The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The hot news on the Future Shock front is that Amazon has opened its first Amazon Go grocery stores in select cities across this Great Grid we call America. You walk in their futuristic A&P, grab yourself a cart you still have to drive yourself, load it with all the goodies you want and then sail out the door to your Tesla. No checkout, no waiting in lines, no self-check, all done for you and by the time you make it home, your credit card will have been charged. No fuss, no muss.

Amazon claims there will be no facial recognition software used to track you through their store. Just cameras everywhere covering your every move, no big deal. According to the company, they’ll use instead computer vision, deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion to manage the store, you know, stuff like that. How the hell they know your identity, much less your credit card information, I couldn’t tell you, but I suspect they use the nano trackers from your vaccinations or something similar, nothing to worry about, all good, all for making your life a bit easier. Isn’t that what we were promised in the digital information era? Time saving? Computers doing your chores? Sure it is. And how is that working out for you? Your life less stressful now that you’ve got access to the internet? More time for those hobbies or for reading a book?

The Olympics are opening up over there in Beijing this week. All the athletes are required to use special apps that can monitor their every tweet or conversation. And no, Amazon didn’t have a hand in this Chinese version of Big Brother. They’re a little bizzy using Artificial Intelligence to monitor your every move in their grocery store, the one coming soon to a neighborhood near you. If you’ve got nothing to hide, why worry? Shoplifting should be a thing of the past along with criticism of your government. Kind of a neat trade-off. Now if only we could get an android to help load and unload that cart, life would be nearly perfect.

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