Rewind: AI, Classism, and the Digital Divide - Revisiting Episode 51

Future Commerce Podcast: eCommerce, DTC and Retail Strategy

These show notes were written at a time before LLMs were available to the public, if that's any indication of

In this episode from 2017, we covered:

WILL WALMART BE COOL AGAIN?

• Lord and Taylor started selling on walmart.com with their own special homepage.
• Also, remember how Walmart acquired Bonobos and Modcloth? The world has changed, people.

THE DIGITAL DIVIDE:

• Walmart's upmarket aspirations clashed with the working-class market. Perhaps this is still true?
• Brian's unfailing optimism about the future of technology and the working class, with technology enabling efficiency and providing better products and better services.
• Robby Berman posits that AI will serve and make life better for humans, but only the top 1% of humans.
• A Princeton study on bias in bots explores how AI has the problematic ability to target people for committing potential crimes based off the bias and prejudice of the bot creators.

AI ENABLING JOB ELIMINATION?

• Chris Gardner from Forrester predicts that automation will eliminate 9% of jobs in 2018.
• "These jobs are not low-end jobs, they're white-collar jobs being replaced."
• Brian is again optimistic: a whole new host of jobs will be created for creating and servicing AI.
• Reuters reported that a son used data to recreate his dad as a chatbot.