I hate those self-checkout things, but for a different reason than the lady in the article.
The bottom line is we haven't gotten the tech right yet. The machines measure several different variables in order to keep shoppers honest: the speed of the scanning and bagging steps, the weight of the bagged item (compared against a database of acceptable weights), etc. The problem is that false positives are all too common, and it's impossible to back out of a false-positive scenario without help from an attendant. I find the results deeply unsettling, like a science fiction nightmare scenario come true in miniature, and these machines have become like miniature versions of GLaDOS from Portal: hostile, paranoid, seeking to catch you out and make you feel bad with their irrefutably friendly female computer voices.
It's telling that when I committed the unforgivable offense of putting something in with a different measured weight than the database said the scanned item should have, the attendant came over and said "Sorry about that. She gets a little sassy sometimes."
That's my sign that the future we've dreamed of and feared is here. We're putting computers in charge of formerly human-mediated decisions, but people tend to forget they're not humans so they frequently get it wrong and you can't argue with them like a human.
I would love to see business processes streamlined by machine. But keep humans on the job until the machines stop sucking, please.
The bottom line is we haven't gotten the tech right yet. The machines measure several different variables in order to keep shoppers honest: the speed of the scanning and bagging steps, the weight of the bagged item (compared against a database of acceptable weights), etc. The problem is that false positives are all too common, and it's impossible to back out of a false-positive scenario without help from an attendant. I find the results deeply unsettling, like a science fiction nightmare scenario come true in miniature, and these machines have become like miniature versions of GLaDOS from Portal: hostile, paranoid, seeking to catch you out and make you feel bad with their irrefutably friendly female computer voices.
It's telling that when I committed the unforgivable offense of putting something in with a different measured weight than the database said the scanned item should have, the attendant came over and said "Sorry about that. She gets a little sassy sometimes."
That's my sign that the future we've dreamed of and feared is here. We're putting computers in charge of formerly human-mediated decisions, but people tend to forget they're not humans so they frequently get it wrong and you can't argue with them like a human.
I would love to see business processes streamlined by machine. But keep humans on the job until the machines stop sucking, please.