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Comment by crazypyro | Hacker News Reader

Trying to save jobs that are no longer the most efficient way of solving a problem is not the way to promote the value of humanity, in my opinion. People want groceries as cheap and fast as possible. They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction and forcing the majority of people to pay extra for something that only the minority get value out of is not a competitive strategy.

If humanity were to take your opinion, we'd never evolve as a society, lest we remove a need in society and with it, someones job.

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I am unsure we are evolving. We have evolved in many areas that solve real problems, like healthcare and such, but I'm not sure today's society is any better for all the technology that allows us to save a couple of minutes in a queue.

To improve the efficiency of a particular group, we create problems elsewhere. The result may not be net positive. In fact, I think it isn't, since those saved "couple of minutes" will probably be spent browsing Facebook.

It's not just time checking out that is saved. This is de facto a cashless store. Having cash on site is a liability.

The point isn't that we save 2 minutes, it's that there's now 10 less job we need. And that may seem as a negative at first, but the idea is that as more and more job get automated, prices should go down until the point where people will not have to work full weeks anymore, or rather, focus on learning and reaching higher education, rather than doing dummy work all day (aka just scanning items non stop for 8 hours).

It might be worthwhile to re-frame it. Rather than say "10 fewer jobs," say "10 people are no longer forced to spend eight hours a day sitting in front of a cash register."

That assumes we can find something better for them to do, of course. But man, we have to try! Forcing people to do things a machine can do is inhumane.

I'm a bit worried that most of us here on HN are feverishly working on ways to automate away jobs, and there is quite a strong economic incentive for us to do so, but there is hardly any effort and no incentive for policy makers to catch those affected. Who is building and planning for this new social utopia once people no longer have to bag groceries? Right now it looks like a lot of misery and poverty on the horizon before things get better.

I totally agree. Getting rid of wasteful jobs is a good thing if you can somehow handle the people who lose those jobs, whether redirecting them to something more productive or pensioning them off or whatever. And that side of things really doesn't seem to get much attention. There's a lot of hand-wavy talk about basic income, some lip service paid to continuing education and retraining, but not a whole lot really being done to prepare.

I have a notion that one of the major ways people will be spending the time they otherwise would be working is by consuming entertainment.

If that notion is correct, moving towards an educational model focused around creating the components needed for general entertainment (video/AR/VR/Music etc) might alleviate the problems we'll face.

> I have a notion that one of the major ways people will be spending the time they otherwise would be working is by consuming entertainment.

Where are these people getting the money to spend on entertainment if they aren't working? I don't think this will happen.

What I do see happening, however, is that people have less free time between juggling more than 1 job and a side gig with Uber/their ilk.

Getting rid of wasteful jobs is a good thing regardless of whether you can handle the people who lose those jobs in the short term.

The job-saving technology will live forever, long after the people who are temporarily displaced die. You're doing an immense amount of good for the untold number of people who aren't even born yet.

Technology is also global, but the political problems associated with eliminating jobs are problems on a state-by-state basis. Is it immoral to develop a technology just because some political systems are incapable of handling the gains in productivity, while other states are?

I would never say it's immoral to develop the technology. The tough question is how to deploy it.

This is the right question to ask. The laborers in question could all be productively employed as artists, homemakers, social workers -- whatever. To the extent that we get lots of new workers in those categories, and still get to have groceries too, that's a net gain for society. But it's up to society to get us there, and right now society doesn't seem even remotely up to the challenge.

> Who is building and planning for this new social utopia once people no longer have to bag groceries?

I grew up in a country (Finland) where people bag their own groceries. The table behind the cashier just has a bit more room and some dividers, so even 3 customers have room to bag their own groceries simultaneously.

So an utopia without the "grocery-bagging class" is certainly possible.

Same in Germany. When I visited the US for the first time. It was really strange for me to have people bag my groceries. Also. I usually shop groceries with a back pack. How does that work in the US? Will they put the stuff in there for me?

