A French grocery store is fighting
Amazon Go with a secret weapon: human intelligence
WRITTEN
BY
December 23, 2016
In Amazon’s vision of the future, the groceries we pick out are
lovingly tallied by machines, allowing customers to just walk out the door when
they have everything they want to buy.
But a French grocery store, Monoprix, has provided a similar
service for years by leveraging vision, soft robotics, and their flagship
technology: human intelligence. Customers just hand their carts full of
groceries to a human cashier and walk out, leaving the human to ring up the
items and arrange a home delivery. Instead of an autonomous vehicle delivering
the food, another human drives a car and carries the groceries to the
customer’s door.
Monoprix’s advertisement pokes fun at Amazon’s idealistic
prototype of a store that could potentially upend the way the world physically
buys items. Past the humor, it’s worth noting that Monoprix has a
point—machines aren’t yet a good replacement for humans in complicated
situations. While Amazon’s stores might be great for the typical shopping
experience, what happens if a friend grabs an item for another friend, or a child
takes items off a shelf? These simple situations might pose great challenges
for rigid machines, but humans with innate awareness of shopping norms easily
understand who should be charged for each item.
Human technology has been in beta for about 160,000 years, after a
lengthy alpha testing process.
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