The Secret Ingredient is People

Amazon Go, the cashier-less convenience store, is being discontinued. With this suspension we see that it wasn't quite cashier-less, more that the cashiers were off-site, way off-site.

The 1,000 India workers that were the secret sauce to the image recognition systems. It's hard for me not to notice again and again that systems that have been lauded as advanced technology requires people. So many digital transformation initiatives are held together by human beings that have no other choice but to use and abuse it so it works. LLM's and Generative AI all have a wealth of human art that hold it together, the technology isn't the sophisticated part, it is, and always has been, human.

Soylent Green was as good as it was because of the human element. When the truth of that was out there, the miracle food wasn't as appealing.

Hard to say if that story is playing out in real time the same way.