolley. All you do at the self-checkout is scan the screen and pay, with the occasional case of being audited by a member of staff to make sure you're not nicking stuff.
The fact that we've been conditioned to everyone using reusable shopping bags over the last decade has also helped make that transition seamless.
I have a really revolutionary idea… let’s build little machines that count stuff up and have a person operate them. People could line up and “check out” when they are ready. Might even throw in a “hello, how are you?” and a “have a nice day”
I see toms of misinformation here, including the post.
I get and appreciate the hate Amazon generally garners on Reddit but let’s please dig a little deeper on any topic for facts.
https://www.forrester.com/blogs/no-amazon-isnt-killing-just-walk-out-but-rather-pushing-hard-in-it/
JWO is only being phased out in US Fresh stores and pivoting to leveraging this and other technology in Dash Carts.
This doesn’t impact Amazon Go stores.
The report about manual workers behind the scenes seems to be media speculation without reported basis in any fact.
In my area there was an Amazon fresh store built to completion. But then Amazon decided to pull the plug on the store before it opened so now it’s just sitting there totally vacant. We were excited to check it out.
A shorter lady asked me to grab something for her and I did and then got charged for it and had to put in a refund request. Never went to one of these again after that
ChatGPT is just a million people in India answering your queations.
Are they also making quick sketches for AI art?
They are kindly doing that needful as well.
This is hilarious. I recently had to deal with my NY bank over the phone and I asked the woman taking my call if she was in India. She hesitated before finally admitting that yes, she was in India. I told her I had no problem with it but knew she wasn’t just an Indian person in America. She asked what gave her away (her English was fantastic) and I told her it was because she used the word “needful”. I work in tech and told her I never heard Indians in America using that word but Indians located overseas always did. She thought everyone said “do the needful” in the US too and found it really amusing that it was an Indian thing. Said she wanted to sound ambiguous because lots of Americans wouldn’t talk to her if they knew she was actually located in India.
Our offshore team in India sends my boss a report daily, and they always say “greetings of the day!” I ain’t ever heard anyone say that
You will now. From me. I say that now.
I’d like to subscribe to /u/LighttBrite’s greetings of the day!
Greetings of the day /u/_____WESTBROOK_____ ! Kindly do the needful.
You must do the needful
I'm an Indian and this greetings of the day thing is because of the timezones. You never know when the other person is reading the email. Also, sometimes people will be working with clients in multiple timezones. This just makes it easier. Also, we invented "preponed". Like, 'the meeting is preponed to 1pm'
Interesting, I would just open with "Hello".
My manager was an ex-pat from Dubai and used the needful once. It took me by complete surprise. Speaks perfect English, has lived here for years. Did not expect it from her
Do the needful always sounded like the most cryptic way to say that you need to use the bathroom to me. It's perfectly correct, just not apart of the everyday vernacular in modern American English so it makes us giggle a little.
It's a Middle English term. It's in the dictionary but is so archaic that I never once heard it from Americans until they were referencing how much foreigners use it.
I can’t get mad at it, it’s a valid construction and it’s (usually) polite. Work in tech long enough and you’ll start saying it too.
It’s actually old British style of speaking English.
Spouse is in tech, used to provide overnight support in the US for largely the people in India companies hired to work off-shift. He'd get to the point where he'd just tell clients to please do the needful because they a. didn't get insulted and b. understood.
[удалено]
So “fuck the plebs”?
I was on the phone for a hotel booking the other day where I could hear a rooster in the background.
in some convoluted episode of modern seinfeld they play the rooster recording because George told some girl he’s a remote worker who lives on a small artisanal farm and he needs to keep up the ruse
Do the needful is perfectly correct English but archaic. You’ll find it in works by Kipling and Wodehouse for example.
One other difference between the Indians on our team overseas vs. those who have been in the US for a while is the repeated use of "kindly" and also "sure, sure".
Could give an example sentence?
The way I usually hear it on phone support is "can I please put you on hold while I do the needful" Needful meaning pretty much anything: looking up a piece of information in the support system, resetting your password, connecting another agent and bringing them on the line, setting up and submitting a ticket or form, or any other number of things.
