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Comment by FourOnTheFloor | Hacker News Reader

But this was an obvious sham and a fraud that couldn't scale. I don't think its demise is sad at all.

What's sad is putting cashiers out of work, and even worse is replacing them with outrageously piss-poor alternatives. Self-checkout is a clinic on incompetent system design, and has been for DECADES now. It's mind-bogglingly bad, all to take jobs away from people. Fuck that.

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Why is it a fraud? Did they ever tell you it was entirely computer-driven? I thought their value proposition was you could just ... walk out. This feels pretty inescapably the future. Why have people do bad jobs like cashier work when computers could do them instead? This is why UBI is going to be critical. We're moving to a world where we'll have more people than work, and that's not just ok - it's fantastic.

They're not wrong, they're just early. Which you could argue is the same thing on a micro scale, but not on a macro.

> Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. Our Just Walk Out Technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you're done shopping, you can just leave the store. A little later, your receipt will be available and we will charge your payment method.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

Thanks for answering his question.

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