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Amazon Go is a go:
The first clue that there's something unusual about Amazon's store of the future hits you right at the front door. It feels as if you are entering a subway station. A row of gates guard the entrance to the store, known as Amazon Go, allowing in only people with the store's smartphone app.
Inside is an 1,800-square foot mini-market packed with shelves of food that you can find in a lot of other convenience stores — soda, potato chips, ketchup. It also has some food usually found at Whole Foods, the supermarket chain that Amazon owns.
But the technology that is also inside, mostly tucked away out of sight, enables a shopping experience like no other. There are no cashiers or registers anywhere. Shoppers leave the store through those same gates, without pausing to pull out a credit card. Their Amazon account automatically gets charged for what they take out the door.
[...] There were a little over 3.5 million cashiers in the United States in 2016 — and some of their jobs may be in jeopardy if the technology behind Amazon Go eventually spreads. For now, Amazon says its technology simply changes the role of employees — the same way it describes the impact of automation on its warehouse workers.
Also at TechCrunch.
Previously: Amazon Go: It's Like Shoplifting
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @07:21PM (11 children)
not me. i always use the automated checkout when avail. i don't want cashiers to have jobs (as cashiers anyways). i don't like to have to leave my house to get anything. i especially don't like waiting in line just because there's a human that has to physically take my money from my hand and put it into a drawer, usually in the slowest and most annoying way possible(privacy invading questions, incompetence, etc). let the food wars begin!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by vux984 on Monday January 22 2018, @08:11PM (10 children)
"i don't want cashiers to have jobs (as cashiers anyways)"
What do you think 57 year old 'Carla' the cashier is going to be retrained as? A robot repair technician? Or the 18 year old 'Steven' working his first job? He's still in high school; and maybe he can be a robot technician, but at this point he's still learning math 12 and saving up to go to robot repair school. Maybe his mom should pay for his education? oh wait... she's a 'Carla'...
Automation and technology is good because it makes human labor more productive, and therefore more valuable. But we need jobs for unskilled humans too, it used to be they benefited from technology -- sure it only took half as many of them to work the farm 3x times efficiently, but we needed them in the factories putting things together.
When you can run a grocery store with a security guard, a robot technician (who himself is outsourced to a maintenance company) and a store manager (who manages 5 stores). And we're working on automating the security guards too.
Where do we need the displaced humans this time? What do we do as a society if the demand for unskilled human labor loses its value? Some people can be trained to higher skill jobs (at some expense), but some just aren't going to be qualified. These days, I'm looking around, and I'd advise kids to get into fixing things... plumbing, electrician, roofing, drywall repair, furnace repair, elevator repair, kitchen counter installation...
Those careers seem to be robot proof for at least the coming generation. No amount of cameras, robots, and drones is going to replace the hot water tank in a rural basement home built in the 1980s anytime soon.
(Score: 1) by bobthecimmerian on Monday January 22 2018, @08:24PM (5 children)
The only problem with your suggestion is that I imagine a lot of people will be moving into the plumbing, electrician, drywall, roofing, and similar areas. So you'll have more competition for work, and that will drive your wages down.
I don't have an economy-wide solution. Supply and demand dictates that if there are fifty million qualified physicians in the US, then physicians will get junk wages. No matter what the skill is, if enough people have it the value goes down. But it seems likely that at least for the next few decades high level medical skill (nurse practitioner, physician's assistant, physician) and robotics-related skill demand will exceed supply. For an individual, that's where I would suggest going. Again, though, that's not a national or international solution. Just an individual one.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday January 22 2018, @08:33PM (4 children)
At some point, it's going to make more sense to just adopt UBI, so that unskilled people only capable of stuff like scanning groceries can survive and maybe pursue some more productive venture with their time. It's not worth it for the rest of us to subsidize their existence by giving them time-wasting bullshit jobs that just slow the rest of us down; it makes more sense to just have a tax on productivity and give them a living wage from that. Then we'll have more people getting an education and pursuing higher-level jobs, which will expand the economy.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday January 22 2018, @08:38PM (3 children)
The big question is, when is that point, and how many of us working poor will have been effectively genocided by economics before then?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Monday January 22 2018, @08:47PM (2 children)
Then I guess it's time for the working poor to stop voting for the party that pushes policies that hurt the poor.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday January 22 2018, @09:38PM (1 child)
Agreed, but when neither party really has their interests in mind, and the one that's worse for them is the only one that even pretends to be on their side, what do you expect?
The Democrats owe people like me a 45+-year-long apology. After McGovern lost to that ambulatory shitstain Nixon they gave up on the poor entirely and decided to focus on special interest groups and the highly-educated, cynically believing that the poor would vote for them anyway because "we're not the Republicans."
Theirs was partly a failure of being cynical, and partly a failure of not being cynical ENOUGH about just how dumb a lot of poor folks are. Meanwhile, the GOP, which is cynical to the point it might as well be called sociopathology, decided to court the fear vote, starting from the civil rights act backlash and continuing onward.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday January 22 2018, @10:54PM
We're getting the government we deserve.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday January 22 2018, @08:29PM (3 children)
What do you think 57 year old 'Carla' the cashier is going to be retrained as? A robot repair technician?
A stockist (stocker? Whatever you call the person who puts items on the shelves). They still need those, and probably will for quite some time; taking stuff out of boxes and arranging them on shelves is extremely complex from an automation point-of-view, while pretty simple for humans (though they do a much better job at some stores than others).