I've never seen someone with a backpack, but it's not uncommon for people to bring their own reusable bags and have the bagger use them. I think a backpack would work the same way. Hand it over, then get it back full of food.

I normally pack my own backpack. That way I can be sure the squishy stuff is on top, the glass bottle goes in the glass bottle holder, etc. As a nice bonus, the bagger can take a couple minutes rest.

I was being a bit facetious with the grocery bagging example. My core point is "Who is building and planning for this new social utopia once 5, 50, 95% of jobs are automated away?"

> Right now it looks like a lot of misery and poverty on the horizon before things get better.

So what is new? We have been automating jobs out of existence for a long time. Every era has had a lot of people that are redundant, every era has had useless governments get to grips with it.

Recently I automated three jobs out of existence, making the computer do the data entry work with the customer filling in forms. This is great for the customer as they now get what they want done instantly instead of having to wait a week for the human to do what the computer can do. It is great for the company as 3 people don't have to be managed, provided office space and paid. But as for my colleagues?

I obviously have had thoughts about automating my friends on the next desk out of existence, how I see it is that there are actually plenty of vacancies in the company, there are plenty of vacancies outside the company and the writing has been on the wall for the last year regarding the changes we put through. 2 of my 3 former colleagues are now working elsewhere, having moved on fine, but there is the one that did not step up and go for other interviews within the company or look elsewhere. Now I am sure that government handouts are available, however, if someone does not look out for their own job and assumes it will always be there for them, what can you do? Is it always the government's fault in this situation?

My above sentiment is a tad Thatcherite, it was Norman Tebbit who said 'on your bike', i.e. if there isn't a job for you in your home town then you have got to move, the government isn't going to magically create a job for you. The 'on your bike' remark didn't go down too well in the 1980's, but 'on your bike' it has been since then.

Thats a highly individualistic point of view. One where as long as you're willing to put in the effort and be flexible you'll be able to thrive. I see it a lot on HN because most of us work in growing fields with many opportunities. Maybe you had to uproot your life and move to San Francisco but hey, now you work for Google and clear six figures.

There comes a point where flexibility and gumption don't get you far enough. When the pool of good quality jobs shrinks so much that the ecosystem cannot support the species.

I'm not calling for a halt to progress. If you hadn't automated away those jobs someone else would have. There are very strong economic incentives to do so. I just wish governments would see the writing on the wall and start planning for the future where the status quo leaves most people out in the cold.

Look at what happened in the us. Unemployed people are looking towards the government to make sure that there are jobs for them to do.

But how can we be sure that enough meaningful jobs will exist for all people who want to work? It would be kind of surprising if there was a meaningful full job for everyone.

This feels like former communist countries where everyone was employed, although many jobs were pointless.

XBox and OxyContin seems to be the current trend.

>That assumes we can find something better for them to do, of course. //

In practice what [is and] is going to happen is that the jobs of the poor are removed, because they are more easily automated and the capitalists will retain much of the revenue that would formerly have been spent on wages.

Nothing is going to be done politically until there is either civil unrest or until there is so much impact to those with lowest wealth in society that the capitalists start getting poorer returns because too few people can afford to purchase the goods produced. In either case the situation is going to be very dire IMO before we get there.

This on top of the apparent existing inequalities and the increasing pay gap that the gig economy is creating (the efficiencies don't appear to be improving pay for the workers nor reducing costs as much as they could), and things like zero-hours contracts are pushing [in the UK] makes for a bleak outlook for those who are not already rich IMO.

"Nothing is going to be done politically until there is either civil unrest or until there is so much impact to those with lowest wealth in society that the capitalists start getting poorer returns because too few people can afford to purchase the goods produced."

The problem is the civil unrest seems to be moving in the direction of ethnic nationalism and isolationism, which may not turn out to be the best long term solution to this problem.

Keep half of them to unstuck the automatic cash registry, watch buyers and restock the shop.

That certainly seems to be the solution so far.

This would be great if they got to keep the same salary.

Now they're just plain out of work. Hooray?

"Forcing people to do things a machine can do is inhumane."

