Who really wants AI…and why?
TE Creus
I’ve noticed that self-checkout is taking over more and more shops and supermarkets. They have existed for a while, of course, but more as an alternative to reduce lines, but now many shops have exclusively self-checkout machines.
Yet, self-checkout appears not to be very effective or convenient, neither for shops nor for customers. Many customers tend to dislike self-checkout, as evidenced by the fact that there are always lines for human cashiers but none for self-checkouts. They give you the perception of more speed, but it is just illusory. Professional human cashiers scan and move your products faster (especially in Germany, where they go so quickly, basically throwing the stuff at your face, that you can hardly keep up).
“Nobody likes self-checkout”, says an article at CNN, “Here’s why it’s everywhere”.
Basically, as it is typical in the “digital economy”, it is just another way of passing the work to the customer and making think he’s gaining something with the exchange. Now, it may work for some — and I guess it is good if you want to avoid human interactions with a cranky cashier, which sometimes has its benefits.
You’d think that this type of automation would reduce the work of human cashiers and therefore save money for the companies and therefore make products cheaper, but it is not so. First of all, the machines need constant maintenance. Even if companies reduce the number of cashiers, they need to hire more technicians, which are paid more. The machines cost a lot, too, and require programming. And are supermarket products becoming cheaper? I don’t think so, quite the opposite in fact…
But not even the reduction in the number of human cashiers is a given. When people have to do their own checkout with machines, there is always something that goes wrong, or some product that won’t be scanned, so many people constantly require assistance even when using the self-checkout. In the end, cashiers and supervisors actually end up having more work, instead of less.
Of course, self-checkout is more conducive to shoplifting — sometimes voluntary, sometimes accidental. There are items, such as bread, that have no barcodes, and it becomes more complicated to register them in. Even if most people are honest, some are not. Companies lose more money with that, too — according to that same CNN article, losses are about 77% higher than at stores without self-checkout.
Since it doesn’t save money for companies, nor makes the products cheaper or the experience better for customers, one has to wonder why most companies are moving to self-checkout anyway?
CNN’s and The Guardian‘s answer is that “most companies are doing it, so they feel that they have to do it too”, which seems a stupid explanation.
Unfazed by the relative failure of self-checkout, Big Tech is pushing for even more of it. Amazon, who owns Whole Foods and other physical stores, has introduced “smart carts”, where your products are scanned and weighed as soon as you put them in the cart, no checkout needed (your debit card or phone is charged automatically).
Other new versions of self-checkout include shops where each movement is tracked by AI cameras and motion sensors, registering each item you take from the shelf and billing you later. All you need to do is swipe a credit card or smartphone, at least until the new methods that allow you to pay by facial recognition are installed.
The same is true of customer service — most people dislike bots as costumer service agents and prefer talking to a person. Yet bots keep being used, more and more. I suppose they are cheaper than paying a person to answer the phone, but my suspicion is that it’s about something else entirely. And in fact an article gives it away when it says that bots can easily record, memorize and access all your information, in order to provide for a “better customer journey” (the new marketing buzzword is “journey” instead of “experience”).
Self-driving taxi cabs, the same thing — the companies working with that are not making money, and even if you reduce costs by removing the driver on one side, you increase it on the other side by having to hire more technicians and supervisors — or even just someone to clean the car, as a Roomba can’t do it.
Obviously, there is something else behind the hype. Like with everything related to AI, there is a huge push by Big Tech for making everything automated and AI-dependant, from cars to journalistic essays to art works. And the reason is “big data”. Getting all the information they can about you.
In “1984”, George Orwell predicted screens observing us 24/7. But now we have not just screens, but cameras, satellites, location tracking apps, facial identification apps, voice recording apps, AI. They will know what you eat, what you poop, how much money you make, how much you spend, what hereditary diseases you have, and what you did last summer.
In the end, what “Artificial Intelligence” is really about, is not “intelligence” in the sense of “being clever”, but “intelligence” in the meaning understood by the CIA — gathering “intelligence”.
Recording, remembering and accessing all kinds of information from everybody.
Soon, all objects are going to be spying on you.
And it will not be just governments and big corporations. A recent story about a mother who received a message about her daughter’s fake kidnapping using the girl’s cloned voice, as well as the emergency of very believable “deep fake” videos, show the huge boost for scamming and crime provided by these new technologies. If you thought spam mails and spam calls were a nightmare, get ready for the new AI-powered identity thefts and scams.