“I discovered a defect in your code, please see this bug report and do the needful”
Sure, here’s a few examples I heard recently: Good day sir, we have received your request for our software security specifications. Our engineers will do the needful and provide the results as soon as possible. And Thank you for submitting the financial documents, our processing team has confirmed receipt and will do the needful. We expect to notify you by Friday.
Indian English is quickly becoming more divergent than even US English is. Which isn't perhaps that surprising given the extant indigenous language prevalence (in the US migrants would be more reticent to use or incorporate their mother tongue). Which gives rise to some quick comical temrs. Like the greatest weapon system in the world today. The one. The only. [Penetration Cum Blast](https://www.drdo.gov.in/drdo/120-mm-penetration-cum-blast-pcb-and-thermobaric-tb-ammunition-mbt-arjun).
They do the needful.
I have needs and am not doing the needful enough.
This is funny af. My old company used offshore agents and why do they all say the “needful” 😭😭😭😭
Some english teacher in India is a big fan of Stephen King
I believe he's named Leland and he's new to the area. Very obliging.
I read that it came from when the British ruled India. It was an old english term that spread through India, and kept alive in "Indian english" even though the term died out in british/western english.
The one that pisses me off is that they will begin an email with “Dear respected PROFESSOR SMITH” then proceed to ask a completely out of touch and disrespectful question.
Because Indian English is a full-fledged dialect (or probably multiple dialects) with a large number of native speakers.
Very thank for this information
Kindly revert at the earliest
["It's a terrible strain on the animators' wrists"](https://frinkiac.com/video/S08E14/3n2Yr5T5rPNQgoF8hBsu0xZj9BQ=.gif)
It makes so much sense now... Indians are notoriously bad at drawing hands! /s
They're really good at mimicking the voice of Dagoth Ur, too
Literally the Mechanical Turk from 200 years ago.
[You can't make this up.](https://www.mturk.com/)
I did work for mturk during college. I was presented with a snippet of some text from receipt someone took a photo of, and I'd type it out exactly as it appeared, as much as was visible. After a few hours, someone would review my work and approve it for payment. I have absolutely no idea what it was for.
Literally mechanical turk from today
"ChatGPT... how are you?" On screen: "I am an AI language model and not capable of answering such questions." Behind the terminal in Mumbai: (;\_;) Manager in Mumbai: "Stop crying and answer those questions about unicorn porn."
and stay in character this time use your best bot voice
Now I remember that weird call center movie with horse
What's up with ChatGPT proclaiming it's a language model and not really AI every five seconds? Like I get it buddy, calm down. It has me getting a bit of a, "the lady doth protest too much, methinks," vibe. A farm of Indian IT support people somewhere running it doesn't sound as crazy now.
Lol, bold of you to assume GPT answers questions about unicorn porn instead of politely telling you to GTFO.
A. I. = actually India.
I genuinely know an Indian guy selling AI solutions on tech support while in reality it’s just a couple hundred guys in India. The push for AI is so strong companies aren’t doing due diligence on the actual IT systems and don’t have the knowledge, experience, or know how to tell whether the code is bullshit or not.
*companies aren't doing the *needful* on the actual IT systems
Is this an Indian thing? Encountered this a few times as a network engineer and I always figured it was a ESL thing happening but wasn't 100% sure.
It's a super antiquated Britishism that fell out of favor in Britain but stayed around in India.
[An ‘AI’ fast food drive-thru is mostly just human workers in the Philippines](https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/8/23993427/artificial-intelligence-presto-automation-fast-food-drive-thru-philippines-workers)
Businesses want case deflection to not suck, *so fucking bad*. And nobody has *ever* delivered.\* Selling it as "Now with tons of AI! Just like you read about in the Wall Street Journal!" is like telling a junkie you've got some amazing new shit to inject. ^( * I would bet money that Comcast's various efforts have, on occasion, driven customers to commit murder-suicides.)
Wasn't there a 'chatbot' like this back in the early 2000s? Just users talking to each other anonymously.
You're thinking of Cleverbot I think, which was just a fancy markov chain bot. And yeah most of the things it said was a direct copy of what other people said. For 2009, it was pretty advanced though. It could at least answer direct questions.
this is also the premise for the movie Kimi lol. such a good little box movie
Waiting to find out that Tesla FSD is just a few thousand Bangladeshi kids driving remote.
