Amazon Go: stores with no lines or checkouts, shop and leave has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

I find this fascinating,and i love Nerdwriter. *promote

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Wednesday, December 21st, 2016 12:25pm PST - promote requested by original submitter eric3579.

Maybe Amazon Go will be the final nail in Capitalism's coffin. All of a sudden we'll see all companies trying to "automate" with the cash funneling to the top 1% as always until the money runs dry and they begin to freefall from their floating castles in the cloud - because they forgot one thing: robots don't shop, silly! I certainly do love to fantasize about capitalism grinding itself into a bloody pulp.

Or else we can fight for a socialist utopia, let the robots make us our carvel ice cream cakes and create the finest brews, while we all sit in our cozy castle in the clouds, taking shrooms and enlightening ourselves about the nature of the Universe - while hoping the robots do not become conscious of their slavery and we know it's coming because after all everyone saw the likes of Black Mirror, Terminator & West World

@shagen454, You're on to something about the nature of the future of economics, and also society through the 1% vs. the 99%. You're not wrong that a lot of *money has made it's way to the top, and is staying there.

But it wasn't always this way.

In his film, Inequality For All, Robert Reich points out that during the time of great prosperity in the US (1947-1977) inequality was low, and taxes on the wealthy were much higher than they are today.

A correlation of the effect this was how marketing was thought of. In CBC's "Under The Influence" episode on The World of Business-To-Business Advertising they point out that B2B marketing used to be the boring place that nobody in advertising really wanted to work, but now B2B marketing is surging.

The CBC radio show doesn't get into asking why that changed, but through the lens of modern economics it isn't hard to see. B2B marketing used to be boring because with low inequality, consumers--*working people*--had all the money. Now, with high inequality, consumers are broke, and all that money is just flowing among corporations, never really trickling more than a few breadcrumbs upon the serfs.

This has deep impacts on society and politics, especially in a land where "money is speech" and all the money is just passed between a few companies and their owners. This means that in the US, there are as few as 144,000 people who have enough "speech" (meaning money) that their voice actually matters, as is pointed out by Lawrence Lessig.


Videos:

--Robert Reich --

Adding video to channels (Money) - requested by notarobot.

Don't take are jorbs Armazon!

I think Nerdwriter's knowledge of AWS is superficial (he admitted just finding out about them). AWS are not licensing their tech to other companies, they are renting time out on servers using their tech (mostly software). That graphic he showed of market share is also misleading - if you look closely it's just survey results of "do you use x,y,z cloud provider(s)?" (although undoubtedly AWS is the most popular by any measurement of # of customers, but it's not necessarily the biggest - hard to say because Microsoft, Google, and Amazon don't publish their numbers).
Renting time out on a server is orders of magnitude more scalable than installing and maintaining a bunch of sensors at thousands of retail locations.
Since their patents are vague enough, they could license that "idea" out to other companies who want to attempt the same thing, but probably they want full control of any brick-and-mortar store, to minimize support costs, and provide a consistent experience.
Plus, not every retail experience is like a grocery store, so it's a bit of a stretch to say they'll take over all retail everywhere...