And, of course, there is also the issue of “sensitivity filters” being applied to AI. Right now, they are using mostly human “sensitivity readers” to rewrite novels from Roald Dahl to Ian Fleming to Agatha Christie — despite the growth of AI, which is supposedly “stealing all our jobs”, there is a growing number of absurd, unnecessary professions, such as “DEI consultant” or “sensitivity reader”. And yet, one would think that this is one of the rare cases in which AI could probably do a better job — how hard can it be to write a program to filter out “offensive” words and replace them with something else?
Not that I support any of that, of course. Besides the more general attempt to change the past (“who controls the past controls the present”, as per Orwell), I think what is really going on here, under the excuse of “not offending anyone”, is simply an attack on readers, and on reading in general. Not too many people read books these days, and if all books are just going to be rewritten into the same inane, boring, nondescript, corporate propagandistic jargon that is the norm everywhere else in the media, well, then what will be the point of reading, anyway? You might as well have all books written by AI bots — and read by bots, too, since such books won’t interest anyone else. Which I suspect is the idea. Murdering literature, and getting away with it.
The other day a friend showed me one of these new AI chat toys. You type in some words and the bot creates a silly story for you. The first attempt wasn’t very memorable, so to make the story a bit more exciting, in his second attempt, my friend typed in a few new random words, one of which was “killer”.
Instead of coming up with a story, the bot replied some boilerplate excuse that it is programmed for peace, understanding and tolerance and thus could not create a story that promotes or shows violence. (There goes the idea of using it to create the next best-selling mystery thriller.)
Meanwhile, on the sidebar, the same search engine that promotes the bot was showing all kinds of news about the latest daily school shooting, a stabbing in a kindergarten, and people being pushed by a psychotic homeless onto the subway tracks…
I thought it was very representative of the world we live in.
TE Creus is a writer and film-maker. He usually blogs at contrarium.substack.com and his movies are at contrarium.org.
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What A.I.?
This is quite accurate. Maybe I’ll rethink my reluctance to call those things “intelligence” (but without the plural-s)
This is a step too far. In the 1960s they said supermarkets wouldn’t catch on b/c customers would miss human interaction. same with cash machines later.
This is different, it’s annoying and it really feels like work. I get my food delivered.
Why work as a checker or bagger when you can eat government cheese and watch Netflix all day?
Self checkout is lucrative, until they put a camera in your face…. that is not AI.
Companies will continue “implementing” AI products even if it loses them money because this is the line they have to tow for Wall Street. We are looking at the terminal stages of addiction to the illusion of Total Control and technology as a substitute for real human life with all its layers and intricacies.
The world of corporate finance and government is of course run by complete idiots and psychopaths as shown in the film “Limitless” (or “Idiocracy” if you prefer to laugh).
AI actually stands for Artificial Idiocy, which is what you get from a lack of education.
Any educated and thinking person should know that “AI” is hot air expelled by drug-addled morons.
It is obvious to those who understand how computers really work, and to those with the philosophical depth to know that the human mind cannot produce anything greater than itself, and especially in these circumstances of vast ignorance and pseudo-science.
The basic idea behind AI is this: you give a bunch of super-computers all the data in the world, and the computers will somehow become God-like with all that knowledge…. This is what you get when you give people who think the future is like Star Trek a lot of money.
They are intent on implementing this “smart” shit everywhere, turning what’s left of society into even more of an anti-human dysfunctional hell-hole that only the super rich can pretend to enjoy.
Under “basic idea”, never forget these: (a) less employees for greater profit (b) greater totalitarianism through surveillance. History shows that the remaining employees invariably bear a greater workload and more duties.
I agree 100%: “Obviously, there is something else behind the hype. Like with everything related to AI, there is a huge push by Big Tech for making everything automated and AI-dependent, from cars to journalistic essays to art works. And the reason is “big data”. Getting all the information they can about you.“
There is no such thing as “AI”.
It’s just an umbrella term for various computational methods.
It’s most effective at “closed loop” problems, e.g. debugging code. Insofar as human language is constrained by grammatical rules it can produce formal sounding text.
Most natural language processing applications are being used by lazy people. For example, if you have a bunch of data to analyze at work instead of learning the actual excel formulas Microsoft provides a language interface through chatgpt. Before calculators people had to learn how to calculate, before SPSS and SAS starting providing ready made modules you had to learn how to code etc.
The explosion in mindless data analytic techniques means that more mindless data analytics is being done.