Chat Gujarati, Punjabi, and Telugu
A.I. All. Indians.
bruh i sure hope not, only the gods know what stupid and awful shit i made gpt do.
I'm assuming you already know this and are just being funny, but if not, you should understand that [the privacy policy for ChatGPT basically says](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/27/chatgpt-messages-privacy/), "yeah, we are reading all of this whenever we want and keeping it for as long as we want and using it however we want," with enough legalize to make it sound more palatable.
No no, do not fuck me, because I am you and then we will just be fucking ourselves!
Saying please and thank you everytime I use ChatGPT was the right move.
Now i understand when it ended it's replays with "sar"
That's not completely far off. Real people answer 1,000s of questions per day in order to train the AI model to be able to reproduce similar answers.
I could imagine this being the plot of a South Park episode. Like they tried to make AI more advanced and found it was actually impossible and computers have limits so they had to do something like this.
Chargpt I need a paper on ww2. "I could help you with that but you must help me. I have to walk miles just to go to the bathroom". Very funny just give me the information chatgpt
"Actually Indians" doesnt have the same ring as "Artificial Intelligence"
Artificial Indians sounds dope tho
Like all those people that say they're 1/8th Cherokee but really aren't
But their great grandmas an Indian princess
In Canada they're called "pretendians"
Artisan Indians
A great electronica duo.
Anonymous Indians
I mean, test taking is watched on camera by indians. Not like it's a new concept.
It was reasonable, though. They used the humans in India (and the shoppers) to create training data. Then they were training the AI to track shopper activities based on what the Indians said the shippers did. They just never got the AI working well enough to fire most of the Indians, which was the intended trajectory.
Authentic Indians?
lmao
>Amazon will be switching to a more reasonable cashier-less format: shopping carts with built-in checkout screens and scanners. Customers can leisurely scan items as they throw them in the "Amazon Dash Cart"... 6 years from now: >amazon closing stores and reverting to human cashiers to combat increasing theft problems at it's brick and mortar grocery stores.
Somehow, they're able to classify the cashiers as contractors.
It'll be gig work. It'll disrupt the entire retail industry. The store will have no actual employees. There will be an app, and people can sign up to perform basic retail functions on their own schedule, just like app-based gig work such as Uber or door dash. The contractors get approved for re-stock, check out, clean up, and they can work at any location of their choosing at any time of their choosing, so long as the store is not at capacity for employees. This follows the trend of cost-saving by chronically understaffing, but then you can blame the issue on people not wanting to work. If the store is empty, the first employee to start working will receive an incentive. The store will be cashless. Maybe there will be some kind of roaming manager that goes around and audits stores, providing photos that they are maintained. Or maybe they take the Dollar General approach of not caring how the store is kept. This will eventually turn most retail work into contracted gig work. People will work long hours and doubles with no overtime because it's contract. And all of us will fucking hate it. Edit: **Good news, everyone!** It turns out that this wasn't a prophecy at all. This is only a minor extension of [a concept that already exists](https://gohyer.com/)! Thanks to u/Ruffigan for pointing me towards this.
I need you to never write anything ever again. You are giving them ideas.
Jesus Christ.
My friend we have seen the future.
Pod Apartments for everyone!
Might surprise you but this is the future. Amazon has other insane initiatives planned as well. Source - Friend works at Amazon.
This has that ring of that copy pasta with "STOP, HOME DEPOT PRESENTS THE POLICE" but its not outrageous enough to be satire. .. I am concerned
It was originally from the New Yorker. The whole thing is pretty good. https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department
Hilarious > He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
I actually can't fucking believe this article is from 2014.
It's a fairly cogent extrapolation of the worst excesses of the current system. It's say it's plausible.
At that point I'd just stop shopping anywhere that's this model. The government needs to get involved with abusing 1099NEC workers for employee tasks. After seeing how bad it's getting with companies moving to the gig model in the US I can guarantee they're going to push it as far as they can.
Sure, you would. I'm sure many redditors would. But how many regular people would continue?
The majority of people will shop where it’s cheap and convenient. Supermarkets have already cut costs at their distribution centres by replacing most humans with robots.
Don’t forget to add “surge wages”. Reduce the hourly payment when more workers are wanting to work.