It's not clear there's anything a person can do that a machine can never do, in principle.

So then what's the point of having people?

Unless you believe in souls or some other form of dualism, then clearly machines will eventually be able to do anything we can do.

But we're far from that point now. Anything machines can currently do is, pretty much by definition, drudgery. I'd be happy to reevaluate that statement if and when this changes.

I have no idea what the ultimate answer to that question would be. Lots of SF authors have tried to address it, coming up with answers varying from humans always having something they can do better, to humans existing to have fun, to humans having no point at all and therefore get wiped out by the machines.

Generally in sci-fi, one of:

A): None (catastrophic). People die out, or are wiped out, as advanced machines outcompete them for all resources.

B): The boundary (hopeful). AI capable of creating new ideas is either impossible or just too difficult to invent (hard to prove which way it goes), so people keep pushing it farther.

C): None (utopic). Machines do anything people would have done for society, including the creation of new things to have and/or do. However, machines don't reach the level of autonomy required for them to actively eliminate people, or decide against it because there's plenty of resources for everyone, so people have 100% leisure time (which may happen to resemble what used to be work, if the people in question enjoy the process, but is no longer necessary to society).

D): The boundary (dystopic). Machines end up being more complex than people - to the degree that people are valued less than sufficiently advanced machines, and are put to work rather than manufacturing robots to do the jobs.

A note on D: Generally relatively soft sci-fi that does this, because the stories generally put humanity's role as hard labor, which doesn't make sense. However, I could see a story in "The Thinking Machine of the Future has become so Incredibly Advanced that the Absolute Pinnacle of Human Thought is to them what Plowing Fields is to Us." Humanity as the intellectual equivalent of the plow ox (or the tractor), doing the jobs that the machines (with their much higher potential for more complex thought) find to be beneath them and refuse to subject each other to. Possibly with the assistance of basic nonintelligent machines, the way we wouldn't try to make an ox plow a field without first affixing a plow to it.

The Earth's population isn't getting any lower, those 10 jobs lost mean 10 people that will need support from the rest of society, just to survive.

It's utopian to think job losses mean everybody gets their workload reduced, as this has never happened before. Automation has never reduced anybody's workloads. In fact, every reduction has happened to either eliminate de-facto slaves (industrial revolution) or because excessive workloads actually reduce productivity.

those 10 jobs lost mean 10 people that will need support from the rest of society, just to survive.

If we have the technology to replace those people and we don't do it, then we as a society are already supporting them just to survive. You're talking about artificially maintaining inefficiency. If we're going to go down that road, we might as well start paying people to dig holes and fill them back up again.

They already need the support of the rest of society. No one survives on their own anymore. Automating a job like this gives more time and money back to people who buy groceries, which is almost everyone. Some of that can be used to support the lost jobs while they find something else to do.

>Some of that can be used to support the lost jobs //

It can, that's clear, the problem is convincing the people who didn't lose their jobs that they should take a take hike to support the others; that's not an easy sell in Western Capitalism at least.

> Automating a job like this gives more [...] money back to people who buy groceries

Honestly, I think this is never going to actually be the case. Why would a grocery store lower prices just because their costs went down a bit? Neither the demand nor the supply has changed, nor has the price people are willing to pay for their groceries.

If nothing has changed but your costs, why lower the prices when you can simply report increased revenue to your shareholders? If competition comes along, a quick "we're premium, they are cheap" marketing campaign (or buying them out) would probably cost less than lowering the prices to match.

Just look at Walmart. They're dirt cheap because their costs and their margins are the lowest and consumers flock to their stores.

Funny enough, if you find the same products at other stores, they are the same price. I think Walmart thrives by offering a diverse selection of inexpensive offerings, not by pricing identical items lower (to reflect their lower workforce costs). For example, videogames cost the same at Walmart as they do at Target. To see a different price for a specific item, you have to go to a very different type of store (Sam's Club/Costco).

I think it's fair to say that even if Walmart could half their operating costs with technology, those savings would not find their way into the pockets of consumers.

