We can’t feasibly stop automation, nor should we. We SHOULD be taking the profits back from billionaires that they’ve stolen since time immemorial. Automation means less work overall. But we need to ensure the workers actually benefit from that.
Self checkout is not automation. It’s making the customer do the work.
Automation would be: Stick an RFID-tag to all your items, make me check in with my phone at the entrance. Automatically “scan” all the items when my cart and my phone leave the store at the same time. Bill me.
As the customer you’re already taking stuff out of your cart and putting it on the counter. Maybe automation isn’t the right word, but it’s certainly more efficient than having a human clerk. It removes a bottleneck.
But it’s not a bottleneck. It’s the opposite. An experienced human checker will tap in the code for oranges way before you find it in their stupid menu.
Those Amazon just walk out stores like you’re describing are extremely expensive to setup though. Even a spall space requires tons of cameras and sensors, all items to be placed on shelves a certain way, lots of networking backend, etc. Most business are unable to do so right now and I’d say most buildings can’t accommodate it. My work looked into putting one of those in one of our spaces as a test and the cost/work to make it happen in even a small area of our business wasn’t worth it
Or a fuckton of cameras: https://youtu.be/NrmMk1Myrxc?si=olYDaZnChc4LN47k
I think in terms is control, more people feel as though they can stop/protest automation more than they can take profits back. I think that was the luddite mentality? I speculate, it’s been a while since i learned it in school.
The ‘job killers’ argument is kinda bullshit. I want to kill jobs - I want to eliminate all labor that can be automated, such that in the ideal perfect future, no human ever has to work; they can spend every moment doing things they enjoy without worry.
But self checkout is not automation. No human work has been eliminated. It is the same exact fucking checkout process, only now the customer does it instead, and the store doesn’t pay the cashier. And no they don’t pass that savings on to you because of course they don’t, they just pocket the difference.
That’s all true, but just to be a bit nitpicky I’d argue some human work has indeed been eliminated by self checkout.
Cashiers main job is to scan your stuff, but in order to do that they also have to stand around waiting for you and other customers for hours on end, and when you arrive they have to do emotional labor of acting cheerful and upbeat
Still I wish we didn’t live in a society where increased efficiency leads to people being homeless with no jobs.
There’s at the very least a lot of social and managerial pressure to act cheerful. Even if you didn’t do it, many people would because it’s effectively required of them. Something being technically a choice doesn’t remove the social pressures that make many feel that it’s not a choice. Plus I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been used as rationale to fire people before, which means that for some, it isn’t a choice (and most people are scared of losing their jobs, so won’t try to find out).
In tipped roles, it would definitely result in less pay.
It’s a choice right up until you get fired or reprimanded for not meeting some arbitrary criteria
With normal checkout the customer is still the one putting groceries on the belt, and in most cases putting the bags back into the cart. Hell, at Aldi’s you have to bag the shit yourself anyways.
I don’t see how “scan and bag” is any more intensive than “place everything on belt(which is annoying tetris when you have lots of shit), stand around waiting for cashier to scan and bag”.
Aldi backs up that tradeoff with commensurately lower prices, though.
“intensive” isn’t the right term here, IMO. Pushing me to do the cashier work via self-checkout is more effort than what I do at Aldi. It doesn’t need to be “carry this pallet across the Grand Canyon” to be objectionable.
And the cashier is probably going to screw up the bagging. Does the ice cream go in the insulated re-usable bag, or does it go in a regular bag next to the room temperature canned goods? Pretty good chance it goes into the uninsulated bag, the tomatoes end up in the insulated bag with the milk, etc.
How about universal income, free education, free health care, and free housing?
I love your spirit, but that world doesn’t exist. Capitalists and conservatives will never allow for a utopian society where people can enjoy their lives on the masses, no matter how advanced production or whatever elses automation becomes. It’s always going to be millions suffering and a small majority having more wealth and power than they can even use in a lifetime.
That’s stupid. Capitalism is the reason why humanity has advanced so quickly in such little time and why we have the technology that we do.
This is a bad, regressive argument.
We need to legislate the benefit of automation for society.
Trying to bury the technology never works if it is indeed an improvement. Technology is benign, people twist it for malice.
This is the same argument as still using oil based street lamps, just to maintain a the lamplighting jobs that don’t need to be done anymore.
It’s a Bizaare hill to die on to fight to maintain jobs a robot can do faster and better, rather than fighting to make society the beneficiary of such advances through taxation. Either way, you have to fight the billionaires and will probably lose, so why not fight for a better outcome than maintaining shitty, menial jobs?
This isn’t automation though. The self checkout tech is the same tech that a cashier uses. It’s not automated. A human still does the work, they just don’t get paid for it.
