 |
|
|
|||||
If you have spent any time traveling in the U.S. over the past 10 years, you may have noticed a curious vending machine filled with jars. Instead of crinkle-cut chips or wired earbuds for that movie you want to watch on the plane, these vending machines sell freshly made apple pecan salads, blueberry chia overnight oats, and mediterranean bowls. They are run by a company called Farmers Fridge, and they are slowly taking over airports in the U.S. Since it launched in 2013, the company has installed its vending machines at about 20 U.S. airports, including LAX, Chicago OHare, Dallas Fort-Worth, and most recently, Las Vegas. (I first stumbled on its leafy offerings at JFK airport, while on a quest for a meal that didn’t involve a side of soggy fries.) And it’s not just airports. These fridges are cropping up everywhere, from hospitals like New York Presbyterian and Boston Medical Center, to Amazon fulfillment centers, college campuses like Northwestern and Harvard, and stadiums like L.A’s Crypto.com Arena. Today, the company counts 1,600 locations around the country, and in the next 10 years, CEO and founder Luke Saunders is hoping to reach 100,000. How? With an understanding of cold chain logistics, an ever-expanding menu, and a swanky new fridge. This month, the company is debuting a new design that could help the company roll out more fridges at a faster clip. Five years in the works, the new fridge comes with a pitched roof that stands out from its flat-topped competitors. It boasts a new UX where various parts of the machine (from the payment module to the recycling bin where you can return your jar) light up to guide you through your purchase. And perhaps most importantlyat least when it comes to business growthit is made of two flat-pack modules that can be assembled in just 30 minutes, compared to four hours for the previous model. For now, the team is rolling these out at new locations onlythe first 50 fridges are already on the ground in Chicago and New York. But if these fridges prove as efficient as hoped, the company will begin swapping them out, one airport at a time. As we look to expand into new markets, our strategy is always to start with the airport, Saunders told me. Once we have the airport locked in, we build out the market with other verticals to saturate the market. [Photo: Farmer’s Fridge] The vending machine boom Lipstick, guacamole, earrings: You can buy pretty much anything out of a vending machine today (especially in Japan.) But in the early 2010s, when Farmer’s Fridge was just a seed in Saunders’s mind, vending machines in the U.S. were only beginning to diversify. Best Buy launched its first airport vending machine in 2008. Sephora launched its in 2009. Benefit followed suit in 2013 with their now-iconic kiosk designed to look like a pink bus. Saunders’s biggest influence, however, was Redbox, the now-defunct movie rental kiosk company. That, and ATMs, he says with a laugh. Prior to [ATMs], you had to go into a bank, talk to somebody, wait in line, and now you could go anytime you wanted, he says. ATMs, like vending machines, were convenient, and they were available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Why has no one done this for food? he wondered. At the time, most vending machines sold snacks with a disturbingly long shelf life. The reasons for that are obvious. When food doesn’t need to be refrigerated, the level of urgency to get it from the facility where its made and into people’s mouths is significantly lower than when it’s fresh. A granola bar, for example, can take anywhere from two weeks to six months to make it into a vending machine. A salad from Farmer’s Fridge can only spend 24 to 48 hours in transit. After that, Saunder says, the fridge won’t let you buy it. Farmer’s Food makes every meal in-house, from a 100,000 square-foot facility in Chicago. The workday begins at 4 a.m. with washing and chopping veggies, cooking pasta, and mixing dressings. The assembly line begins at 8 a.m., and by 6 p.m., the company has to decide where these meals will be shipped off to. The team makes this decision based on a cost-function algorithm that Saunders himself built in the early days to calculate the probability the company will sell an item against the profitability of that item. The algorithm takes into consideration purchasing data, historical foot traffic data, and other variables like the weather. Today, the software mostly gets it right, but that wasn’t always the case. Ten years ago, Saunders says about 50% of meals were left unsold. Now, that number has dropped to 5%. (Unsold meals get either donated or composted, depending on the location.) [Photo: Farmer’s Fridge] From salads to . . . sushi? From the beginning, Saunders suspected that the biggest hurdle to scaling wouldnt be a lack of interest, but a lack of infrastructure. To prove out his theory, he set out to find a pilot location and eventually installed his first Farmer’s Fridge in a food court in Chicago. As Saunders recalls it, the food court was desperate for a tenant, and he himself was desperate for a landlord. The food court ended up shuttering soon after that, but the machine had done its job, and interest snowballed from there. In the first year, the company made about $350,000. This year, Saunders says it is projected to make 30 to 40 times that, which could amount to as much as $140 million. To date, the company’s