Amazon announced GO this week: a real grocery store, opening in Seattle, with NO CHECKOUT. Walk in, grab things, walk out; cameras and sensors and ML figure out what you took and bill your account. “Just Walk Out technology,” which is either the best product name or the best shoplifting instruction ever printed. The demo video looks like sci-fi; the employee-beta caveats suggest the edge cases (occlusion, shared carts, indecisive shelf-returners) are where the bodies are buried — they always are; the demo is the dream (#034, evergreen). But note the trajectory: Amazon spent a decade making BUYING invisible online (one-click, Dash buttons, Alexa), and now it’s compiling that philosophy into PHYSICAL SPACE. Friction is their sworn enemy in every dimension of reality.
Elsewhere in the fortnight: AirPods (#090) finally shipped after a mysterious delay — verdict from our office’s early adopter: “they’re real magic and I look like I’m growing antennae”; Super Mario Run hits iPhones NEXT week (Mario! On a phone! Nintendo’s walls keep lowering — first phones, next the Switch in March); and Rogue One premieres Friday, the first Star Wars with no opening crawl and, by all whispers, a genuinely great third act.
TIL: sensor fusion — how many overlapping cheap sensors approximate one impossible perfect sensor. Go’s cameras, LIGO’s interferometers (#076), my alerting stack: same philosophy, different budgets. Redundancy plus statistics equals sight.