Amazon Go: Grocery Store with No Checkout Lines

Amazon’s new Go store is an incredible look at what automation can do for our daily lives. This was shared at work the other day, and I was just blown away.

Whenever we’re at the grocery store, I would oftentimes mention to Liz how inefficient the checkout lines were. I mean – there we are, standing there clutching our food, waiting for someone to manually scan each and every item.

Not just us, but everyone in front of us and behind us, funneling into a bottle-neck process. Self-check out is a nice way around this, but the whole process of manual scanning just seemed so… antiquated.

This video was shared at work, and our conversation took a quick turn to automation: specifically, the number of jobs that a store like Amazon go would replace. No more cashiers, no more baggers.

The news of Uber’s self-driving truck making its first delivery was a big deal, but to me it felt somewhat distant. Coupled with Amazon’s video today, the timing of when we’ll start seeing automated processes in our day to day seems… much closer than I thought.

And this is coming from me, a guy who spends most of his hours online, around tech folks, all of us linking and talking about tech stuff. If I’m thinking “Wow, automated stuff is happening really quickly” – what must it be like for others, who aren’t involved in tech?

While talking with my friend @Cbab about the impact of automation on jobs, this video came up:

I’d seen this before, a while back. But watching it again, I was in awe at how autonomous everything was. Such complexity and coordination, all handled by robots. And then I realized the video was posted back in 2011.

Which, honestly, seems like a lifetime ago.

Related:
The Allure of Automation in an Imperfect World
The Mathematics of Murder: Autonomous Robots and Choosing Who to Kill
Moral Machine: When, Exactly, Should A Driverless Car Kill People?