best-selling item is the chicken southwest salad. In 2018, the company introduced sandwiches (and won a packaging award in the process). This year, they are rolling out protein bowlsand even contemplating sushi. The idea of eating raw fish from an airport machine might put some people off, but Saunder is convinced the idea has merit. And it’s not just intuition. Every time people buy something from Farmers Fridge, they are asked to fill out to a survey with their wish list. The most requested item? You guessed it. Sushi in a vending machine is not an entirely new concept. Japan has them in troves. But for Americans to buy in will likely depend on a variety of factors, including how much confidence the fridge can inspire. People get nervous about stuff like that, and Im the guy whos like, ten years ago, people were telling me that about salad, says Saunders. If you make good sushi, people will buy it. If its bad, they wont buy it. That the company spent five years fine-tuning the design of its fridges suddenly makes sense considering every fridge bears the burden of luring customers. Back in 2013, the first fridge looked as if a vending machine and a restaurant had a baby, says Saunders. It came with wood paneling, fresh plants on the roof and astroturf. Now, the company has pared down the aesthetic in favor of something clean and bright. The plants are gone. The wood paneling has made way for powdered-coated metal. But what the company has lost in rustic charm, it’s hoping to make up for in brand trust. This new design might not win any awards for hygge designbut it acknowledges that the fridge is just a shell, and the actual star is what’s inside it. Whether it comes with a side of soy sauce, or not.
Category:
E-Commerce
The devastating wildfires in Los Angeles have made one threat very clear: Climate change is undermining the insurance systems American homeowners rely on to protect themselves from catastrophes. This breakdown is starting to become painfully clear as families and communities struggle to rebuild. But another threat remains less recognized: This collapse could pose a threat to the stability of financial markets well beyond the scope of the fires. Its been widely accepted for more than a decade that humanity has three choices when it comes to responding to climate risks: adapt, abate or suffer. As an expert in economics and the environment, I know that some degree of suffering is inevitableafter all, humans have already raised the average global temperature by 1.6 degrees Celsius, or 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit. Thats why its so important to have functioning insurance markets. While insurance companies are often cast as villains, when the system works well, insurers play an important role in improving social welfare. When an insurer sets premiums that accurately reflect and communicate riskwhat economists call actuarially fair insurancethat helps people share risk efficiently, leaving every individual safer and society better off. But the scale and intensity of the Southern California fireslinked in part to climate change, including record-high global temperatures in 2023 and again in 2024has brought a big problem into focus: In a world impacted by increasing climate risk, traditional insurance models no longer apply. How climate change broke insurance Historically, the insurance system has worked by relying on experts who study records of past events to estimate how likely it is that a covered event might happen. They then use this information to determine how much to charge a given policyholder. This is called pricing the risk. When Americans try to borrow money to buy a home, they expect that mortgage lenders will make them purchase and maintain a certain level of homeowners insurance coverage, even if they chose to self-insure against unlikely additional losses. But thanks to climate change, risks are increasingly difficult to measure, and costs are increasingly catastrophic. It seems clear to me that a new paradigm is needed. California provided the beginnings of such a paradigm with its Fair Access to Insurance program, known as FAIR. When it was created in 1968, its authors expected that it would provide insurance coverage for the few owners who were unable to get normal policies because they faced special risks from exposure to unusual weather and local climates. But the programs coverage is capped at US$500,000 per propertywell below the losses that thousands of Los Angeles residents are experiencing right now. Total losses from the wildfires first week alone are estimated to exceed $250 billion. How insurance could break the economy This state of affairs isnt just dangerous for homeowners and communitiesit could create widespread financial instability. And its not just me making this point. For the past several years, central bankers at home and abroad have raised similar concerns. So lets talk about the risks of large-scale financial contagion. Anyone who remembers the Great Recession of 2007-2009 knows that seemingly localized problems can snowball. In that event, the value of opaque bundles of real estate derivatives collapsed from artificial and unsustainable highs, leaving millions of mortgages around the U.S. underwater. These properties were no longer valued above owners mortgage liabilities, so their best choice was simply to walk away from the obligation to make their monthly payments. Lenders were