Let’s talk AIO (Artificial Intelligence Overkill). In a bar. But not THAT bar.

The “UnderDog London” bar had a unique, unbearable problem: patrons skipping their place in the queue to be served before others.

They could have solved the problem with some version of this (18.90 Euros on Amazon, shipping included):

but that would have been too much 1.0, and it’s easy to understand why. Would YOU settle for something so unexpensive and anonymous, when you could screw things up with Artificial (lack of) Intelligence?

Welcome to The Underdog London!

“the world’s first bar to install AI facial recognition tech”

When patrons queue up at the bar, a computer scans their faces with a webcam, and then overlaps a running counter on their images, so everybody knows who’s the next to be served.

I’ve seen people commenting that this is illegal or cannot work as seen in the Twitter video, because “each single patron should give explicitly consent to be identified in that way, before being filmed”. That is a non-issue. Yes, of course every single patron should give explicit consent. But to get that, all The Underdog London has to do is put a sign on the door saying:

“If you cross this door you accept to have your face scanned, hoping we will keep our promise to not share it with anybody else”.

Overkill, your name is The Underdog London

If there was a problem that absolutely needed to be solved with expensive, highly invasive technology, it’s definitely people that skip lines to get drunk just a tiny bit faster. But hey, even this counts as “growth”, so it must be good, right?