You'll have to lower the prices if you can because the next store in the neighbourhood will do it to outcompete you anyway.

Workloads have been reduced before.

The 40 hour workweek is significantly shorter than the 6 12 hour work days people used to endure.

Why not reduce the workweek again, to say, 32 hours?

Yes, and we shouldn't forget why workloads have been reduced before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

It's not a 'natural' evolution, but organized fight from labour.

The same with the general conditions of work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_and_Collieries_Act_1842

So, in my opinion, reducing the workweek or, an alternative that I think is more practical, stop working younger it's against powerful interests and can't be done without a fight.

And that's a fight that will be prompted by high unemployment after automation replaces many jobs.

The transition will be difficult (they usually are) but the end result (more free time for everyone) sounds good to me.

I hope so. But history tell us that the first reaction to high unemployment and bad economic conditions is the dark side of politics.

This would work if means of production were distributed more equally. The global productivity is already at a point where many of us don't need to work, but we still do because we are denied the benefits of the automation that you mention.

Except prices for living necessities won't get lower, since demand is elastic, people will just get trapped as debt slaves while corporate stockholders become the new monarchy.

> prices should go down

unlikely - can think of a bunch of reasons why this wouldn't happen.

> people will not have to work full weeks anymore, or rather, focus on learning and reaching higher education

too idealistic - why aren't the people who "aren't working full weeks" today focusing on learning and reaching higher education? The logic doesn't work for the people already in this target group, today.

At the end of the day, that CEO has to make bigger profits to justify the technology investment.

> too idealistic - why aren't the people who "aren't working full weeks" today focusing on learning and reaching higher education? The logic doesn't work for the people already in this target group, today.

There are many reasons. "Not working full weeks" doesn't always mean "not busy". Some of the reasons are:

- they're taking care of children / sick parents

- they're themselves sick or disabled (including various psychological conditions that can make you unable to perform effectively as a worker in this economy)

- they don't have a way to find a job that would let them earn more than they get from benefits (going to work in such circumstances is stupidity from economic POV)

- higher education they need costs money they can't get due to reasons listed above

The claim that increased automation will enable people not to work is often cited as a defense of putting people out of work in favor of automation. This relies heavily on a number of assumptions that I think are empirically completely untested:

- that automating all jobs will cause all prices to go down. (It seems just as plausible that if everything were automated, then the relatively small class of people who work building and maintaining the machines wield monopoly-like power and charge accordingly, concentrating wealth even more than it's concentrated today.)

- that with lower prices, people will want less money. (It seems just as plausible that people will expect to be able to keep working and buy more to raise their standard of living.)

- that the intermediate state, where many jobs are automated, but people still need to work for a living, is tenable for society

- that there are no significant social problems resulting from a society where nobody has to work

I don't know whether these are true or not, but if they're not, the result will greatly impact the lives of millions (billions?) of people. Obviously, banning automation isn't a solution either, but it seems flippant to bet the lives of so many people on what we think might happen in a system as complex as the global economy.

[edited formatting]

Funny how I just finish my Thesis on automation and its effects on globalization and the workforce the day before this comes out...

Well, are you gonna share that with us? :-)

As soon as I publish it I will ;)

Is it any good?

I imagine this scenario has played out a thousand times when it comes to the socioeconomic effects of technology given the rapid pace of ostensible innovation. I think it actually is part of the problem, while not a specific critique of Amazon Go, to the degree that technology advances at a rate faster than we can make sense of their effects, we face the possibility of endangering the lives of millions of people. Theses and dissertations aren't the only means of understanding, but they are invaluable mechanisms for grounding the discursive space in a digestible format.

It does enable people not to work in an agnostic view of wealth distribution. Automation means both less labor and more production, which means a net increase in total wealth.

The problem is assuming that total wealth means anything for anyone but the capitalist class that owns said wealth.

I used to believe that, but yeah, that hasn't happened and is not likely to, because the real world does not operate anywhere close to an efficient market.

