Amazon Go, Automation, Drones.

Amazon Go is one of Amazon's new endeavors which has a main selling point of being a grocery store which you do not need to checkout from. It's motto is "No Line. No Checkout. No, Seriously." With the use of computer vision, sensor fusion, and machine learning, Amazon has supposedly created a system where you can just pick whatever items and then they'll bill your amazon account. This announcement brings about a great number of implications and questions should it see massive success.

It brings to question the future of the retail job. Are all the retail jobs going to be outsourced to automation? Are other companies going to try and follow in Amazon's Foot steps? How are those companies going to try and match Amazon? Many companies are already outsourcing their retail jobs to automated checkout services. Pictured bellow is the McDonalds self checkout service which when supplemented to other workers greatly reduces the lines at McDonalds.

These self checkouts had several key pros and cons. They increased the speed of the checkout, took up less space, and reduced the amount employees needed to be payed. Amazon took these advantages and took them to the next level. They completely eliminated the checkout process, it takes up no floor space, and the system does not need any employees. They also had several downsides of customer difficulties and potential for theft. Customers who were tech-savy would have a great time with the self-checkout however, customers who were not can often have difficult times. Amazon eliminated this problem entirely since people do not need to handle a kiosk. Furthermore, apparently according to this Forbes article, this new innovation also eliminates the potential for theft because the AI can detect and track items even under the shirts of customers. It seems like Amazon was planning for this push for quite a few years, here is an patent dating from early 2015.

Amazon has always been changing up the retail industry, for the longest time they've been compelling users to by all kinds of non-food items online. I'm always amazed at their quality of service, and shipping speeds. However, I always thought that their reach was limited to tech, toys, clothing, and other non-food items. Amazon has expanded it's horizons and reached out to a new market with yet another innovation.

In other news, with the advancement of civilian aerial drones, they have become quite cheap and easily obtainable. A popular news story that recently made headlines an Army general says that an ally used a 3 million dollar missle to shoot down a 200 dollar drone. What is a extremely comical case of drastic overkill, turns out to be quite a big problem. 

The need to occasionally bring down these drones has risen in the past few years. Many people have resourcefully come up with some interesting solutions. Like training eagles to bring down these drones.

Or a shoulder mounted launcher.

It's quite interesting that new technologies give rises to new unforeseen problems. It only makes me wonder what kind of new problems would machine learning and automation bring.