Imagine going into a supermarket where you will, of course, find products to buy, and probably other shoppers like you. Nothing else, no one on the other side of the "barricade", no cashiers, no cashiers, no other employees. The whole shopping process with a simple app. In short, just enough time to choose the products and leave the shop. In a while this scenario, which is almost disturbing told like this, will be reality: it is one of the umpteenth revolutions of daily life that Amazon is preparing to make.
It doesn't pay for treat their employees in an often questionable way (there are thousands of complaints against Amazon, in the US and Europe, and a sort of union has also been formed this year through a website that collects protests), Jeff Bezos' company is directly thinking of removing them from half. Not so much those - very numerous - who work in warehouses all over the world (Amazon has over 200 employees in all) to sort the goods that we order with a simple click and expect to receive comfortably at home in 24/48 hours, and of whom for now you can't do without, as those involved in direct sales.
That, in the not too distant future, will be guaranteed by new Amazon Go app: Seattle's first store equipped with this system will open to the public in early 2017. Exactly how it works, he explains a video released by Amazon and impressive enough: you see a customer walk in, swipe their cell phone on a reader, grab something from the fridge, and walk out of the store. A quick, automatic operation, without any human contact, in a 1.000 square meter store that the e-commerce giant has currently only tested on its employees.
From what the company has communicated, to use the service it will therefore be sufficient to install the Amazon Go application, log in and take what you want. It is not yet clear what the company has planned to avoid shoplifters, but what emerges is that Amazon has thought of a facial recognition system: Amazon-branded stores will in fact be equipped with computer vision, sensor fusion and deep learning. A revolutionary way of shopping is coming: very convenient for technology fans and for those who, between a thousand work and non-work commitments, want to waste as little time as possible shopping. Probably much less inviting, even dangerous, for those millions of jobs already defended with difficulty, paying the price of exploitation.
Jeff Bezos this matters relatively; what matters is innovation, going beyond the boundaries of the imagination. So says the Amazon Go website: “Four years ago we asked ourselves: what if we could create a checkout experience? Can we push the boundaries of machine learning to create a store where customers can just grab what they want and go?” After all, the digitization and robotization of trade and production systems are increasingly inexorably burning the labor market.
An example above all: this year the Chinese giant Foxconn, which builds iPhones but also products and components for brands such as Samsung, Dell, Hp and Microsoft, announced that it has cut the human workforce of one of its superfactories by almost half: of the 110 workers in the Kunshan plant, in Jiangsu province, north of Shanghai, only 50 are left. And the other 60 thousand? Replaced by robots, as will the Amazon supermarket cashiers. Consumers will be happy, workers much less so.