I mean, technically the self-checkout package has automation in it, a scale and cameras to “automate” the process of ensuring what was scanned was what was bagged, a process by which the station determines when employee intervention is necessary, etc. Automation tech is in there, things a person used to do are being done by technology, but again it wasn’t created to improve the way it was done before, merely to make the owner more money.
Our self checkouts completely abandoned the stupid scales except when needed for fruit and such. Enforcing the packing with scales makes for a fucking horrible experience.
I haven’t seen any cameras though.
Personally I like that they are more space efficient and time efficient.
Here it is also common to carry around a hand scanner in the store and just pay by docking the scanner without having to pack up anything. It’s way quicker.
Past advancements in medicine has destroyed a lot of jobs… in funeral business. Some jobs should be let go of, if it makes everyone’s lives easier ultimately
I disagree with your analogy. The death rate has held steady at 100% for quite some time now. The only difference is how wrinkly the corpses are.
Lamp lighters, cotton pickers, wooden teeth makers, wool socks knitters, muck rakers, medical leech farmers… the list of jobs and entire industries destroyed in the name of “progress” goes on and on. We’re going to be totally out of jobs any day now!
Well, we are trying to find even more banal jobs to fill in the blanks. Who out there thought influencer would be a job some day?
With UBI, people would be more inclined to pursue their own interests. They would have more time to set up that little shop selling handcrafted items. There would be more variation and competition. Even more niche products could be created and sold, because there is no fear they will ever go bankrupt.
I remembered Mr Omar from Everybody Hates Chris trying to get the mayor that wouldn’t care for safety elected so his funeral business gets more, well, dead people.
I would love a “robotax” where automation is encouraged, but with the caveat that it is also heavily taxed. Not so much that it’s cheaper to have employees, but enough so that the people who’s jobs have been replaced can still get an income. Be it through major subsidies or the ultimate subsidy: universal basic income
Your instinct to use a systemic solution is good. My concern would be the tax gives corporations the wrong incentive (Some percentage of jobs could be automated but would still be cheaper to hire people). As another approach I like worker cooperatives because if they automate some task the financial benefit goes to the employees. The problem is there aren’t enough large scale worker co-ops, so I’d like to see them get tax advantages, preference on government contracts, grants, etc to drive their development.
I think the idea is the tax applies only to any money saved through automation. So if an employee costs $2500/mo and automation costs $500/mo, the company saves $2000/mo. Lets say the tax is 75%, the government takes $1500/mo from the company, but the company is still saving an extra $500/mo from automating, so they are still incentivized to do so.
Then that money from the tax could be used to pay for things like job retraining courses for people displaced by automation, or even maybe UBI.
Tbf, shouldn’t we be doing both? Legislation is slow and in the meantime, people need to be paid. Honestly, to me, this doesn’t feel that dissimilar to the argument around tipping. Yes, we absolutely SHOULD be paying waitstaff a living wage so tipping isn’t needed but in the meantime, you should still tip your server.
Tbf the owners will get 100% of what they want because this country was bought decades ago. I was talking decent world. This will be inflicted on us, and used purely to further satiate the greed of the owners whether we protest for it not to be used and/or to be taxed.
I was just saying it would be stupid to put half our effort into both when one has a much better today outcome in a decent country. But in practical terms? The people are brainwashed, the owners hold all the cards, and this will be used to fuck us all, because the people gave up their voice in the 80s in exchange for the lie that giving the owners everything would benefit everyone. Now we’re trapped in this workcamp of a country until collapse, likely long after everyone alive today is dead, because anyone who lives here paying attention knows the peasants are too chickenshit and/or brainwashed to revolt.
Okay but fuck those stores where the self checkout “bagging area” is smaller than the size of a hand cart. Like what fucking idiot designed those.
Heh. I know that idiot, at least one of them. Personally. At least for some of the major retailers that are making the switch who have very small bagging areas.
It’s not his fault, it really isn’t.
He got a list of requirements. Table is so big, scale is so big, computer is so big, and so many checkouts in so much area.
Every component has a minimum size requirement, and when the client isn’t willing to bend on how many check outs must fit, the only other option is to shrink the one thing that can, and that’s the bagging area.
Then they pile a bunch of shit in the bagging area, they have these giant caddies to hold thousands of bags, and they put three of them up there.
My understanding is that it’s about loss prevention.
They think that self checkout is a high risk for shoplifting, so they want it to be a manageable amount. They need confidence in their security monitoring strategy before they go all in.
After a long trial here including employees monitoring and AI monitored video, the store near me now has maybe 30 self checkouts, with 10 having nice big bagging areas. I never have to wait in line anymore.
“job killer” automation in a reasonable society should mean less need for work and the same amount of resources available (if not more).
