Blogpost at Humanotions 2024-04-24
Just recently Amazon announced that it will no longer use ‘no-checkout’ payment – a system where AI would supposedly monitor and tally up whatever you were removing from the shelves – because it wasn’t working as planned. What had been billed as a technological AI-fuelled revolution in retail was, supposedly, dependent on cheap human labour based in India watching security camera footage.[1] Such stories are increasingly common, functioning as urban myths that remind us of an alternate reality behind the utopian allure of techno-hype. But going beyond the question of whether AI is driven by micro-processors or underpaid agency workers, how much of what our politicians and business leaders call ‘AI’ is really AI?