This will ultimately be the death of retail stores.

Half the reason anyone wants to go to a store in 2026 is to have a good time shopping in person. If going to the store leads to any chance of a shitty experience? Fuck it dude, I'll just order online like everyone else I suppose.

The world would be dramatically better if about 10,000 specific people died

Self Checkouts are not even self checkout anymore. You go up and scan your stuff then 2 times out of 3 someone has to come over and approve that you scanned everything. At that point just open the normal lanes back up

Kafkaesque nightmares

I gotta read something besides The Metamorphasis because all I associate with that phrase is physical body horror of becoming a bug. Somehow I don't think that's what they meant here.

Not a bug.

What is wild about all this is looking back to the old social contract and how it basically made this fobitted forbidden.

The best example is the movie minority report in which the had a fool proof way to 100% of the time predict the future.

I won’t spoil the movie, but the whole premise was that even if there was one instance of it making a mistake, and a innocent person was put on ice by mistake, then the whole thing had to be shut down.

And in today’s reality: all of big tech’s new tools make mistakes constantly, sometimes more than getting things right, and it’s still full steam ahead on the rollout.

MFW dystopia movies were too optimistic

You write just one book about a labyrinthine bureacracy and people use your name to curse organisational dysfunction forever.

I worked at my local Goodwill (they're split up by region). We kept a close eye on known shoplifters, but we couldn't say anything and even my boss couldn't say anything unless he literally saw them conceal the object then walk out of the store and never broke eye contact. They said the store could get sued if we stopped them and they had ditched the contraband in the moment we looked away.

I don't see why the stores discussed here should be treated differently. Someone needs to sue these surveillance stores until they stop automating false accusations.

Someone must have been telling lies about Some slop machine must have misidentified Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.

This is a great way for people to lesen how this technology can be used negatively. Get the backlash early before it has completely infected everything.

When I worked at Lowe's they could tell the instant shoplifters pulled into the parking lot. They even had nicknames for the repeat offenders.

"Heads up, Dumb and Dumber just pulled in, no doubt headed for lumber."

The AI gets to accuse you based on a bad guess, while you have to file paperwork and surrender more personal data to prove you didn’t steal a pack of vitamins. »Innocent until proven guilty« is now a premium feature.

False accusation isn't a crime over there?
What a shitty place!