YouTube Is Making Machines Really Smart

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As the playoffs are in full swing, everyone is littering their speech with baseball apologies, “We are only at the bottom of the first inning for all these technologies,” declared Pano Anthos at last week’s <a href="https://www.meetup.com/RobotLab/" target="_blank">RoboLab</a> forum. When illustrating his point, Anthos deconstructed one of <a href="https://www.xrclabs.com/" target="_blank">XRC Labs</a>’ portfolio companies which utilizes computer vision to identify store merchandise. “Right now the technology is not very smart, it requires low paid workers in Asia to label the images in the database to work,” explains Anthos. Ken Pilot later reiterated this sentiment in sharing his experiences with leading brands that are still trying to comprehend the impact of mobile, much less unmanned, systems. “The store of the future,” describes Pilot, “will be as convenient as Amazon is for online consumers, enabling anyone to find what they want, when they want, without asking.” While that is the goal, both luminaries agreed there will be plenty of missteps along the way with companies deploying technology just for the sake of it. Ending the evening, almost on cue, the two speakers jokingly pointed at a robot store associate as an example of the current state of silliness.