>Freshii’s ‘virtual cashiers’ make $3.75 an hour and have been called ‘outrageous’ — now the chain’s founder wants to go global
>It started as an experiment, designed to solve staffing shortages at Freshii. Last year, amidst harsh COVID-19 business restrictions, senior members of Freshii’s management team — including founder and then-CEO Matthew Corrin — quietly began testing a software called “Percy,” a video-calling device attached to cash registers at select franchise locations.
>The software was built to connect Freshii patrons with cheap, outsourced workers based in countries thousands of kilometres away. The idea, the creators said, was to help franchise owners cut down on labour costs while keeping their doors open in case local staff called in sick. The pilot project went relatively unnoticed until April, when Percy’s business model sparked intense criticism from labour organizers and senior politicians after the Star revealed that some of those “virtual cashiers,” based in countries such as Nicaragua, are paid $3.75 (U.S.) an hour to perform the same tasks as Ontario workers who earn a minimum wage of $15 (CAD) an hour.
Looks like a whole lot of people are about to have their jobs outsourced. How can governments best support people who become unemployed as a result of exploiting the third-world? It seems to cause some problems down the line.
I really don't understand what the fuck a virtual cashier is and how that works any better than the touchscreens at Maccies or the self-service checkouts at Tesco.
Is it purely just that paying for humans over Skype is cheaper than the tech to properly automate it? Because even from a cold capitalist business point of view that's retarded short termist thinking.
This is why everything's going to go tits up sooner or later, capitalism is incredibly efficient until it reaches the point it has to start self cannibalising, then it rips itself apart and does so knowingly and voluntarily.
I think it's because Septics are fucking mental and actually want to talk to people in shops and that. In Walmart they hire a bloke just to stand at the door and say hello to you.
>>9504 I like interacting with a human. I live alone and am not especially cool, and many of my friends are old enough that I can go months without seeing them. I talk to people at work, but it occurred to me a few months ago that I can sometimes go several days without hearing a woman's voice in person at all (as opposed to on TV, or via text message, or whatever). As far as I'm concerned, I have chased away as much of that pesky human interaction as I can, and I'm now getting by on the very bare minimum. When a massive corporation decides to remove part of that minimum simply to save themselves money, which they don't even then pass on to me, you can bet I'm going to kick off.
>Is it purely just that paying for humans over Skype is cheaper than the tech to properly automate it? Because even from a cold capitalist business point of view that's retarded short termist thinking.
It's potentially a very smart move.
As >>9505 and >>9506 say, a cashier is about more than just a mechanism of ordering. If Freshii wanted a straightforward self-checkout system, they could buy one off the shelf from a vendor with tons of experience. They've probably already evaluated those solutions. I think they're testing how satisfied their customers are after an interaction with a video cashier vs an interaction with a real cashier. Do customers feel like they've had a social interaction, do they feel a connection with the cashier, do they trust their recommendations etc. That kind of stuff is hard to test in a behavioural lab or a concept store, but fairly easy to test in a pilot deployment in real stores.
Those video cashiers will inevitably be a bit imperfect - non-native English, a lack of cultural context, stream latency, glitchy connections etc. If customers are happy with that, then it serves as a proof-of-concept for a fully AI based virtual cashier. We do that kind of thing all the time in software, when we know that something can be automated but we're not sure whether it should be automated. Amy Hoy coined the term "Flintstoning" for this process - using human effort to fake software features in the early stages of development. This has become particularly powerful with modern machine learning techniques.
You know those chatboxes you see on websites to ask a question or make a complaint? Some of them just go straight to someone's instant messages, some are purely AI, but the smart ones are a bit of both. You start off with a highly skilled customer service rep answering queries, which you can then use as a training dataset for a machine learning model. Every time the human rep deals with a customer, the AI model can play along, trying to guess what the human would say and refining itself accordingly. As the AI gets better at guessing correctly, it can jump straight in on the easy questions, but if it has low confidence on having an appropriate response it can hand over to the human. It's a man-machine hybrid that slowly becomes more machine than man, a creeping assimilation of human behaviour into a reliable mathematical model.
If Percy know what they're doing (and I think they do), that's the basic ruse here. The minimum-wage humans are just a stepping stone, they're interacting with customers in order to train the deepfake models that will ultimately replace them. The deepfakes will slip in subtly at first, covering for connection glitches or nodding along when a customer can't make up their mind, but eventually they'll be handling 99% of interactions correctly without human oversight. It might occasionally freak out and "have a connection problem" or "hand you over to a supervisor", but the company will have successfully trained an AI to replace most customer service staff without any up-front financial risk.