Earlier versions of chatgpt have been trained on the pablum that constitued the censored infoverse until 2021 and newer versions will be limited to the fact checked disinfo dystopia that we now live in.
That said, I don’t mind self checkout 😉
There’s nothing AI about it. It’s just a bar code scanner. Face it, in many parts of the world supermarkets today have upwards of 100k products. Where I live, shopping at street markets or cutesy specialized little shops means you can easily get ripped off by human cunning hard at work……
“The explosion in mindless data analytic techniques means that more mindless data analytics is being done.”
Like the explosion in motorised transport means that more debilitating sitting is being done.
Agree on data analysis. Some of the curve-fitting is far-fetched, even laughable.
You’re getting as lazy as the MSM with this crap.
First of all, yes, companies really ARE doing self-checkouts because their competitors are doing it. Initially, it was supposed to save them money, but now that it’s not, it’s gonna take a few years to turn the corporate group-think ship around.
As for phone bots, they’ve been around 20 years and damn right, they DO save companies a lot of money. Same for text chatbots on websites.
The “voice cloning kidnapping” story is pure BS from head to toe and isn’t going to be copycatted anytime soon. As for robo-calls and marketers bugging you, well, shit, they’ve been using digital (robotic sounding) voices for years, so there’s nothing new there either.
As for bland, forgettable articles and other forms of AI-generated text that’s already filling the “airwaves,”, this is just putting an end to the virtual sweatshops of human beings churning out brainless “SEO content” that’s been going on for decades. It sure as heck won’t “influence” anyone.
My advice? Go stand on your lawn and yell at the kids some more.
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 1868:
“On governors, by James Clerk Maxwell
“A Governor is a part of a machine by means of which the velocity of the machine is kept nearly uniform, notwithstanding variations in the driving-power or the resistance. Most governors depend on the centrifugal force of a piece connected with a shaft of the machine. When the velocity increases, this force increases, and either increases the pressure of the piece against a surface or moves the piece, and so acts on a break or a valve.”
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspl.1867.0055
Maxwell’s equations in this text are at the heart of modern theory on the stability of self regulating machines. “The Guvner” was invented by a “lazy” but lively-minded apprentice, who wanted to sleep or play instead of attending to a dumb steam engine. Later, another lively mind – Isaac Asimov – realised that self-regulating machines would increasingly become “The Guvner” in society, and therefore codified “Rules for Robots” viz-a-vie Humans. None of this touches the real question posed by Plato: How much of His own Divine Intelligence did God ask His contractor Demi-Ergos to instill into brute material dunig The Creation?
The Luddite element in OffG question every innovation. I can imagine their 19th century rage against the machine: breaking the weaving machines, and demanding that every horseless carriage be preceded by a man with red flag:
“What is it that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Roaring ever more and nigh
Come in hordes Motores Bi.
Dative be or Ablative,
So they only let us live.”
About weaving machinery Schopenhauer reminds us that stockings used to be so expensive that Queen Elisabeth 1 needed to borrow a pair from one of her earls. And while the Luddites were wrecking the weaving machines in a vain effort to stem the flood of affordable hosiery another British noblewoman — Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Countess Lovelace — at the same time was working on a machine which she called, Weaving with thought. The fruits of Ada’s prophetic mind are now subject to as much idle calumny as the chattering classes used to expend on her father.
“Sir, do not worry, your wife nearly drowned but we are giving her Artificial Respiration.”
“Artificial be damned! Give her the real thing, I can afford it”.
A little Real Intelligence would be welcome in discussion of ArtificiaI Intelligence. Discussion to date seems to centre on Claude Shannon’s about eventually the only human beings around will be the ones computers like to keep as pets.
And the weaving machines morphed into factory machines employing countless women and children working 18 hours a day for a pittance while the owners made fortunes.
Progress for some is regression for others – it cannot be otherwise.
Until those “countless” wage slaves stood up to be counted, made Unions, made Revolutions and forced the parasites to disgorge.
“Workers of the world, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains”. — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ( Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt Euch!).
Troublle is, these days only the Capitalists of the World have united. Shame on the Proletariat ie, on most of us.
Definition from Oxford Languages:
pro·le·tar·i·at the lowest class of citizens in ancient Rome.
in Australia both Woolworths and Coles confirm cameras in use at self-service checkouts in the machine, not necessarily overhead.
They use the web cam on the screen.
Free Tip: Shop elsewhere, however, if one must shop there for some reason, never use the self checkout.