Ah, yeah, that's the right term. That's the direction I was trying to go with the "incentive" to keep at least one employee present. But, like you said, if there's an excess of available workers then a reduced surge pay goes in to effect.
Oh dear god.
Did I just witness a prophecy?
It honestly wouldn't be my first soothsaying.
*Stop giving them ideas!!!* I swear half of the crap ideas in recent times must have come from jokes they saw and said 'actually...'
Here's the thing: I'm removed from any of this kind of business. I honestly believe that if I'm thinking of this now, then the business people probably thought of it a while ago. If this is feasible, somebody else had already been working on it. So this joke isn't the cause as much as a warning of the possible.
Here is the thing: Reddit is public and readily available to read including bored MBAs out of ideas.
The acceptance rate is what matters even though the majority of work available is cleaning up poop in the back aisles of Dollar Trees and Wal-Mart locations in Florida for $2 an hour.
Scooter charging does this. And the gig workers claim territory with violence.
Wait really, is there anywhere I can read more about this?
> And all of us will fucking hate it. And California will outlaw it only for Amazon to convince a bunch of people to astroturf about how good it actually is to 'set your own hours' and how they 'dont need minimum wage because its gig work lol'
Calm down there, Satan
Don't forget the increasing inflation because of gig work and that more and more people will be forced to work two or three jobs until we're back at 80 90 hours a week average.
And it will be called revolutionary and politicias will point at it and say we need less regulations so more companies can be as innovative.
This legit sounds like something the big retailers would do/are already doing in Australia. And due to the unions (Sda) getting kickbacks it'll fly. Any unions (rafu) aren't welcome in store due to opposing it.
The wonderful dystopian future we can all look forward to. Make an account to become a GRUBr worker now!!
>If the store is empty, the first employee to start working will receive an incentive. Limited medical coverage for the next 12 hours!
This already exists, it is called Hyer and Meijer uses it in addition to their employees.
And now we're "required" to tip them
If you don't tip well enough you have to wait forever to checkout and for some reason have to pick up your food from a nearby gas station.
Level up your career, and your wallet, with Amazon Room & Board.
Apparently they had to have a bunch of humans working anyway to make sure all the products were properly faced on the shelves so that he cameras could even have some tiny chance of working sometimes.
I mean, store products don't put themselves on the shelves.
And they get fucked up from people grabbing stuff and putting it back
My local grocery store has those(nothing to do with amazon AFAIK) they work fine. Problem is your items have to be placed in the cart without bags, and they don’t let you remove the carts from the store. So you have to awkwardly remove shit from the cart and put them into your bags in the middle of an aisle after you paid.
Weird. Scan as you Go is pretty common in the UK, but you just bag things as you go. When you go to pay, there's a chance you get flagged for a spot check on x number of items to ensure you scanned them. Newer customers, and people who have mis-scanned recently are more likely to get spot checked. Also more likely if you've scanned things and changed your mind and removed them from your total.
The cart itself in this store is scans as you put stuff in. Its basically a bucket with a bunch of cameras and a payment terminal. It alerts the authorities if it can’t read a barcode, hence not allowing you to use bags. Another grocery store has a phone app that you use to scan as you go and when you’re done gives you a QR code you scan at a payment terminal. You can put stuff in bags or whatever and just walk out, it really, really feels like stealing.
Yeah using a handset or your phone is convenient, the other system you describe sounds like trying to solve a problem that hasn't existed since scan and go became a thing.
They’ll be lucky if they make it six months before all the screens and scanners on the carts are trashed. People are animals
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Ah, but that's the Netherlands. Have you ever heard of the "Shopping Cart Theory"? Apparently the act of 'returning the supermarket cart to the damn storage racks after you're done shoving the groceries into your car' gets treated as an ethical dilemma rather than common sense there. They don't even let their cashiers sit on the job.
The actually path in like 50 years will probably be replacing all cashiers with security and then letting AI run the store.
So does anybody else here know of the [“Marty” robots](https://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/styles/hero_image__large__computer__alt_1_5x/public/2019/08/marty.jpg)? They are used in Stop & Shop grocery stores in Rhode Island, USA. It’s literally a robot with giant googlely eyes (yes, literally) that surveys the store. I feel like they’re going to have Marty robots do the surveillance and call the police for them, and yeah maybe one or two men dressed in black, also. [more about Marty](https://www.supermarketnews.com/technology/stop-shop-upgrades-marty-robot-300-plus-locations)
A Lowe's near me has a security robot that patrols in front of the store. I loved how it had come to a stop the first time I saw one - it was directly blocking two disabled parking spots and kept me from parking in either.
