Driverless cars, self-help checkout lanes, AI powered homes, offices, schools can be dehumanizing and isolating to mankind. An endless chat with a driver partner, who is sharing stories from other parts of the world or intriguing discussion at the checkout registers about availability of dinner ingredients or a compassion of human teacher that is replaced by robots, is replaced with automation and overwhelming senses. The robotic revolution and its dehumanizing effect have been criticized for its power of inducing an anxiety and insecurity. Yet keeping aside the psychological impacts on human due to automation, if we consider the monetary benefit of robotic revolution, is it really delivering on its promise? This, blog discusses the same.
Amazon launched GO store in 2017, where the entire store exhibited array of AI technologies powered with deep learning algorithms, sensory systems to identify the items picked, and purchases made with a simple swipe in phone wallet where money automatically debited from amazon wallet. If you picture this store, the description may sound like from that of a science fiction movie. With logistics and warehousing already fully automated, the last hop in retail, where the products are purchased by consumers being automated as well should have had unlimited growth potential. The reduced labor costs with unmanned grocery shops, should have had directly translated into profits. Yet that is not the case.
If we analyze the case, we see that the technology used to monitor purchasing in GO stores relies on bulky 3-dimensional high-power cameras, installed in the ceilings of Amazon Go stores. In supermarkets the volume of items rockets from 1000 to 10000 and beyond. This sheer volume AI technology needs to handle and correctly charge each item and deduct the amount from correct consumer’s Amazon wallet, and thus requires highest precision to largest. A simple glitch would charge wrong product from a wrong account. Even a simple incidence of wrong charge or debit from wrong account would damage the consumer relationship permanently. Albeit the cost of production, installation and maintenance of this automation system proving to be more expensive than hiring a moderate human labor.
The constant face recognition software can be intrusive beyond acceptable norms of being accepted. So, this AI investments would only have diminishing returns, as the human staffed grocery shops continue to profit irrespective of the existence of the fully automated GO shops. By far, technology is the most sophisticated sector of economy and requires highest investments. The cost of production does not get reduced by plainly replacing human labor by AI it only gets transformed from human labor cost to technological cost.
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