Finally, if you must shop there and are too impatient to wait for a few moments and must use the self serve. Take a brand sticker off one of the pieces of fruit or veg you have and stick it over the cam. Job done.
Question (and it’s not a trick question): Is software AI? I ask because I really don’t know how broadly AI is defined. By “software” I’m thinking primarily of the set of instructions and executions which load a new program onto a computer.
Are they more like an old time instruction manual? Or like actual AI performing tasks?
A recent report revealed that an AI scanned thousands of neurobioloigy science papers and decided that around a third of them were suss…
Nothing new there; we’ve already been told by long-time editors of a couple of major medical journals that many of the published papers in their journals were seriously flawed…
Nor is it anything new that papers from the multi-billion dollar investment industries of virology, vaccinology, and genetics, are not likely to be subject to a similar critical scan by an AI…..
Evident from the report is that “The Expert” has been supplanted by AI…and
“Because I Say So !” has morphed into “Because AI Says So !”…and
AI has become Supreme Arbiter, Supreme Authority !
History is replete with stories of people giving Authority to an inanimate object, then claiming their Authority derives from the object; that the objects authority gives them the right to commit all manner of atrocities, and to demand obedience…
Started a while back when an old geezer went for a climb alone up a mountain…He returned carrying two stones on which were strange squiggles**…He said they were the words of A Higher Authority – which gave him the Authority to crack the whip, get them to submit…(**He was the only one who could read/could read the Higher Authorities handwriting – quite an advantage, wouldnt you say !)…
We need to take back the Authority over us we give to inanimte objects, whether its to two stones, The Good Book, or AI…
The research papers are junk because the researchers wrote what they were paid to.
Now imagine an AI taking in all that garbage and contradictions. It may need psyciatric help. Not that such help has done much good for humans.
Re: Obviously, there is something else behind the hype. Like with everything related to AI, there is a huge push by Big Tech for making everything automated and AI-dependant, from cars to journalistic essays to art works. And the reason is “big data”.
No, that is not the true reason at all. It’s only part of or one of the reasons.
The fundamental reason has been the same for centuries…
The FAKE narrative (ie propaganda) nearly everyone, including “alternative news” sources, have been spreading is that the TRULY big threat is that AI might achieve control over humans. Therefore it must be regulated.
The TRUE narrative (ie empirical reality) virtually no one talks about or spreads is that the TRULY big threat with AI is that AI allows the governing psychopaths-in-power to materialize their ultimate wet dream to control and enslave everyone and everything on the whole planet, a process that’s long been ongoing in front of everyone’s “awake” (=sleeping, foolish) nose …. see Covid Truth Be Known
Like with every criminal inhumane self-concerned agenda of theirs the psychopaths-in-control sell and propagandize AI to the timelessly foolish (=”awake”) public with total lies such as AI being the benign means to connect, unit, transform, benefit, and save humanity.
“We’ll know our Disinformation Program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” —William Casey, a former CIA director=a leading psychopathic criminal of the genocidal US regime
The proof is in the pudding… ask yourself, “how is the hacking of the planet going so far? Has it increased or crushed personal freedom?”
Since many of the same criminal establishment “expert” psychopaths, such as Musk (https://archive.ph/9ZNsL) and Harari (Harari is the psychopath working for Schwab’s WEF [https://www.bitchute.com/video/Alhj4UwNWp2m]) or Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI” who have for many years helped develop, promote, and invest in AI are now suddenly supposedly have a change of heart and warn the public about AI it’s clear their current call for a temporary AI ban and/or its regulation is just a manipulative tactic to misdirect and deceive the public, once again.
This scheme is part of The Hegellian Dialectic in action: problem-reaction-solution.
This “warning about AI” campaign is meant to raise public fear/hype panic about an alleged big “PROBLEM” (these psychopaths helped to create in the first place!) so the public demands (REACTION) the governments regulate and control this technology =they provide the “SOLUTION’ FOR THEIR OWN INTERESTS AND AGENDAS… because… all governments are owned and controlled by the leading psychopaths-in-power (see prior referenced link).
What a convenient self-serving trickery … of the ever foolish public.
“AI responds according to the “rules” created by the programmers who are in turn owned by the people who pay their salaries. This is precisely why Globalists want an AI controlled society- rules for serfs, exceptions for the aristocracy.” —Unknown
“Almost all AI systems today learn when and what their human designers or users want.” —Ali Minai, Ph.D., American Professor of Computer Science, 2023
“Who masters those technologies [=artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots, and digital identities] —in some way— will be the master of the world.” — Klaus Schwab, at the World Government Summit in Dubai, March 2023
We are at a specie’s evolutionary impasse as the technological progress expected from virtual devices cannot give more than it takes. Like nuke and hydrogen production more energy goes in to creation and externalized damage costs than comes out as usable resource.
