A portion also associate EVs and their ilk with environmentalists, and would probably not buy one even if their very lives depended on it.

This doesn’t really sound like a revolutionary use case

It’s basically the same as a non-LLM voice assistant.

Maybe an LLM query ran faster than doing a search in a map tool, but by how much?

Can’t be that much, since someone could pull up the satellite navigation on their phone, to much the same effect these days. At most it saves maybe a minute.

It was bound to happen. The model wasn’t that reliable, and Amazon was basically paying so many people to double-check the model, they may as well have staffed the store the traditional way, with a self-checkout.

Plus, in the eyes of much of the public, those people they hired to double-check the model were instead hired to act as traditional cashiers working remotely behind an impersonal, semi-friendly dystopian interface.

I’m reminded of back in the day, when people made similar promises of the personal computer back in the late 1900s. You could have the computer in your living-room, and it would check your stocks, write your letters, and do your shopping for you, without you having to lift a finger.

There’s also an argument that if the business was that reliant on free things to start with, then it shouldn’t be a business.

No-one would bat their eyes if the CEO of a real estate company was sobbing that it’s the end of the rental market, because the company is no longer allowed to get houses for free.

They’d basically already be doing that for the touch screen, and may well be using similar controls under the hood, where the physical buttons send a command to the computer to do a thing, in lieu of a mechanical connection.

Not just the search engines, but the websites themselves as well. Gaming the search engines is now an entire profitable industry, not just people putting links to their friends’ websites at the bottom of their webpage, or making a webring.

It’s just been a race to the bottom. The search engines get worse, as do the websites, and the whole thing is exacerbated by people today being able to churn out entire websites by the hundreds. Anyone trying to do things without playing the game simply ends up buried under layers of rubbish.

They didn’t learn from all the previous times someone tried to train a bot on the internet.

They’re not joking about a hypothetical. It was a real thing that happened.

The manager was generous enough to let her carry her child while working, but not generous enough to pay her enough to get childcare, or provide it themselves?

It reminds me a bit of the story of a mother going in for a job interview, and shortly after, being arrested for child negligence/endangerment, because she’d left her child unattended (in the same area) while attending said interview. This situation feels like it’s setting up for that kind of thing.