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> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. Tha
by speff 3y ago
> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts.
That line was unintentionally hilarious to me. Like looking inside a TV and finding a bunch of fast-working little people drawing images.
- silverquiet 3y agoI often wonder how much human intervention goes into self-driving car fleets.
- BitwiseFool 3y agoThat reminds me of this, https://xkcd.com/1897/ https://xkcd.com/1897/ perhaps it was based on something after all.
- leviathan303 3y ago2-4% of the time according to the former Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt in a Hacker News comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145997
- fsckboy 3y agothose grocery delivery robots you see in LA, turns out are being monitored/operated by people in a central location with all their camera feeds.
- deathanatos 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk, on the off chance you've never heard of it. (This article is not the AWS service by the same name, though by the time you conclude reading the Wikipedia page, it should be obvious where the AWS service got its name, and what it does.)
- speff 3y agoThanks for the link. I knew of the concept and the Amazon service, but wasn't aware of the connection between the two. Interesting stuff.
- saddist0 3y agoIt isn't that bad an idea. Imagine that next time you are drunk, you can hire a driver who will drive you back home remotely (along with some AI to stop the car in case connection goes away).
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoImagine you hire a taxi, but the taxi driver follows commands of someone in another country who receives video stream from the car. That’s what it’s actually like. It’s just strictly more work than simply having a cashier.
- munk-a 3y agoI disagree - at a basic level if people are able to tell which products you're picking up the resolution is necessarily high enough that there's a huge creep factor. I am sometimes amazed at what companies will pursue without a glance towards common sense.
- stemlord 3y agoSomeone will reply to you saying "I have nothing to hide"
- cdchn 3y agoIs high enough resolution to identify products more creepy than simple ubiquitous surveillance?
- saghm 3y agoOne creepy thing existing doesn't mean that another thing can't also be creepy. Getting rid of one of many creepy things is still nice even if it's not the only one.
- freedomben 3y agoI'm a huge privacy advocate and don't think stores should track what you buy at all, so don't confuse what I say next with the is/ought fallacy. They already have perfect resolution and data retention of everything you buy at checkout time when it's scanned, plus they can verify your identity rather than have to rely on facial recognition or other things. I don't think this is any creepier than what they already do so from their perspective it is "common sense."
- rco8786 3y agoMechanical Turk
- ribosometronome 3y agoThe article they link for that isn't readable without subscription. Were they actually labeling data live? That sounds like effectively a secret concierge following you around and writing down what you're getting & like it would be pretty difficult to keep up with. Otherwise, labeled data and machine learning kind of go hand and hand. It's not wild that Amazon would dogfood its own product while creating training data to improve it.
- diggan 3y agoIt does sound like a person was watching the shopper live: > Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped. But who knows, tech articles are so inaccurate that it might as well have been some misunderstanding regarding how the labeling/training was done.
- ribosometronome 3y agoYeah, that's line was what got me trying to look at the article they cite, which is unfortunately paywalled. It'd be one thing to do that at like... several stores to generate the training data. But scaling it to dozens while it still requires that? Baffling.
- skywhopper 3y agoIt sounds like the receipts weren't necessarily "live", sometimes taking hours to appear, so I'm guessing they did it as live as possible and when they got backed up they would just revisit recorded video. Something tells me the expectations for throughput were also pretty overwhelming to the individuals who worked there.
- dotnet00 3y agoKind of reminds me of how back when speech-to-text started to get good enough to use (in the form of Google Assistant/Siri), my parents wondered if there was someone on the other side doing the transcription.
- mikehollinger 3y ago> Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. Yup. I got the chance to go shopping at one in 2018 (so it's been a while). You could tell there was some "reconciliation" happening, because your receipt didn't show up until 20-30 minutes after you left. My guess is that this was some person via mechanical turk crawling thru the data and indexing what you -really- bought. Of course, my colleague and I (who were working on computer vision at the time) did stuff like take our bags off, put them in the middle of the floor, and roll a can of soda into the bag, just to see what would happen.
- giantg2 3y ago"Of course, my colleague and I (who were working on computer vision at the time) did stuff like take our bags off, put them in the middle of the floor, and roll a can of soda into the bag, just to see what would happen." I'm many jurisdictions this could be enough to get you prosecuted for shoplifting if it evaded payment.
- walterbell 3y agoAfter advertising "Just Walk Out"?
- giantg2 3y agoYeah, the author is trying to see what would happen if they roll a can into the bag. This is meant to conceal the act from the computer. The act of concealing merchandise is all that is required in many jurisdictions. If they walked out without the concealing act, then I would think the error should be on the store. There have been some cases of self checkout prosecution too. They don't need any proof of intent. Even regular errors can be prosecuted.
- walterbell 3y ago> Even regular errors can be prosecuted. Volunteer to work for free, with bonus legal liability, as a self-service cashier. So convenient!
- shmatt 3y agoi've written about this multiple times on HN and always got downvoted I work in the CV industry and this was a very badly kept secret. There is absolutely no financially feasible way to run something like this with current CV
- Ginobili 3y agoi'm curious to know what the limitations of the technology are. Are the machine learning/CV algorithms not accurate enough to run it at scale?
- JohnFen 3y agoI work with ML CV industrial systems, and they can certainly do accurate and detailed analysis and identification very quickly. The systems that do this are also necessarily very, very expensive -- much more expensive than any grocery store could possibly justify. Of course, costs change with time, but right now I don't see how this sort of application could approach being financially feasible.
- PreachSoup 3y agoIt's me, aws Mechanical Turk again!
- slaymaker1907 3y agoSo what we thought was automation was really just outsourcing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]