The Guardian has a nice article on the curious case of Amazon’s AI-powered shops. Customers would go to the Amazon shops, pick whatever they wanted, and leave, and Amazon would charge them using AI. According to the article, the AI was in the form of human data labelers in India.
The whole thing is funny and a bit sad. Primarily funny.
Imagine the first truly self-driving car that turns out to be driven not by AI but by humans through an API. You get this gigantic self-driving center with state-of-the-art gamer sets where young folks will ride your luxury self-driving car for you. Tesla couldn’t solve this problem for 10 years using the brightest engineers. Here we are, solved for you, Tesla, using some Amazon Mechanical Turk magic. Then this driving center can be optimized, for the moments when the drivers have no cars to ride, they’d vacuum with robots or mow grass with the 100% AI lawn mowers.
Veselin.blog 
I could use someone to vacuum using my robotic vacuum. It meanders around for 6 hours and still misses places.
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And my robotic vacuum cleaner doesn’t know what to do with socks.
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Yeah, that was really surprising to know about AI not being AI, but humans. It makes total sense.
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Yeah but the thinking behind this is that once it goes through an API, you can start replacing certain interactions with robots and gradually remove the human employees starting with the tasks that are the easiest to automate. The whole thing is evil.
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Yeah, it is in many aspects.
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