Or the 18 year old 'Steven' working his first job?
Same thing. Or he can work as a greeter, or the person retrieving the carts from the parking lot (automated checkout isn't going to remove the need to have grocery carts after all). He could also go to a restaurant and work as a server there. For some reason, people seem to still like that, even though it's ridiculously obsolete and can be replaced with self-service, kiosk ordering, etc.
But we need jobs for unskilled humans too
We still have plenty of jobs for unskilled humans, even at the Amazon Go grocery store.
Do you think we should keep buggy whip makers employed too?
When you can run a grocery store with a security guard, a robot technician (who himself is outsourced to a maintenance company) and a store manager (who manages 5 stores). And we're working on automating the security guards too
You're forgetting the stock people and the grocery cart people. Maybe you should at some grocery store in Manhattan where they don't have carts, but in most of America they do because most people can't carry 1-2 weeks' worth of groceries without a cart. That will never change until we have grocery delivery (which we do have in some places and some stores, but it's slow to catch on for various reasons: delivery fees, waiting time, not being able to pick stuff yourself, etc.). And it'll be quite some time before we have robots stocking the shelves. By that time, we really should have UBI.
These days, I'm looking around, and I'd advise kids to get into fixing things... plumbing, electrician, roofing, drywall repair, furnace repair, elevator repair, kitchen counter installation...
Some things are worth fixing, others are not. Stay out of fixing consumer electronics, or any place where the labor rates for repair will be roughly as high as just buying a new one (made by lots of automation usually). Things in buildings are a pretty safe bet though. You can't import a high-rise condo building from China.
Those careers seem to be robot proof for at least the coming generation. No amount of cameras, robots, and drones is going to replace the hot water tank in a rural basement home built in the 1980s anytime soon.
No, but at some point it may be more economical to bulldoze older houses and replace them with manufactured houses. There's manufactured houses now that are built much like, and offer comparable specs to, regular stick-built homes. They build them in modules and bolt them together on-site. And considering how energy-inefficient a lot of older houses are, they really should do more of this.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Monday January 22 2018, @09:06PM (2 children)
Fair enough, but they already have a stock person, and a shopping cart person.
People displaced from jobs by technology need *new* jobs to go into, they can't all funnel into the existing jobs. When farm workers got displaced by automation, a few got trained on the tractors and the rest moved to the city. There weren't any other jobs on the farm to absorb them.
Same thing here... if a grocery store has a staff of 50... and 20 of them are cashiers, the cashiers just get let go, they don't need 20 more stock people.
Plus, organizing shelves and displays... that may itself disappear. Other than produce or meat you just grab a box or can or jar, maybe you just pick those on an app on your phone or a terminal at the wall, and all the dry goods/canned goods/etc show up on in a box with your name on it at the front of the store for you to pick up on your way out. Your right there will be a produce guy and a deli/meat guy for a while yet, but the bulk of the aisles could be converted to automated warehouse with some terminals... I'm not even against that as a concept. In some ways it's full circle, you used to walk into the general store go up to the counter and list what you want, and they brought it to you. (1/2 lb flour, 1/2 sugar, 24 shotgun shells, 3 cans of beans...)
Some things are worth fixing, others are not. Stay out of fixing consumer electronics
Agreed! I specifically mentioned things that were part of people's homes, expensive, and integrated fairly tightly. Repairing anything small and inexpensive is a complete dead end. Assuming its even worth fixing, it might be cheaper to send it somewhere else and have it fixed there. But something heavy and plumbed in like a natural gas hot water tank, or fully integrated like an elevator that's going to need a local human for a while now. In the same way, network admin is getting outsourced fast, but pulling cable and wiring/rewiring buildings will be around for the foreseeable future.
"No, but at some point it may be more economical to bulldoze older houses and replace them with manufactured houses. There's manufactured houses now that are built much like, and offer comparable specs to, regular stick-built homes. They build them in modules and bolt them together on-site. And considering how energy-inefficient a lot of older houses are, they really should do more of this."
Nobody is going to replace their house because the hot water tank failed. And the hot water tank is going to fail in the new more modular house too, and it won't make sense to replace a whole module when all that's required is swapping out a theromocouple that's preventing it from lighting or fixing a leaking connection, or installing a new trap primer because the old one got gummed up, or replacing a broken window because a pane broke, or the latch broke, or the seal failed...
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Monday January 22 2018, @11:24PM (1 child)
It will be difficult to see what the *new* jobs will be until they arrive. It would be like trying to predict the iPhone; if it could have been done, it would have happened sooner. Of course, some trends can be predicted to continue, such as an increase in healthcare. I don't know what sort of unskilled jobs will become available in that field, but as that segment of the economy grows, there will likely be new jobs at all skill levels.
In tech, we are likely due for society's first generation of telephone sanitizers. Some day, we might look back and declare it a useless field, but until then, I think it's an idea whose arrival is due.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Tuesday January 23 2018, @04:07AM
It will be difficult to see what the *new* jobs will be until they arrive.
That's not terribly helpful for the waves of people being displaced right now.
The local McDonalds has order kiosks and reduced human order takers to one from 4, the local grocery store has converted all but one of the express checkouts to self-checkout, replacing 5 cashiers with 1, its happening at walmart, it's happening at home depot. Its just getting started and its already noticeable.
Those people are displaced and looking for work now. If the replacement jobs aren't already showing up, then we have a problem.