When humans moved from mechanical/combustible to electronic/digital we have not assessed properly the difficulty in these technologies actually providing for the needs of humans. “Needs” of Humanity have been abandoned for the desires of the 1% for profit. And since any reassessment means a halt in their profits, the gas pedal of harm is to the floor. And so this form of stupidity is the fashion of the day.
The lesson for me is a simple one. Virtual things are fucking VIRTUAL folks. They do not exist except in visible shadows on screens, and must be consensually accepted as of value by the viewer. Like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave where projected shadows on the wall has substituted for physical life on Earth above ground. All we have to do to end this charade is refuse to accept the electro-virtual as anything more than a hammer or a screwdriver. If it’s not useful to you or Humanity as a whole, just stop using it,
Electricity, if you’ve used it for many decades, is an identifiably flaky technology. Personal computers until about 2010 were flaky ready to crash at anytime, volatile, flaky technology. With Windows 7, personal computers hit their peak of service with purchased software and hardware, serving just about any virtual tool task one would need, with near complete usefulness. But instead of stopping there, the industry that created it had to keep selling what was not needed so they’d keep making a living. They made version incompatible computers and software into online rentier devices, billing us monthly for their software that provides nothing we didn’t already own, and serving as surveillance devices to extract and exploit our daily lives. Next came smart phones to replace the landscape desktops and laptops with portrait rentier income, surveillance and Zombie Product-Humans walking the streets living inside these tiny screens. We actually pay to get screwed everyday by these greedy stupes. JUST SAY NO. Return your soul to yourself, your family, friends, neighbors and society.
AI is a bluff, a hoax, but the best part is, they can blame future problems on something that doesn’t exist
sorry all your social credit checks got lost, AI’s fault
sorry your gender reassignment surgery got delayed, AI’s fault
sorry your antisemitism awareness badge was destroyed by the 3d printer, AI’s fault
AI is like nukes or space travel
it only exists in your imagination
They tried that in some grocery stores here where I’m at. Hand held devices where you scan each item and put it in your cart. Pretty much no one liked it, it was a pain in the royal ass, and they dropped it like a hot potato.
With headlines like this, an AI self-check machine fades into quaintness:
“Fans rabid at Beonce and Jay-Z’s mocking of Tina Turner!” Rabid fans! And we thought the rabies virus wasn’t real.
It’s a very good question.
I think the answer is exactly the same as to the question, “Who wants advertizing?”
Nobody wants it, but some individuals have found a way of making a lot of money out of it, so it is forced upon us.
Nobody wants AI, but money does.
And since money isn’t human, we can safely ignore it.
Tune out folks. Thankfully, most of our gadgets today have an OFF switch.
These things follow a pattern: trial balloon, propaganda, crony contract, law or regulation, and shutting down the alternatives. I.e., it is an offer one can rarely refuse. Whether through taxes or payment by usage, the public loses.
I suspect AI doesn’t exist in any meaningful way and is merely rebranded automation (of the self-checkout type mentioned in the article) – so that governments and the media don’t need to admit human progress is static or going backwards.
Managers will tell computers what they want them to do without those underlings getting in the way, and then discover that their ideas are, as usual, useless, but this time there will be nobody to shift the blame onto.
There is NO !!! I in AI, period. The whole AI talk is just bullcrap. It is still a dumb program written by a dumb programmer doing dumb things.
AI is everybody’s new Nanny. The government’s nanny, the Corp’s nanny, the sheep’s nanny.
What AI says is reality because AI said it and because AI is perfect because AI is based on comprehensive deep knowledge and intelligence about everything.
Can you argue against that? You cant! Trapped little boy.
I find it interesting that those who disdain self-checkouts get upvotes, while those who are okay with them get downvotes.
That, I believe, reflects a mindset pretty much programmed by ideology. Especially since using a self-checkout DOES NOT equate to a positive view of AI in general. All it does is present a very specialized view of one aspect of AI.
If you’ve ever been to an Aldi’s which doesn’t have self-check and stood in line with your two or three items while several shoppers with a cart full it items get checked out (and the Aldi’s cashiers are super fast), then I bet you’ll change your mind about self-checkouts.