Instead, those with the means of production have hoarded the benefits. Despite all of our technological progress after the American industrial revolution, we are working more hours and earning less as a whole. Despite record profits, companies are not increasing wages and prices are not decreasing for anything except cheap, low-quality, mass-market consumer goods.

See: trickle down economics.

> those with the means of production have hoarded the benefits

And, behold, we see someone rediscovering the central tenet of Marxist economic theory.

(Entirely serious; not an insult. HN readers could really do with a more balanced economic diet – reading more Marxist theory and less Chicago School...)

I think anyone who uses the phrase "means of production" was probably already familiar with Marxism.

Many people know the phrase - maybe they even remember it from history lessons. But understanding what it means is often absent (as with many concepts one doesn't use) until one for some reason starts thinking about it more.

I upvoted you, but I want to also vocally agree with you because I think it's important. Even if you don't come away agreeing with the conclusions of Marxist economists, etc., understanding it is worth the time it takes. Considering theories that are not automatically in agreement with those that currently run the show is valuable.

(This is why I've read a solid chunk of the Austrians. I generally laugh at them. But I've read their stuff and I can think in it once I get into the mindset.)

I agree. Also, Marxism didn't appear out of thin air - it was a response to real and perceived problems of the people living at some point in the past. So even if solutions don't ultimately make sense, the problems they've observed are worth thinking about.

An argument for learning about history, too? Are we allowed to have this thread on Hacker News? ;)

Oh. I didn't see the HN Experiment announcement until just now.

I'm promptly shutting up about anything for which the valid answer isn't "Lisp does it better". ;).

Haskell's type system is clearly political dialectic.

> Even if you don't come away agreeing with the conclusions of Marxist economists, etc., understanding it is worth the time it takes

Yes! It's a useful lens – just as Hayek is. No-one has a monopoly on absolute truth in the social sciences, so understanding (and empathizing with) all the framing narratives, most all of which have some kind of a point, is crucial to being able to navigate these kinds of discussion.)

Understanding Marxist (and Hayekian) thought has been very helpful to me in framing my own politics – which, ironically enough, wind up being moderate market/social liberalism in the European tradition.

Sounds similar to my own path. I started off in the libertarian bucket (unsurprisingly, being an affluent white kid) and ended up evolving towards a position roughly summed up as "markets are fine so long as you put the fear of the state in them for antisocial behavior" the more time I spent outside of my CS classes and in my political science and economics classes.

To this day I'm so thankful that I got a B.A. that let me actually leave the CS cage during college instead of just taking more math.

"those with the means of production have hoarded the benefits"... totally agree, for example, Elon Musk's Tesla should be Nationalized ASAP. </sarcasm>

> "the idea is that as more and more job get automated, prices should go down until the point where people will not have to work full weeks anymore"

Fallacy; apart from a short break thanks to syndicalist wins, we're just working more and more since the industrial revolution.

Reading suggestions: "A People's History Of The United States" by Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky.

Losing 10 jobs to automation would be far less concerning if the businesses and individuals that cut the jobs would reinvest a greater percentage of their newfound profits into social programs to retrain the 10 people who are now without jobs. Or into a fund for the much-vaunted basic income, even.

Reminder that unions have negotiated and continue to negotiate compensation plans from employers that automate away or move jobs overseas to workers that are replaced.

Unions... in the U.S.???

Is there any evidence that reducing the number of jobs correlates to lower prices?

The last 300 years during which capitalism and tech have done more for the common man than any other ststem in the last 30,000.

Uh... I'm not a luddite, nor comparing the modern world w/ pre-electricity society.

I'm specifically asking about the assumption that "if we remove cashiers, supermarkets will obviously bring the prices down" (as a counter-example, I remember reading somewhere that Seattle's minimum wage didn't affect inflation in any meaningful way)

Think about how many bodegas, convenience stores, and small grocery stores are in large cities across the world. Now if all of those stores only had to be restocked for a few hours a day, instead of watching the till 12+ hours a day, the storekeepers would have more time to spend with their families.

