If the AI can’t figure out bar codes there may yet be some hope that we will not have to worry about Skynet coming on line in the near future.
AI can figure out the barcode just fine. They’re running into a problem with FINDING where the barcode is. And Amazon is figuring out that the level of object recognition they’d have to program into the AI to figure out where the barcode is would just let the AI know what the object is without bothering to find the barcode. If the AI can figure out “this is object X and therefore the barcode is here” you don’t actually need it to do anything after X, the AI already knows what it’s got, forget the barcode.