I never thought I’d be writing about my experience as a retail associate, but here I am. With an MS in CS from Georgia Tech and years of experience in NLP research, I found myself picking groceries part-time at Walmart. It’s a long story, but the job turned out to be an unexpected field study. I started noticing that my role wasn’t just about walking and picking items, but about handling everything the system got wrong – from inventory drift to visual aliasing and spoilage inference.
As I observed these issues, I realized that we’re trying to retrofit automation into an environment designed for humans. But what if we built environments designed for machines instead? This is the conclusion I came to after writing up my observations, borrowing vocabulary from robotics and ML to name the failure modes.
I’m not saying ‘robots are bad.’ I’m saying we need to think about how we can design systems that work with machines, not against them. This is a much shorter piece than my recent Tekken modeling one, but I hope it sparks some interesting discussions.
If you work in robotics or automation, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Have you ever found yourself in a similar situation, where you had to adapt to a system that wasn’t designed with machines in mind? Let’s connect and discuss.