This is naïve. In reality, the larger companies will be the ones that can afford the technological advancement, and they will eventually drive the bodegas, convenience stores, and small groceries out of business. The benefits that would otherwise accrue to the shop owners will accrue to the leadership of major corporations instead.

I'd suggest we are evolving, but you are both mis-using "evolve." Evolution does not mean better, it just means change to fit the current environment. Humanity and intelligence is not the logical outcome of evolution.

This feels like a natural evolution. It's a outcome product of the environment.

Also, you are conflating social return vs. private return. Yes, me being able to go on facebook has very little social returns but it has some private returns. Private returns mean a lot to people - just look at all the people working on wall st.

So who decides where you spend those couple of minutes? I feel like I should decide if I want to go spend time on Facebook or interact with someone on the corner who is singing. Effectively forcing me to spend the time with the person on the corner singing may in fact be the best thing for me, but I think the choice is still more important.

Browsing Facebook sounds like passive social interactions with friends that you've deliberately chosen, rather than passive social interactions with whoever your local grocery store employees happen to be. It doesn't really sound that much worse to me.

That sounds like an echo chamber to me. Hardly healthy for a society, let alone an individual. Such alienation from your neighbors!

Good point of view, and indeed procrastination is the opposite of evolving.

However "I am unsure we are evolving" sounds like paradox. Isn't a version 2 of anything always "evolving" by definition? Otherwise, what's "better"?

"all change is not progress as all movement is not forward"

"They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction..."

False. Sometime I go to the grocery store for social interaction. You know, to get out. I generally go to a particular wine shop cause I like chatting with the guy at the counter. The idea that we do all this "stuff" ("processes") to get "stuff" done, and then separately we go somewhere for the express and sole purpose of socializing, is just clearly wrong. It's all mixed in. We're social creatures. We socialize while at the barber shop. We socialize at the grocery store. We socialize at work. At church. At football or soccer games. If we attempt to "refactor" out the "process" to make it more efficient, fine. But, don't pretend like whatever we replace that effort with we're not going to be socializing while we do that new thing.

It's frankly really sad that we have all these people that used to be persons we knew and visited with at the checkout counter, now they're in some warehouse being super efficient having no time to visit with coworkers while they work, meanwhile, we pretend that stuff magically shows up at grocery stores and we can walk in and walk out and magic and future wow.

You're going to back up your claim with anecdotal evidence? The overwhelming majority of people do not go to the grocery store as a social exercise. People view it as a chore. They want to get in and out as soon as possible.

i have to agree. i hate any level of socializing at the supermarket - i'm there to get what i need and be gone. i don't mind running into friends i like, but i really get annoyed running into casual acquaintances due to the social niceties.

His personal feeling and experience of going to stores is "anecdotal evidence"?

Where is your three-year, peer-reviewed study into the emotional motives of shoppers? After all, you flatly stated that "The overwhelming majority of people do not go to the grocery store as a social exercise."

Since you seem to be a very serious, data-minded person: CITATION PLEASE.

"You're going to back up your claim with anecdotal evidence?The overwhelming majority of people do not go to the grocery store as a social exercise."

Wait, where's your evidence for this claim? I live in a small town in Croatia and, no, the overwhelming majority of the people in my neighborhood are not in a hurry to get their shopping over with. The speed at which groceries are acquired is just one metric out of many influencing their experience.

This is not to say that progress is necessarily bad or that checkout lines are great, merely that reducing every transaction down to its economic value risks overlooking other, less quantifiable aspects of the transaction.

You're biased by your experience, because you live in a world that's starkly segmented between work and play. I lived there, too, so I understand your perspective. But your values -- and Silicon Valley values in general -- are not necessarily universal.

To be fair, there's no evidence presented to support your claim either.

Well maybe you too should take your turn to back your claim with evidence!

I shop fast too. I get in and out as fast as I can, because - after all - the attendants in the store where I go to would not know a leaf of spinach from a leaf of kale...

The same applies to my electronics shopping...

...at least I can justify the guys there not knowing kale!