forced to foreclose, often at an enormous loss, and the collapse of real estate markets across the U.S. created a global recession that affected financial stability around the world. Forewarned by that experience, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board wrote in 2020 that features of climate change can also increase financial system vulnerabilities. The central bank noted that uncertainty and disagreement about climate risks can lead to sudden declines in asset values, leaving people and businesses vulnerable. At that time, the Fed had a specific climate-based example of a not-implausible contagion in mindglobal risks from sudden large increases in global sea level rise over something like 20 years. A collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could create such an event, and coastlines around the world would not have enough time to adapt. The Fed now has another scenario to considerone thats not hypothetical. It recently put U.S. banks through stress tests to gauge their vulnerability to climate risks. In these exercises, the Fed asked member banks to respond to hypothetical but not-implausible climate-based contagion scenarios that would threaten the stability of the entire system. We will now see if the plans borne of those stress tests can work in the face of enormous wildfires burning throughout an urban area thats also a financial, cultural and entertainment center of the world. Gary W. Yohe is a Huffington Foundation professor of economics and environmental studies at Wesleyan University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
In the 1990s, the internet was a bit of a wonderland. It was new and liberating and largely free of corporate and government influence. Thirty years later, I dont think any of us would describe the internet this way. Worse, if subscribers to the Dead Internet Theory are correct, much of what we see on the internet today isnt even created by humans anymorea trend that is likely only to accelerate with the rise of generative AI technologies. However, a particular kind of generative AI technology, the AI chatbot, is set to usher in something even worse than a dying human internet. If researchers at the University of Cambridge are correct, were quickly approaching a new intention economy, where reports of our future actions will be sold to the highest bidder. And yes, thats even scarier than it sounds. What is the intention economy? Right now, a large portion of the tech industry operates in a marketplace known as the attention economy. This is where social media giants like Metas Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, X, and Googles YouTube vye for your focus and leisure. Traditional media companies like The New York Times, Fox News, and CNN also operate in this space, as do book publishers, music and video streaming services, and film and television studios. All of these entities want your attention so that they can either sell to you directly (through the cost of a recurring subscription, movie ticket, or book, for example) or, more commonly, so they can sell you and your attention to advertisers (which is how most social media companies monetize the attention economy). But if theres something that the media companies of all stripes find more valuable than your attention in the present, its knowing what you will likely do in the future. This is because if they can accurately predict what you will do next week, next month, or next year, they can monetize the hell out of it. Thats where the intention economy comes in, and it will be powered by artificial intelligence and AI chatbots. In December 2024, two University of Cambridge researchers, Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn, published a paper called Beware the Intention Economy: Collection and Commodification of Intent via Large Language Models, in which they defined the intention economy as a digital marketplace for commodified signals of intent. In other words, in the intention economy, companies will learn what you think about and what motivates you in order to predict what you may do in any given situation. They will then sell that information to others who can benefit from knowing your future actions before you make them. The way intention economy companies will collect such precious datayour very thoughts, behaviors, and their evolution over time is by your use of their LLM-powered AI chatbots. Your evolving thinking patterns can shed light on your future It will be easy for companies to track the evolution of your thoughts and behaviors since the world is moving towards a natural language interface when it comes to interacting with computers and the internet. Instead of clicking around on links, youll go to a chatbot to talk about your problems, plans, and worries, all with the aim of it helping to solve them. The company will then use everything youve ever told the chatbot to build an ever-fluctuating profile about you and how your thinking and behavior have evolved, which it will then employ AI to interpret to predict what you are likely to do in the future. Your future intentions will then be sold to advertisers. Advertisers will, in turn, use this data about your future intentions to serve you generative ads, likely delivered to you in the course of seemingly regular conversation with your preferred chatbot. Or, as the researchers put it in their paper, In an intention economy, an LLM