How Your Social Identity Will Be Used By Vending Machines

News from Japan of their smart vending machines gaining - if not quite self-awareness - awareness of others is interesting for a couple reasons. Firstly, being able to identify customers age / gender is COOL and CLEVER, with obvious applications for targetted advertising / shifting more soft-drinks... but it's clear where we're going here:

IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE
- More automated machines instead of humans - (BAD THING IMO for everything except for shareholder returns)
- Even more of those devil-bitch-speaking-auto-tills (that supermarkets so love and customers hate)
- The spread of til machine equivalents to everywhere else human-costs can be "saved" - Bank Tellers, Argos, etc

LONGER TERM
- Social Networking / online identity integration

How this final point functions is yet to be determined, but the technology will have OAuth as a forebear. Not sure how these points will identify you yet (the successors of rfID tags/Oyster?), but once it has (and you've given authorisation for it to do so - probably at a group-of-devices level) it will be able to target products and ads directly, debit your account, communicate your choices, earn you badges / loyalty points, cancel your order for it to be delivered at home, etc.


MORE INFO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr-AGV1tqT0
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8136743/Japanese-vending-machine-tells-you-what-you-should-drink.html

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