Us nerds are the worst kind of scabs and the rest of you should really read up on the Wapping dispute before we come for your jobs. We're coming for your jobs. We're sorry, but then we remember that we got bullied at school and then we're not sorry at all. Of course, all that bullying means that we hate ourselves, so we're busy automating our own jobs too. https://github.com/features/copilot/[/spoiler]
For a start I don't think it's necessarily a sound lead of logic that if people "like" speaking to a third worlder over skype instead of a totally dead robot checkout, that it means they'll also like speaking to some terrifying uncanny valley AI checkout worker. Personally I don't see the point if it's not a real person, that is, in and of itself, the entire point. I think most people would rather just have a till that doesn't speak to you at all than a dystopian reality where you have to make smalltalk with a fucking robot when you're buying three boxes of choc-ices and a bottle of Glenn's on a Thursday night.
I reckon a big part of it is a generational thing. Oldies who are so computer averse they never got past their old trusty Nokia phone and still queue up to use the real checkout even when there's loads of empty self-serve ones, they'll be who they're hoping to convert here. But that won't be permanent, and when my generation is that age, we will already be quite content with a world completely absent of face to face interaction, the zoomers even more so. They've grown up in the world where you don't have to speak to the person. If you chat with them it's a pretty common thing that they prefer Spoons because you can order without having to interact with someone, something as simple as just saying "pint of Guiness mate" is enough to tip their decision.
And I understand it, I do, I was terminally shy as a younglad, so I know if I'd grown up under those circumstances I'd simply never have broken through that. Luckily I was a young adult just early enough to still have to do things like phone up for a takeaway instead of using just eat, but I can see what a difference it would make if I was a few years younger.
>In Walmart they hire a bloke just to stand at the door and say hello to you
Truly one of the most undignified jobs out there.
Coincidentally, a lot of elderly people in Japan now work as door openers or lift attendants, and all sorts of jobs like that, because Japan's social security and retirement system is increasingly suffering from a shrinking younger workforce.
>>9508 Not him but it's that at the moment there are certain things you can't manage with pushing few buttons. You don't need a lad from Calcutta to process your Maccies order but outside of the bare minimum you need a human involved for when you have a problem.
I'm interested to see if we can get an AI in to handle something like B&Q where it can advise customers on DIY and the like. An area an AI is completely unsuited to perform itself but which if you get it to work will have the feckless 16 years olds who work there coming to it for help in finding the tartan paint. Maybe push ahead from there into human-machine teaming for domestic tasks, you buy a complicated IKEA table and it comes with AI of a proper man to talk you through it, like a satnav for your masculinity.
>>9505 They exist to catch shoplifters too and generally extend the area of control the staff maintain. You can never trust the intentions of a smiling American.
>>9509 I remember Christmas 2019 and seeing all the elderly out working over Christmas doing free samples even here. Initially I thought it was sweet to see them earning money to buy the grandkids presents but then I tried the products and suddenly I'm walking around the supermarket carrying some burning hot disgusting fruit tea in a plastic cup that did nothing to protect my fingers.
Ultimately I think the lesson here is that we do have elderly people in the workforce but the way they seem to be deployed is horribly inefficient and it's going to cause us problems as we extend peoples working lives. They might like the idea of only working part-time at Tesco express but if we combine them with machines we can work them to the bone.
> but the way they seem to be deployed is horribly inefficient
What's an efficient way to employ a septuagenarian though. A lot of them struggle with mental tasks and asking them to get an item from five aisles down is like a whole day's workout for them.
To be clear, the reason more of them are still employed nowadays usually isn't that they have a useful contribution to make to the workforce. It's just the dire need for money to cover their monthly costs, which their pensions will increasingly no longer provide.
>>9510 >They might like the idea of only working part-time at Tesco express but if we combine them with machines we can work them to the bone.
...Augmented... Eldelrly?! Robo-Grandpas?!
>>9511 This has given me an awful idea for the supermarket of the future: Get one of those automated stock-collecting robots they have in warehouses, stick an old retiree in a basket on top of it. The robot will wheel around getting the items you want without being tired or forgetting where things are, and then for that all important human touch the old bloke can hand it to you.
Don't bother going to the patent office, I'm already on the bus.
>>9511 >To be clear, the reason more of them are still employed nowadays usually isn't that they have a useful contribution to make to the workforce. It's just the dire need for money to cover their monthly costs, which their pensions will increasingly no longer provide.
Nah, it's more like they take early retirement from a full-time job but continue to do part-time as they close out their working life. It's not like you can't work at all in your 60s but it's already getting a bit much to work full-time at that age, hence why it's common sense to plan to take early retirement these days after you pay off the house.
If they're proper old then you need to take it case-by-case but we can give them exoskeletons like in Aliens or however else we handle disabilities these days. They've already done a lot of research into this as you'd expect and old people still have a tendency to make less catastrophic errors than the young.
>They've already done a lot of research into this as you'd expect and old people still have a tendency to make less catastrophic errors than the young.
I'm not sure. I seem to remember numerous studies which all tended to conclude that people age 65 and up have far poorer judgement than younger adults. In fact, even the average sixteen year old can often make better decisions.