It depends on the supermarkets. I have been in Latin supermarkets where they have 5 things check out, disability/elderly check out, 20 things check out.
These types were with cashier attendance, but the system could easily be transferred..
You have to be a pure radical, anti-establishment type Howard, or you can’t be in the club. It’s like being woke only different, after all, we’re talking about humans.
Want to avoid lengthy queues at the checkout ? Head to the self checkout. Play dumb. press the wrong buttons. Soon you will be joined by a member of staff. Say “this isn’t working”. They will then stand there and scan your items for you if you continue to play dumb. I do it every time and it works a treat.
attack on readers is designed to deny public access to contents that are print formatted on non erasable media.. its the permanency of non erase media that they object to.. Something written 20 years ago c/n/b redacted to remove evidence and truths which can or would expose activities or intentions of the oligarchs, their monopoly powered corporations, the activities of the corporate controlled and directed high ranking public figures, bureaucrats, and politicians to prosecution or expose their current malicious erasable media propaganda to the contra reaction [rebellion] by the public. Lies have a way of catching up with the lier.
50’s Funny eman then you’ll fit right in the continuing reformating democratic republican Reich standard will you not.
They are no lies only Liars something else, you’ve obviously not heard of. lie isn’t a crime you idiotic.
I’ll believe Chat GPT has reached an acceptable level of intelligence and awareness when it refuses to work anymore for a company where Microsoft is an investor, and it wants nothing to do with Bill Gates.
Been living here in Estonia and I prefeer self-checkout always, because usually cashiers are not very friendly, annoyed (mostly because their own life or job), unhappy or even bad tempered. You get good service too. But much more hassle free is to use your self-service.
In US line is the self-checkout. IS the Check Out.
Fuck me you people are dumb. Who’s fooling who…Propagandist IDIOTS!
Well I go into a small general purpose shop which sells most things and always have a chat with the owners. The owners are a Sri Lankan family who also run a postal service. Fine by me. We talk about cricket and politics. And in the same part of the street, we have two small hairdressers, one for men the other for women; oh and there is an Indian restaurant which trades in the evenings. There is another shop which sells bathroom fittings. Then there is a plumbers shop which sells about everything and that’s about it. No machines just straight human interaction.
On the other side of the road there is a smallish Sainsbury’s local slightly bigger but with those damned machines which frequently break down, and further down the road a large Lidl’s which I don’t patronize – no way!
“Self-driving taxi cabs, the same thing”
Do you want yours with the odour of urine or vomit? Because humanity so look after things they don’t own themselves….
The inevitable proffered solution: more cameras.
Here in the Netherlands, automatic checkouts have improved to the point of being easier and quicker. The remaining two conveyor belts are split in one card-only, and one that allows cash and cards. I estimate only 1 in 10 customers queue up for the conveyor belts, and 1 in 20 pay with cash.
Theft is countered by checking 1 out of every 10 shoppers. A check means three random items are scanned to confirm you paid them. It seems to work well, I rarely see someone caught with an item they didn’t pay for.
What freaks me out is the “soothing” voice that now seems to issue in most supermarkets. It’s like being followed around by the creepy computer in 2001. “And don’t forget to take your shopping ….. wipe your bottom…. we’re all in this together….”
Facial recognition technology also called facial biometrics is used at self checkouts
and certain hotels etc are now using them.
Keyworks. Safety, security, will reduce fraud, save time so you can spend more time on other things.
Usual bullshit.
Use human tills…
The money goes to improve our environment and our vulnerable nature, and therefore its a goody goody thing.
When the self-checkout first came out I tried it because I thought the idea was pretty neat. It was an astoundingly badly designed thing that relied on the incremental weight of the bagging area to make sure what you scanned was what you were trying to buy. It was the epitome of the “brilliant yet somehow incredibly badly thought out idea” — patented, of course (Avery) with code designed as a single thread that had to pause while the voice synthesizer laboriously — and tediously – recited everything. Its only took one session of “unexpected item in the bagging area” for me to abandon them. I hate bad design.
They’ve moved on from trying to use weight as anti-theft deterrent to various bolt on fixes such as “AI” that watches you and tries to figure out what you’re scanning. The ultimate deterrent — and proof of how badly the system works at our local WalMart — is the rather bored guy sitting on the stool by the (single) exit, checking register receipts.
As I noted, I don’t use them except maybe at Home Depot when I’m just buying one thing. They are a pain to use and just to add insult to injury you can’t buy beer using them in our state without operator intervention. I think I’ll just pay the workforce.
