Report of Chapter 7&8

  There is a nonnegligible fact that online shopping is becoming more and more convenient and important than bricks-and-mortar shopping especially the coming application of VR technology which refers to visual reality, a computer technology that simulates an 3D environment with which a user may interact.

  Chinese biggest online retailer Alibaba has determined to develop a new online warehouse based on the VR technology in order to make shopping more essential, customers can try clothes and furniture or other merchandises they wanted in a visual store just by wearing the dedicated VR glasses.

  As the author said, smart shopping is “Enabled by technology that identities individual shoppers when they enter a store, calls up their personal data and shopping history, and then provides pointers and promotions that drive them to specific areas or products within the store.” (2851, chapter 7) So the smart shopping is indicating to the bricks-and-mortar shopping in my understanding, the view of author may base on the fact that people prefer to go physical store for shopping rather than online shopping.

  I know that online shopping is just a supplement for Americans although Amazon or Best Buy can provide enough various merchandises as physical store like Tanger Outlets or Walmart, but it is really different in China that Chinese people are getting used to shopping on the Internet for almost everything because of cheaper price and rapid physical distribution system. By the way, Chinese people don’t need pay for the prime membership for the free two-day shipping. Alibaba won’t be the biggest online retailer in China if it made profit from the rapid distribution system.

  Some Chinese economical scholars have warned economical department of Chinese government that physical economic would be destroyed by Internet economy one day according to the present development speed of Internet shopping. Actually, so many malls in China have to be closed because of the serious customer loss.

  Smart shopping may make shopping quickly because we won’t waste time on looking for the merchandise from splendid shelves and compare the price of the same type of goods or queue up to pay. Smart shopping system know what we want to buy, when we will go for shopping or how we pay for it. But the problem is that if the smart shopping system knows all about us, where is the privacy? what we are? The Muppets under the monitoring of cold smart devices? Absolutely, online shopping could be more convenient even though the smart shopping would come to our life in the future. And, women won’t like smart shopping at all I think. But smart cars are really needed in the future.

  As we all know, China is the most crowded country in the world, Chinese roads as well. There is a saying that it’s better to riding a bike than driving a car in Chinese cities especially in Beijing, Shanghai because of the serious traffic jam, it’s not much farfetched. The significant reason is illegal driving; Chinese drivers always change the lane and park cars casually when they are driving. I think it will be better if they drive a smart car.

  A smart car could achieve self-driving without any manual control, what we should do is opening the door and enjoying when we return home from working place. We won’t be bored or annoyed on the road anymore because smart entertainment system knows how to make us happy; we can take a nap or reading without worrying about collision or driving though a red light because the car knows how to drive itself by obeying the traffic rules; we won’t also worry about our poor technology in parking car to a certain position, the parking assist system would make it easier.

  But we can just enjoy the wonderful journey in the future with a smart car though Tesla have developed a self-driving system. The security and feasibility of smart car still need serious consideration and comprehensive verification in a long time, after all, it’s about our lives.