Jokes aside: not all stores are like that, and not all people shop like that.

I can think of many elderly people using shopping as a main daily source of social interaction.

Diversity means choice and choice is generally good.

I think the interesting point here is that when you remove social interaction and product advice from physical stores, then really you might as well only buy online... and Amazon is the king of online.

So this looks like a fantastic move by Amazon.

Since you're posting anecdotal evidence, let me post my own:

> We socialize at the grocery store.

I never go to the grocery store for socializing. When I was still in England, I constantly ordered online. Now it's a chore and I miss england.

> We socialize while at the barber shop.

I shave my head to avoid having to go to the barber shop.

> We socialize at work.

I work remotely to avoid having to deal with that.

> At church.

Not religious. Probably because I'd have to go to church if I were.

> At football or soccer games.

I play tennis just so I don't have to deal with a team.

I can't wait for this technology to make its way here. The grocery lines on saturdays are insane. Also maybe that means the shops will be open longer hours and I can go in the middle of the night so I can avoid meeting people even more.

But you come to HN and read the comments because... I mean, the comments are the social portion. Not pure facts. They're other peoples views. So, I mean, you kinda socialize when get your news here and post pleasant comments interacting with other readers. So, I take it, you totally get what I'm saying.

This makes sense from a suburban, car-based perspective. From a walking, city-based lens, neighborhoods and social interactions make a lot of sense. It's why coffee shops haven't been made obsolete by vending machines - at least here in New York. Point is, it depends on your perspective.

I think it makes sense whatever way you get around. If people value something, by and large, they'll pay for it.

Most people want to get their shopping done quickly and efficiently.

However, I could easily see niches keeping people around. The first thing that comes to mind is a higher end sort of place where customers want some knowledgeable help in selecting what they're buying. Spend some money on a few people who know their products well and give good advice, and maybe have time for some chit chat.

It also depends on the state and stage of one's life. For instance, as a student, I loved chatting up clerks in grocery stores. I actually met my SO this way. Being older and working full time now, I would vastly prefer to never visit any store ever, and buy everything on-line. It's not cheap enough yet though, so that's why today after work I'm visiting the cheapest store around to restock my fridge...

Yeah, I could easily see things kind of sorting out along some lines like that, just like we have everything from 'convenience stores' to small local markets to supermarket chains to Costco.

    > This makes sense from a suburban, car-based perspective.
    > From a walking, city-based lens, ...

Funny, I'd have said if there was a distinction between driven-to and walked-to locations, it would be the opposite: if I've already taken the time to drive there I'm likely not in that much of a hurry.

Someone else points out the security benefit of a cashless store, which again I'd have thought is more of an advantage to the high street shop than the suburban warehouse-like supermarket.

> It's why coffee shops haven't been made obsolete by vending machines

I really don't think that's why. Vending machines can't compete with humans still for freshly produced goods. There have been a few shots across the bow, but producing food that requires adjustment is still beyond the range of our sensors.

I can't imagine a robot "dialing in" an espresso machine based on taste like a barista would, at least for another decade.

But I go to coffee shops for the productive atmosphere. I think baristas (and bartenders and sommeliers) will always have a place even in a post-work world.

How does a barista offer that, versus simply visiting an interface (app, browser), clicking a button, and having it delivered to your table by a robot within five minutes?

I don't think the "productive atmosphere" concept is fully realized yet. Imagine how happy starbucks would be if they could reclaim all of that bar area for more seating (and more customers ordering more drinks!) or less area and less rent.

Ah, you got me! Yes, it's the overall atmosphere, not just the productivity. The romance is admittedly a part of it. I'm not opposed to robots making coffee, but I also suspect that in a post-work world, I'd be a part-time barista for the social-cool factor and mechanical-aromatic satisfaction.

(I can't help but think that half the attraction of Starbucks is having chipper college students hand-write a personalized drink order...)

I think there will probably be a lot of niche, human staffed places. I worry though, that as robots close the gap, our collective baseline for cost will drop so low that $3 for good espresso will seem outrageous when the robot will churn it out for a $1, perfect every time.