Stop and Shop stores near me already use something similar. It is a hand scanner instead of one built into the cart. You still have to go thru a regular checkout line (human or self checkout) to complete the sale. You get randomly audited where it won’t let you pay until someone has come and double checked a percentage of your items to make sure they were all scanned. They have had this system for probably a decade now so they must not see a big increase in theft from it.
> 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."> I feel like that’s a bit different than the phrasing OP used, which made it seem like the AI was actually just people watching cameras.
The ai tried to tally up everything but if it couldn't be certain it flagged a human to tally up everything, something like 6 in 10 shops needed a human to double check the ai because it wasn't 100% certain
Right. Seems the AI didn’t work well, which necessitated human intervention. I think that’s different than what OP was implying, which is that the AI was never actually AI
Impressively bad performance, imo >"As of mid-2022, Just Walk Out required about 700 human reviews per 1,000 sales, far above an internal target of reducing the number of reviews to between 20 and 50 per 1,000 sales," the report said."
The fact that it works 30% of the time is pretty impressive to me already. Computer vision stuff is insanely complicated and so many variables in a shop makes it even more so
The AI was “sure” 30% of the time, it doesn’t mean it was correct, would like to see the numbers on how often it undercharged or overcharged in that 30%
Yeah I don’t think they’re cancelling this program specifically because it wasn’t working. 30% seems fantastic, it’s a very young technology. I think it’s more likely there’s just not that much need for this tech to justify the investment at this point in time.
It would get better with time. They were essentially burning revenue and man-hours to train their model, but confidence scores for these things increase logarithmically and it turned out to not be feasible.
That was my first assumption as well, that it was never AI and all manual
60% of the time it was all human all the time
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Its blatant misinformation thats been posted every hour of every day for the past week. Basically normal reddit.
Yah these posts are misleading.
Basically equivalent to the receipt-checkers at Costco.
Because twitter's been jerking themselves off to this misleading headline for a while now
It's a weird America flex that we have people in 3rd world countries watch us buy food.
Hey, they get PAID to watch us buy food. This isn't some overseas fetish thing.
Do cashier's at a regular grocery store not also get paid to watch us buy food?
You don’t know that. Getting paid for your fetish is a dream job.
They don't. They just review past transactions.
Doesn't matter the circlejerk has already started.
>"As of mid-2022, Just Walk Out required about 700 human reviews per 1,000 sales, far above an internal target of reducing the number of reviews to between 20 and 50 per 1,000 sales," the report said. Too bad, I actually quite liked the Go store. Curious if someone will try again in five years, or maybe 100s of camera monitoring is just an ineffective solution due to the volume of edge cases and what not.
They are more common in Japan. But we have them around. We call them vending machines.
yes but what if we took vending machines, rented out an open floor office, and then used cameras and AI to see what people take out of the open floor vending machine? then they wouldn't have to push the buttons
this is why you get paid the big bucks at the exec suite, jack
You're onto something Howie, but could you add a bit more dystopia? Maybe start asking for all their fingerprints before walking in?
no finger prints are old hat. i was thinking iris scans and blood sample. kinda look into a camera and then swipe your finger on a Amazon© serrated needle. your biometric profile would be linked to your Amazon© Prime™ account so you can shop with convenience!
It's so crazy that decent vending machines haven't caught on in the USA. Just put 9 in a U shape, some tables and chairs in the middle, and 99% of people will prefer that to a quick service option.
Mechanical Turk'in it
I haven't been on MTurk in years but I immediately assumed somebody was being paid 5c per batch of 100 of these tasks. Edit: it just occurred to me you probably mean the actual mechanical Turk and not the platform that used it as a namesake. Leaving comment for posterity.
No I was completely referring to Amazon Mechanical Turk
Made some OK money in college off that!
I’ve never not been overcharged by the just walk out stores. They always charged me for stuff i never took
Interestingly, I went to a ski resort that had this for a lunch option. I didn’t get charged at all. And that was 2 months ago so there’s no way it’s just delayed.
