Their recommendations feel to me like the recommendation engine is still more or less the one they had when they were mainly an online bookstore. So they assume you want things similar to the item you bought: other novels in the same genre, nonfiction books on similar subjects etc. Works fine for books, less well for coffee tables.

Hmm, I think it's smarter than that.

Every year around burning man time it "notices" that I'm buying supplies for burning man, and starts recommending me things like baby wipes, which are completely unrelated (naively) to things like lag screws, rebar pullers, etc.

I suspect that's the impact of other burners also shopping, generating a good list of "people who bought A and B also bought C, D, E...". As soon as you hit A & B, you trigger the rest, while the average person doesn't.

It could just be recommending things you buy seasonally, without recognizing the relationship between the items.

Try buying lag screws, rebar pullers, etc. in 6 months and see if it recommends your baby wipes.

Think of this next time you worry about the singularity AI taking over the world.

It makes the idea of a trying-to-be-helpful AI scarier. Imagine a post-scarcity world in which you merely have to ask for whatever you want and it'll be delivered to you for free, but everyone still lives in squalor because if you ask for a coffee table you'll instead get one of every type of coffee table ever made and then starve to death in your house because the food delivery drones can't fit through the wall of coffee tables.

You could feed them to termites then cook them.

Autofac.