Amazon has opened Amazon Go, a grocery store using artificial intelligence (AI), prompting speculation about its potential effects on the labor market, worries about consumer privacy and skepticism about how well it will work. Shoppers scan a smartphone app at a turnstile as they enter, then items are added to a virtual shopping cart as shoppers pull them off the shelf. If the shopper puts the item back on a shelf, the item is deleted from the cart. When shoppers leave the store, their credit cards are charged for the total. The store reportedly uses machine learning algorithms and computer-vision image processing along with weight sensors, camera-friendly bar codes and infrared sensors to track products as they leave shelves and the store. The store's technology hit speed bumps before its unveiling. Amazon Go’s opening was delayed by a year as the company fine-tuned and tested the technology; among early bugs was…
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A Burger King advertisement featuring a prompt for Google Home, a voice-powered digital-assistant device, has caught media attention as an interesting but flawed method of incorporating artificial intelligence into a food-marketing campaign. The 15-second ad features a Burger King employee noting the ad is too short to explain the ingredients, stating Google Home's trigger, "OK, Google," and asking, "What is the Whopper burger?" When triggered, Google Home recites the answer from Wikipedia, which functioned as expected when viewers first saw the spot. As the ad caught attention, however, pranksters began editing the Wikipedia page, removing the actual ingredients and replacing them with "toenail clippings," "cyanide" and "medium-sized child," among others. Further, Burger King did not collaborate on the project with Google, which quickly disabled Google Home devices' responses to the ad. See New York Times, NPR, and Reuters, April 12, 2017. Issue 631