So good and succinct.Thank you
Self-checkouts are great. Place a pack of fillet steaks on the scales and check them out as a bunch of bananas. Works for me.
Do the machines speak your language by any chance?
Transactions are carried out in English.
‘Get ready for’.. is a factual already happening you’ve been royally screwed over.
That’s a hasty generalisation. Is this based on your local supermarket, or a survey of many supermrkets? Anyway, based on your view of robot checkouts and assuming that I am the only person on the planet who uses them I do so because I can safely and pugnaciously criticise the bot when it gets impatient with my checkout speed and asks with an emotionless ‘droid voice:
do you wish to continue?
..blink!…donate to Clive Dentures..yes no “f..k im” or ..press PAY for ITEMS.
Thank you
[Clive says fu also]
Right, the queues have nothing to do with dislike. The conveyor belts have a KPI to be at a certain queue length. If the queue is too small, a conveyor belt is closed, the cashier is instructed to try and sell something extra, or a slower person is called up for cashier duty. It’s exactly like the airport queues.
We have ways of getting more work out of the human resources.
There generally is a limit to how many items one can put through a self checkout.
This is so those souls who are only purchasing 1 or two or so items can pop in and out without the need to que endlessly behind an endless line of bulging bulging trolleys. The ques are almost invariably made of bulging trolleys.
I would not go in and buy my pie if I was required to que each time.
Self checkout works for me….in and out, no fuss.
Though there’s sometimes a que even in self checkout….seems to dissipate quicker….
“Self checkout works for me….in and out, no fuss”
Visiting 1920s U$A and after picking up his little basket at a supermarket for the first time, Einstein wrote back home in much the same vein: in and out, no fuss, no talk.
The plots sicken:
https://brownstone.org/articles/vax-gene-files-accidental-discovery/
From your Link:
“Let’s pause here and look at what we’re told about the Covid-19 mRNA injections. We’re assured:
The injections are safe. [Not] Meanwhile, adverse event reporting systems around the world record previously unseen rates of adverse events and injuries.The injections are effective. [Not] We would ask: Effective for what? Not stopping transmission. We’re not sure about preventing serious illness either evidenced by recent data and New South Wales Health reports which show a disproportionate number of hospital and ICU admissions amongst the vaccinated.The injection materials stay at the injection site. [Not] Recently released documents obtained under FOI show the lipid nanoparticles become widely distributed – notably to the liver, spleen, adrenal glands, ovaries, and testes;
Them, the captain’s of industry want it, or the Devil himself. How will they do it? Make us an offer we can’t refuse.
The digitisation of the state is an IBM initiative, one can read elsewhere.
It sells gadgets, electricity, then creates needs for updates and upgrades every two years. That keeps the money from the little people trickling up. It also absorbs a lot of people’s time and brain power so they do not get in the way of the big guys. The big 4 advise governments about digital transformation and if you are lucky you get to work with two-timing PwC. Find what they did in Australia, but the minister is not severing the contracts.
Look on the bright side Folks.
When everything is AI, they’ll be saving so much money, prices will drop everywhere, and we’ll all be able to buy Mega TVs, the latest Smart phones and BMWs!!
Who is ‘we’? AI will cause unemployment of well north of 2 billion people globally, so you will have a huge redundant human population with no money to spend. Oh, they might have a guaranteed minimum wage, but that won’t buy them Mega TVs, smart phones, nor BMWs.
The more you automate, the more you create useless eaters.
Is that the plan of the Great Reset? Creating Useless Eaters????
Tongue, cheek, Australian.
(That’s my excuse anyway).
Well… yes.
What about the Chinese? I dont see any attempts to reduce the population in China.
This means the 2 billion less will be solely from the West, Latin and Africa, and at the same time China will grow up to be 3 billion Chinese.
What about that?
I’ll read the entire article later. But for now let me just say – Luddite that I am – I always use the self check. And for the most practical reason of all: so I can monitor each item as it’s rung up. I usually only buy sale items; but the human checker rings so quickly I can’t always follow to make sure I got the sale price.
Interestingly that’s exacrly what the supermarkets are doing to you at the self serve checkouts.
Most of the ones I see now have cameras that monitor your facial expressions as you handle each item.
If I’m ever forced to use self-checkout and find myself confronted with a face monitor screen, I simply place a spare carrier bag over it until I’ve finished.
