Most people experienced the fall of the American Empire as, “One day a Starbucks storage room went empty, and no AI agent came to resupply it.”
they say a person dies two times; once when your body gives out, and again the final time an ai adds your smeared likeness to a generated image
A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a coffee decision.
You could have made me CEO and I would have made no changes, saving millions, I am built different and am the most rational actor in a market system.
It’s funny but I recall someone asking on reddit if AI could replace CEOs and everyone blew a gasket; they were literally more angry than when you suggest maybe Kamala shouldn’t support Israel, people were swearing him out and calling him an idiot.
Fuck Reddit but I find this pretty surprising as they’re generally pretty radlib. I constantly see the “CEOs are the one job AI could replace and no one would notice” refrain there.
ah, the Rasputin approach
For real though more and more I feel that the capitalist class does not understand that AI cannot be as valuable as a human employee just for the common aspect that, for the employee, a mistake like this means being fired and going homeless. Like it’s literally our social and environmental pressures that make us effective group workers as humans, we don’t want to cause problems for our coworkers and we are deathly afraid of being punished for mistakes (depending on the work environment we might also take pride in being effective and having an organized workspace). Meanwhile “AI” as they are now are just bumbling non-conscious agents that don’t care if they screw up or even have the concept of what screwing up means.
fucking collapse already god damnI’m sorry but how can they not do this more programmatically, based on like sales data or something
That’s literally how it’s been done for decades. I used to do the purchasing for a 7-11. There already are systems in place they just require a human to actually judge based on the sales data and an understanding of stuff like the weather, seasonal trends, etc. to make the final decision of what to actually order. They tried to replace the only human element left in the supply chain and of course it worked horribly.
and it might have worked if it was hooked up to enough inputs like NWS 7-day forecasts and state DOT road closures through a series of rules rather than the hallucination machine.
That’s how supply chains traditionally have been done. Supermarkets for example have hyper-optimised ‘just in time’ systems where they order stock based on projected demand and it’s all done with stats and probability, has been for decades. Very much the hard math type stuff that AI sucks at. I don’t know for sure but I can’t imagine Starbucks doing it much differently. They have the resources and economies of scale to make it work. From a capitalist perspective there’s no reason to change it, except that some CxO decided to go all in on AI in an attempt to juice the stock price.
I imagine a real estate company like Starbucks gets a lot out of investors throwing money at them because they found some supposed use case for AI. Likely more than they stand to gain giving people coffee well. It might give someone who actually does something for a living a headache, but that sort of thing is priced in.
So I doubt there’s much optimization they could get out of a supply chain that they couldn’t get sniping someone from Amazon for a million dollars for a year doing algorithms in a more traditional way. But being an AI native company helps with the adoption narrative, implies future proofing, and probably does something to ease the bubble and they stand to gain from the status quo.
Funny because a custom tool that counts inventory via a camera could probably do this job pretty well, without AI. Costs money to write but i think a lot of pretty average devs could do it these days.
I hope they spent a lot of money on it only to throw it away.
