Perhaps keeping an old phone for purposes of doing this scanning thing might be ideal.
That’s an excellent idea!
all grocers have a ‘cashier’ desk where you get lottery tickets.
Ha! Great observation. There’s no way in hell stores are going to give up on gambling cash. :-)
I would actually install the vendor’s phone app if they built in this functionality instead of having these terminals.
I think you’re right, but I dread it. I avoid installing apps. The thought of installing even more tracking for multiple vendors annoys me.
Although I am resistant, your point about bagging once is a true benefit.
One downside, that system doesn’t seem to support cash.
Good point. A US department store chain – Kohl’s – has been using electronic shelf labels that change several times per day. Not sure how they handle the discrepancies. How do I prove the product was prices $1 when I picked it up if the label now says $2? Is it my responsibility to notice the register price was different?
I more or less avoided Kohl’s, so I’m not sure how that was handled.
I saw demos online where they could also determine heart rate through video. The example I saw was a video of a newborn’s face.
I’ve heard of similar, but how exactly does this work? Does it say $0.99 on the shelf and the receipt winds up being $1.50?
I also have to keep remembering what someone else online said, “They’re no longer selling their product. They’re selling their stocks.”
I’m guessing CEOs will be replaced by their assistants, who will just type questions from the investors into the LLM and post the answers into another chat window.
Agreed. I have to keep reminding myself that CEOs should really be CLO (Chief Lying Officers). Their job is to lie convincingly.
Excellent point. Modern CEOs are just the face of the marketing org. Maybe always have been.
5 years ago voice assistants were being promoted with all the breathless excitement that “AI” is receiving today. I imagine in 5 year’s more time Google will be giving the same listless attention to their AI products that they are giving to their voice assistants now. Well, actually to just about every product they’ve ever made, except maybe for Google Mail.
My how things have changed over the years! Why, when I was a young girl, we didn’t have the internet. When we wanted to turn a light on, we had to write a letter to Ford Motor Co. (They were the tech of the day.) I’d write, “Dear Mr. Ford, please give us permission to turn on our light in the dining room.” Of course then we’d have to find a stamp, then walk the letter down to the nearest post office. (That was faster than waiting for the mailman to pick it up from the neighborhood mail box.) Sure enough, 6 weeks later we’d receive a reply saying, “Fine, turn on the light in the dining room.” The postman delivered mail in the morning, so we had to wait until dark to all gather around in the dining room and turn on the light with great ceremony.
We never understood why we needed to get permission from a company far away to turn on a light switch, but we were patriotic Americans, so we knew better than to question the process.
Oh, stop your complaining. It’s not perfect, but we’ve all seen how easy this is to fix. Just barge into Tesla tomorrow and randomly fire 20% of the employees. That’s how real leaders get things done.
/s
I read a quote somewhere to the effect, “The successful politician knows the exact time to step in front of the parade and pretend they’re leading it.”
I will never forgive Carley Fiorino for killing HP.
“AI” is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation).
Yup. That was very intentionally done by marketing wanks in order to muddy the water. Look! This computer program , er we mean “AI” can convert speech to text. Now, let us install it into your bank account."
Sure. And AI that identifies objects in pictures and converts pictures of text into text. There’s lots of good and amazing applications about AI. But that’s not what we’re complaining about.
We’re complaining about all the people who are asking, “Is AI ready to tell me what to do so I don’t have to think?” and “Can I replace everyone that works for me with AI so I don’t have to think?” and “Can I replace my interaction with my employees with AI so I can still get paid for not doing the one thing I was hired to do?”
Man, if only someone could have predicted that this AI craze was just another load of marketing BS.
/s
This experience has taught me more about CEO competence than anything else.
Guess this means Apple has run out of ideas on how to make iPhone better.
What can we do to distract attention away from the fact that we don’t have any decent new features?
Wait. I thought we were going to be replaced with robots. What do they need AI for? To interview the robots?
Goddammit! Is there anything that US corporations won’t fuck up?