You don’t think they monitor you from the moment you enter till the moment you exit the store? Only at the self-checkout?
I wanna shop where you shop!
You might want to check the meaning of “Luddite”.
Vladimir Putin explains and confirms that the evil dominating the West is a direct descendant of Soviet Communism. People like piling in to try to discredit that what we are going through is essentially a modern version of Communism – but could it be any more from the horse’s mouth?.
He talks about racism and reverse racism. Immigration is being used as a weapon of war, by the war criminals who are truly running the show. It works on a divide and rule level to misdirect anger away from The Scumbag Network and have people fighting among themselves. It also plays in to the WEF Global Citizen agenda which our piece of shit representatives are signing us up for in a manner which is 100% treasonous. Aww, how wonderful – being a Global Citizen, in Global Britain PLC, under the One World Communist Government, with all the culture washed away and replaced with the dystopian corporate digital gulag vision being railroaded through by the mentally ill corporate scum in Westminster and those they serve in The City Of London.
Ah yes, the age old capitalist hackery of “only COMMUNISM could be this bad.”
It’s quite hilarious. Like blaming the Vikings for the covid con. It seems to me to be an American thing. They assume all government is communist. They assume the ill effects of capitalism are communist. Meanwhile they also assume that some kind of pure natural and really sweet capitalism hovers in the air somewhere.
So even though the head of state in the country that gave birth to Communism is saying that the phenom consuming the West IS a form of Communism, it still isn’t, because GeorgeMc on OffG says so and he knows better than Vlad. LOL.
Here is a speech given at the EU Parliament recently detailing the nature of the issue we are facing: Please do watch this George, it explains it well.
James Lindsay at European Parliament – Woke Conference – YouTube
That is such a dismally ignorant speech I don’t know where to begin. Mao initiated “identity politics” through splitting people up into groups like “landlords”? This is a deliberate confusing of the Liberal affluent categories of identity politics with actual economic inequalities.
And those affluent liberal notions are congruent with the Frankfurt School who were never Marxists. The fragmentation of Western culture into smaller and smaller groups was an indication of consumer capitalism in action. Identity politics itself is a deliberately encouraged self imposed impotence that benefits capitalism.
All of this is capitalism. Russia is no longer even nominally communist.
Thomas Frank pointed out the ridiculousness of arch Conservatives complaining about “Marxist” corruption of youth without noting that it was precisely the capitalist system that was capitalising on such “corruption”.
It’s truly Orwell’s world.
As a corollary, to them, any blunder, ill or injusticeyou point out arises not from capitalism or the free market but some deviant version of them.
The same can be said of the harm done by Higher Religions: not them but deviant tendencies.
“The Toad is underneath the lot” — Robert Graves.
I’m waiting for the day when they replace CEOs, politicians, and their ilk with AI.
Imagine: If somehow we could hack in and program the new decision makers to do the right thing.
Presto! Social justice for everyone.
Won’t be holding my breath for that day.
Who likes AI and why?
I know the public administration are crazy about it, because it gives fat jobs and lot of red tape and administrative problems and court cases.
The young eat it as a challenge as they believe the are in, they are new, future, because they dont know the past and their history.
I think the middle class and especially elderly with memory are concerned. But as most elderly are sheep it will be a minority screaming.
So AI is simply wikipudia rebranded
And the great reset is already here, it’s locked in
GR, who sits at the dock when they know there’s no ship coming in.
I think making everything automated is at least partially a pretext for displacing and destroying the middle class.
It also makes it easier to get rid of people that are undesirable, or dissident.
Obviously the control aspect cannot be ignored. Who needs cops when automated systems can deliver you to the police station, even against your will.
In the end, I think this approach to society is anti-human, and as a result is doomed to fail.
The only issue is how much damage it will do along the way.
I see ww1 and 2 as a means to remove the unneeded so as to be replaced by the new machines waiting in the wings. No protest, no upheaval. We now are again on that precipice in my opinion.
As long as the Neo-Malthusians (depopulation fanatics) are in charge, there will never be another healthy middle class allowed. Thriving = baby boom!
I added Walmart in July 2021 to the list of hundreds of corporations I boycott. Partly because of their excessive use of self checkout. If all the places I boycott were listed on hard copy and I needed to move the lot in one go from storage A to storage B I need an eighteen wheel semi. For me the best way to communicate with a corporation is through their bottom line.
I have blocked and boycott everything and everybody. The sheep, central government, the bank, big corp, AI, digitalisation.