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As a kid, I always wanted to be on the TV show "Supermarket Sweep."
In the middle of a Lowe's store in 2017, my dream almost came true. The home improvement retailer is rolling out an augmented-reality app that tells you the fastest way to find items on your list.
It's powered by Google's Tango, an indoor-mapping technology using special cameras to sense depth in 3D space. Measure objects, map a room and see virtual objects in the real world with augmented reality.
With a phone in one hand and a shopping cart in the other, I'm rushing around the aisles pulling items off the shelf. On screen I see a yellow line overlaid on the camera image, navigating me to the next item on my list. There's an aisle and shelf number in case I get really confused, as well as an estimate step counter that tells me how far I have to go.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @04:29PM (2 children)
Why something is at a particular location in a shop is carefully decided in such a way that you see as much of the store as possible. This is to increase the amount of money you'll spend in the store. Like fuck are they going to 'optimize' your path to the store so that you 'get in and get out' as quickly as possible and thus not spend as much money there as you can.
This is just another step on the road to conditioning and blind obedience to technology: "my app tells me to take this road, so I just take it". If you think this doesn't happen, just search for articles on idiots blindly following their GPS and ending up in a lake. Now extrapolate from that and you've got a recipe for nice little obedient lemmings that do exactly what they are told.
I can't wait for fanbois to go all gooey and claim that "this saves me soooo much time" or "but this is for your own good". If you think the latter, then frankly, you're just dumb. There's nothing I can do for you.
When will we domesticate this technology (and technology companies) and make them work for us instead of for someone else.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @04:36PM
This strikes me as a different kind of reason to drop the oblig Manna reference.
Instead of the fantasy about hot chicks come to save the protagonist from his terrafoam prison and whisk him away to a post-scarcity utopia, this reminds me of the employees following Manna's commands over their headset like Borg drones in a half-conscious haze of obedience.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 20 2017, @02:48AM
When grumblers will become doers. E.g. contributing to openstreetmap [wikipedia.org].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford