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[Image: Sainsbury's, modified]
Unintended consequences in checkoutless stores
In Amazon Go, no one thinks I'm stealing - “No one cared what I was doing. Is this what it feels like to shop when you're not black?”. The cameras don’t care what colour you are, removing the employees gets rid of the human biases. As with all automated systems, it’s possible though that new algorithmic biases are introduced, ones that are less visible to a shopper, or harder for them to get a handle on and influence. An economic look on this story and discrimination in shopping.
But! Maybe the humans will game your system if you’re doing checkoutless but haven’t built the full Amazon Go. Perhaps shoplifters will wander in, theatrically wave a mobile at some goods, and confidently strut out. It’s harder for staff to tell who is using the mobile app and who’s nicking stuff. (Some ways to fix that problem. Accounting: do what self-checkout stores do and accept more shrinkage because you now have reduced cost of checkout staff. Tickets please: have every shopper show receipt to a machine or a security on the way out (see Sam’s Club below). Expensive IT: tag all the produce and tie it to the purchasing system. Costco: club members get access and cheaper prices. Panopticon: tag and track the shoppers by having them check in through a barrier and using cameras, which is what Amazon Go does.)
Related: Sam’s Club (Walmart) is close to launching its own checkoutless store format - though it won’t be “just walk out”: when shoppers are ready to check out, they find a store associate and scan a barcode on their phone.
Luxury convenience stores
Hipster convenience stores in New York. And hipster office landlord WeWork plans to open 500 in-house WeMRKTs in the next few years, to maximise the productivity of the young workers in its office spaces.
Traceability and provenance
M&S has a good map of its factories and suppliers for own-label food, clothing and household products. “As a condition of trade, we require all direct suppliers and contracted factories to join the Supplier Ethical Data Exchange (Sedex), a web-based database where suppliers disclose information (labour standards, health and safety, environmental) including self-assessments and site audit reports. Factory information and data is based on self-declared information disclosed on our internal order management systems and Sedex which is then reviewed by our specialist Regional Office teams located in the UK, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, China, Cambodia and Vietnam.”
Google Walkout
Thousands of Google employees walked out of their jobs to register their discomfort with Google’s handling of harassment cases against a few of its former top brass. And here is a great list of articles about women working in tech, and being prevented from working.
Big Tech employees becoming politically activated is a good thing, and you wonder if this will lead to similar reactions to the effects Big Tech’s work has on wider society.
UK Budget: digital tax
The Treasury plans to introduce a 2% “digital services tax” on search engine, social media platforms and online marketplace revenue of global companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Language
Weaponised design: “electronic systems whose designs either do not account for abusive application or whose user experiences directly empower attackers” and which is “facilitated by designers who are oblivious to the politics of digital infrastructure or consider their design practice output to be apolitical”. Interesting piece, though “weaponised design” seems a problematic term. You immediately think about intent, about who is turning the thing into a weapon. In one of the first examples in that piece, is it Snap, the journalist, the mobile phone, or even Google Maps who does the weaponising? When Russian botfarms spam political ads and fake news onto FB, is that “weaponising” a platform, or actually using a platform pretty much as it was designed? Maybe it is better if the language is simply “unintended consequences”.
Cryptocurrencies
The newsletter hasn’t talked about cryptocurrencies for a while. Bitcoin‘s whitepaper was published 10 years ago. This is quite young by the standards of other technology or money infrastructure: the internet hadn’t really got going when it was 10, and to be honest this newsletter isn’t sure how double-entry book-keeping or credit ledgers were doing a decade after 1494.
“Stablecoins” are becoming quite popular. The idea is that they have the advantages of digital assets (quick and easy to sub-divide infinitely and send somewhere, hard to double-spend) and the advantages of a fiat currency (predictable price, indirectly backed by a government). “A programmable dollar”, as this VC puts it. Weirdly though, plain old bitcoin has been less volatile than the stock markets of late, so maybe it too is maturing into a stable coin, pegged against the dollar.
But: “If bitcoin becomes more widely adopted, the huge amounts of electricity used to trade the cryptocurrency could push global temperatures above 2 degrees Celsius by 2033.”
UK gov is considering regulating crypto assets and banning crypto-based derivative products. “The FCA has made clear that in its view cryptoassets have no intrinsic value and investors should therefore be prepared to lose all the value they have put in”. An economist put that view in stronger terms when testifying to the senate: “Crypto is the mother of all scams and (now busted) bubbles while blockchain is the most over-hyped technology ever, no better than a spreadsheet/database”.
Finally, there is a new Wu-Tang Clan affiliated cryptocurrency, ODB coin. (Had ODB still been with us, he’d have told his son to give it a better name, Ol’ Dirty Blockcoin or something like that.)
Psychoanalytic tool
Musk tweeted that he’s deleted his titles. Obviously that doesn’t mean that he’s *actually* resigned as CEO etc, just that he had someone delete <p>CEO</p> from the website (or maybe he does the front-end code himself!). He sometimes gets himself into trouble with the SEC for using Special Terms like “funding secured”, but generally it’s safer to see everything he does on Twitter as an unfiltered internal monologue made public, prompting the thought that maybe Twitter could be used as a psychoanalytic tool. Related: Musk is the id of Silicon Valley.
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Events
- Is a co-op right for you? - several sessions in several towns 11 Sep - 27 Nov.
- Delivery community of practice meetup - Mon 5 Nov 1pm at Federation House.
- Engineering community of practice meetup - Wed 5 Nov 1pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- TICTeC Local - by mySociety Where Civic Technology meets Local gov - Tue 6 Nov 9.30am at Federation House.
- Local.co.uk show & tell - Tue 6 Nov 1pm at Federation House 6th floor.
- Funeralcare show & tell - Tue 6 Nov 2pm at Angel Square 12th floor breakout.
- Web team show & tell - Wed 7 Nov 2.30pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Line management drop-in clinic - Thu 8 Nov 1pm at Federation House.
- Heads of practice community of practice meetup - Thu 8 Nov 2pm at Federation House 5th floor.
- Digital Risk discovery show & tell - Thu 8 Nov 3.30pm at Angel Square 5th floor breakout.
More events at Federation House. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.
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Thanks for reading. If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog.
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