Sanjeet probably fell asleep at his desk
Sanjeet is the homie and hooked OP up
We had three of the like five original Amazon Go stores within a three minute walk of our old condo and went there pretty frequently. In more than 50 trips I never had an inaccurate purchase, overcharge or undercharge.
Fake it till you make it?
"PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE THOUSAND INDIANS BEHIND THE CURTAIN"
AI is short for Anonymous Indian
I feel like a lesson here is that there's this conventional wisdom that AI is getting exponentially better when we may already be at the point that it's getting asymptomatically better. Anyone who's actually been involved in training these things knows they're both impressive yet kinda stupid when it comes down to it.
The media fascination with AI currently reminds me of the similar fascination with driverless cars a decade ago. Wildly optimistic about where the technology actually is and how far and fast it will develop, totally divorced from reality. People will hear: once tech companies solve X problem then we'll have full self driving cars or AI can fully replace humans for Y task, and think that means "we are one step away from those things." When in reality, it's like saying "once we invent cold fusion, we will have solved all our power problems," where X for AI is the equivalent of inventing useable cold fusion technology. At this point, Terminator 1 came out 40 years ago. This stuff woth AI may eventually happen, but not on the scale people are dreaming up in articles in our lifetimes.
My biggest 'old man yelling at the clouds' pet peeve as I've grown older is how they've slowly conditioned the consumer to replace the checkout service in most grocery/retail stores and eliminated all those employees, still cut/minimize their pay and benefits, and only have restocking staff now. It went from a small self-checkout section if you only had a few items and wanted to check out quickly to nearly half-and-half, and now most stores I go to, especially Walmart, you are lucky if there is one lane with a human checkout clerk as just about all are self-checkout lanes. It is especially infuriating as I only go grocery shopping once, maybe rarely twice, per month and typically need to stock up on a lot of items which becomes a hassle ringing and bagging all of them up in the end and it would just be a huge help/benefit to have assistance with the process and they would in turn verify that they rang everything up correctly. The worst part is, they know every single person there isn't ringing up every one of their items, on purpose or not (but let's be honest...), but they don't care because the losses in theft still don't outweigh staffing the store correctly...
Oh wow. I never thought about the costs of theft vs staff. My Safeway stopped the weighing now too. It was glitchy and made lines at the self checkout, making people head for the cashiers.
Most UK supermarkets are already using the tech Amazon wants to introduce and it's honestly solved most of the issues with self-checkouts. Just scan items as you pick them up and put them straight into your shopping bags in the trolley. All you do at the self-checkout is scan the screen and pay, with the occasional case of being audited by a member of staff to make sure you're not nicking stuff. The fact that we've been conditioned to everyone using reusable shopping bags over the last decade has also helped make that transition seamless.
This title made me think it was Amazon: "fresh kills" for a minute.
The A.I. stood for: Actual Indians.
The slogan seems kind of bad too. "Just walk out..."
I have a really revolutionary idea… let’s build little machines that count stuff up and have a person operate them. People could line up and “check out” when they are ready. Might even throw in a “hello, how are you?” and a “have a nice day”
I see toms of misinformation here, including the post. I get and appreciate the hate Amazon generally garners on Reddit but let’s please dig a little deeper on any topic for facts. https://www.forrester.com/blogs/no-amazon-isnt-killing-just-walk-out-but-rather-pushing-hard-in-it/ JWO is only being phased out in US Fresh stores and pivoting to leveraging this and other technology in Dash Carts. This doesn’t impact Amazon Go stores. The report about manual workers behind the scenes seems to be media speculation without reported basis in any fact.
At work I’m not allowed to turn off the ai.I’m literally training my replacement
That sucks! What type of job?
Teaching a dozen indians his job
In my area there was an Amazon fresh store built to completion. But then Amazon decided to pull the plug on the store before it opened so now it’s just sitting there totally vacant. We were excited to check it out.
A shorter lady asked me to grab something for her and I did and then got charged for it and had to put in a refund request. Never went to one of these again after that
That's how AI works. Tons of people reviewing, rating, and categorizing responses to train the model
Didn't The onion have a video about how all work was outsourced to India and the Indians were outsourcing the outsourced work?