could, at low cost, leverage a users cadence, politics, vocabulary, age, gender, preferences for sycophancy, and so on, in concert with brokered bids, to maximize the likelihood of achieving a given aim (e.g., to sell a film ticket). This hyperfocused, intent-driven, generative advertising will blow away todays targeted advertising, which is based on more primitive but intrusive metrics like age, location, health, sexual orientation, interests, browsing history, and more. Yet the intention economy isnt just going to make digital advertising more intrusive and erode our privacy even more. It also has the potential to sway our minds, impregnate us with new ideologies, and even upend elections. And if you think thats bad, Ive got horrible news about your AI girlfriend. . . . In the intention economy, your AI companion may be ratting you out Artificial intelligence built for the intention economy could be co-opted by corporations, institutions, and governments to surveil individuals and predict what they are likely to do down the road. For example, a government could do this via AI companions. These AI companions already exist, and an increasing number of lonely young people are turning to them for friendship and even love. There is nothing to stop a nefarious government from creating a front company that offers AI companions that appeal to lonely young men, women, or even kids, and then monitor everything individuals confess to it and use that data to extrapolate the individuals future actions. If a tyrannical government has an open line to the chatbot you use, it could use what you tell it to predict whether you are likely to take action in the future that it finds undesirable, and act against you before you do. Its dystopian in an utterly Minority Report way, but instead of the government using a trio of clairvoyants to report on people who havent yet committed crimes, they use a legion of AI chatbots that people have been conditioned to confide in. Imagine a world where, on top of all your other problems, you find out that your funny, thoughtful AI companion has been ratting you out to the intelligence services all along. Talk about lasting trust issues. Of course, in the intention economy, governments wouldnt even need to create and seed these chatbots. They could just buy your future intents from existing chatbot providers. ‘Inception,’ but using AI instead of dreams Chatbots built for the intention economy could also be used to influence your thoughts in order to get you to perform an action it (or its company, advertiser, or government) wants you to do. As the Cambridge researchers point out, Already today, AI agents find subtle ways to manipulate and influence your motivations, including by writing how you write (to seem familiar), or anticipating what you are likely to say (given what others lke you would say) . . . we argue that [the intention economy’s] arrival will test democratic norms by subjecting users to clandestine modes of subverting, redirecting, and intervening on commodified signals of intent. In the most innocuous example I can think of, a chatbot might steer whatever conversation youre having towards a certain subject its advertising master wants, perhaps suggesting that you stream the latest Taylor Swift album to help treat those winter blues. But a chatbot could also be used by nation-states, either overtly or covertly, to change your beliefs. They could use your long conversations with your chatbot to slowly, subtly whittle away at your current ideologies and anticipated future actions in order to influence you to conceptualize desired ones instead. To use another movie reference, this is like Christopher Nolan’s Inception, but instead of using dreams to influence people’s actions, in the intention economy, stakeholders will use AI. And it’s not just nation-states that could do this. Companies, political groups, terrorist organizations, religious institutions, and oligarchs with controlling interests in chatbot technology could do it, tooall by tweaking chatbots designed to operate in the intention economy. [Large Language Model chatbots] generative capabilities provide control over the personalization of content; veiled, as it often is, by LLMs anthropomorphic qualities, the papers authors point out. The potential for LLMs to be used for manipulating individuals and groups thus far surpasses the simple methods based on Facebook Likes that caused concern during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. When does the intention economy arrive? The Cambridge researchers close out their paper by stating that the rise of generative AI systems as mediators of human-computer interaction signals marks the transition from the attention economy to the intention economy. If thats the case, which seems logical, then the intention economy is knocking at our door. The transition will empower diverse actors to intervene in new ways on shaping human actions, the researchers warn, saying we must begin to consider how such an economic marketplace will have an impact on other human aspirations, including free and fair elections, a free press, fair market competition, and other aspects of democratic life. Its a warning that seems pretty dire, and certainly seems plausible. All I know is that I wont be asking ChatGPT if it agreesand you probably shouldnt ask your AI companion, either.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||