But we will never reach the point where we consider picnics, parties and painting more valuable than manipulative marketing, unnecessary polluting but profitable industry, and especially the all-important busywork. Do something profitable. Anything profitable. It doesn’t even matter if it’s a net negative to society, just do something.
Personal hobbies aren’t valuable to a society, they’re valuable to individuals. A guy playing video games 6 hours a day is probably okay with it, but it’s not contributing anything to society. There’s an argument to be made for people to be guaranteed time to themselves for their well being, but the idea that an economy can function off of picnics and parties is stupid. Automation is not going to make work obsolete, it’ll just shift the economy in a different direction. Just like what happened in industrial revolution 200 years ago.
Automation, AI, should be there to make people have more time doing things that they want to do. Means less “mindless” work, more time for art, reading, philosophy, education, spending time with family, etc. The “banal” work which can be automated should be automated so that more people have more time doing things above. I think the concept of universal income with free education, free health care (and maybe free housing) can work with the automation of work.
I understand what you’re saying and I don’t necessarily disagree, but you don’t seem to understand my point. The idea of automation that you have is based on the sci-fi idea that robots will do all of the work for us and we wouldn’t have to work anymore. It’s just a thought experiment. This idea isn’t reflected in the real world. We’ve already been through automation revolutions before, and every time, the economy just shifts to something else.
For example, for a very long time, being a lamplighter was a popular job. A bunch of people would get hired to go around the city and make sure that the street lamps are lit and well maintained. However, via the magic of automation, the light bulb was invented. Lamplighters were no longer necessary. There were a lot of lamplighters who were angry at this new technology for stealing their jobs and many protested against, some even tried to ban it, but ultimately the convenience of technology won as it always has and always will. But thanks to this new technology there were new jobs created… like electricians who would look after these lightbulbs for example.
My point is that the current automation wave is not going to kill the economy. It’ll just simply shift and make it more complex. There will still be jobs, but they will either be entirely new or they’ll be an existing job but simply updated to address society’s new needs. There will still be people who will work on creating automation technology, people who maintain it, people who will manufacture it, scientists who will try to research improve it, and so on. There will also be jobs that haven’t been created yet. Just 20 years ago, Youtube wasn’t even a thing but now being a youtuber is an actual profession held by tens of thousands of people. What’s to say we’re not going to see something similar in the next 20 years? It’s silly to think that we’re going to have an economy of picnics and parties any time soon when all we have to support this notion is pop culture speculation. The reality is that the wheels of the economy are just going to keep on turning like they always have.
A guy playing video games 6 hours a day is probably okay with it, but it’s not contributing anything to society.
Unlike profitable activities like manipulative marketing, unnecessary and polluting industry, and meaningless busywork?
Oh and yeah, mobile game developers. Whale-catching sure is a huge contributor to the rest of us, right? It’s so much better that they’re putting 8 hours a day into catching whales/addicts, than wasting time just chilling. Right?
My argument, since you need it clarified, unlike the majority; A lot of work doesn’t contribute to society. We might as well let them not work.
Saying “You need to work no matter what no matter how!” with our policy decisions and then hoping people will pick something important has so far led us into a civilization of extreme over-production of useless goods, successfully marketed to easily manipulated apes. A civilization of high pressure/intensity and low focus. The amount of stress experienced in video game development studios is a ridiculous example of this culture of ours.
Additionally, I have personally been told by an instructor at a metalworking/welding shop that it’s a huge part of my job to ensure I’m not replaceable, that is my priority. And automation/efficiency will only hurt me by making me and my time less valuable, and I should not pursue it. That kind of cynicism frankly makes me completely disinterested in continued participation.
My comment got downvoted to all hell by a bunch of Marxists who don’t understand how an economy works… which is not surprising in the least.
Look, my point is fairly straightforward. The idea that automation will do all the jobs and people will just sit around and do nothing all day is nothing more than a thought experiment. It’s a sci-fi idea. Not in the sense that people will have to work no matter what, but in the sense that’s not how automation or society works. We will never reach a point where we max out on what kind of work can be done and therefore we can automate all of it away. There will always be a new chapter that’s slightly more advanced than the last. I think we can agree that new technology should be used to benefit society as a whole, but we’re not going to have an economy based on hobbies any time soon. While automation gets rid of jobs, it also creates opportunities for new jobs to take place. We’ve already gone through automation revolutions before. We already know how the cycle goes. New technologies get invented, those technologies get put to use immediately, the people who’s jobs it is replacing will get angry and riot/protest, they will end up losing and having to either find a new trade or elevate their skills to remain in their trade. Basically, the economy becomes more complex. We may not have lamplighters, human computers, or ice cutters anymore, but thanks to the advances in technology we do have brand new jobs like software engineers, social media managers, or animators. When we look at the past, we can see constant change. There’s no reason to think that will stop with this current wave of automation. I think the economy will just shift to a new phase.