Also, the chipperness is a lot less likable when you're friends with some of them and all they can talk about is how much they hate customers :( The unspoken secret of retail is that it's soul crushing to work in.

I think if someone made a vending machine that actually makes coffee the way a barista would, instead of pouring hot water into dried powder of random chemicals, I'd never ever visit a coffee shop again. But as it is now, vending machine coffee tastes so bad it's almost a separate category of awfulness (and don't get me started on vending machine tea...).

It's not quite a vending machine, but Nespresso has replaced going to the coffee shop for my morning espresso. I think it does a better job than Starbuck, personally.

Well, at Starbucks they appear to literally press a single button to pull a shot. So, not much art to that.

Those machines cost $10-$30k, and require cleaning every few hours (minimum wage, only significant skill is the diligence to do it) and maintenance every few days or weeks by a steam plumber. The operator/button pusher is a little bit like a flight attendant: most days here to get you your drinks—but every once in a while, here to notice steam coming from the wrong place and take the machine out of service.

This comment makes me suspect you may have never been to a farmer's market, or a market hall (of which Barcelona has some of the world's most glorious examples).

While it's possible that some people "want groceries as cheap and fast as possible," I don't think either of those is true of the hundreds of people I join at my local market every week.

I go there mainly because I like buying directly from the producers. I want there to be independent farmers in the future too, for reasons of taste, culture, ecology, and food safety.

But I also enjoy my interactions with some of the sellers. Some people probably go mainly for that reason. The market is full, despite a big ugly multinational supermarket 100m away that has cheaper (and worse) versions of just about everything on offer. That supermarket is also full, though I think the reasons why are not as simple as market efficiency.

A lot of us will continue to share the parent poster's opinion, and hopefully in sufficient numbers to keep all the little bodegas going. Because we care about food, and we care about living among humans.

Farmer's markets will be unaffected by this, obviously. The possibility to buy your groceries in this manner would still exist, as that's a different "use case", and I absolutely support and enjoy it. In contrast, I don't believe there is anything worth saving regarding the human interaction in supermarkets - in fact, I think that working an 8 hour shift which consists solely of scanning items and saying a couple pre-defined sentences is a very dismal, and in fact much more inhuman experience than what Amazon is proposing.

Depends on the supermarket I suppose. A few times a year I go to a rural-ish supermarket in the US (town of maybe 5K people) and it's very old-school, the check-out people are very nice and gregarious, the baggers bag with great skill, etc.

I certainly hope the poor folks who toil at Aldi or Safeway might find a better thing to do with their lives, and if those stores are displaced I won't be too sad.

This doesn't take into account the value of forced social interaction. Seeing a human at the grocery, exercising patience if the line is a little longer than I would perhaps like, being forced to engage in conversation with my neighbor...There is a value to these social behaviors and value to how they shape psychological development. I worry about the world where everything is catered to Me and I, and I can go about my life without interacting with the people I'm forced to share space with.

Your government may enforce these interactions if it so chooses. I'd prefer my government did not, and leaves the choice of where I get my social interactions up to me.

At no point did I say this should be outlawed. But as a society, we should look at these types of "innovations" and question whether it's actually providing benefit to the longterm, wellbeing of our people and our ability to function together collectively.

If a person's only social interaction that is providing meaningful wellbeing is talking with the clerk at the grocery store, then I'd say the person in question is in need of serious help that the clerk cannot provide. They need to find social groups. Personally, I hate standing in line and avoid many businesses because of the slow line-ups. I'd rather be on my way so I can go to my family and friends where the bottle of wine I just picked up is to be consumed. Convenience is not the anathema of society. Not making time for each other may be. Forcing it on each other is a weak "solution".

You're both right, of course. Also, there are apps for that...

    > People want groceries as cheap and fast as possible.
    > They don't go to the grocery store for social
    > interaction and forcing the majority of people to pay
    > extra for something that only the minority get value out 
    > of is not a competitive strategy.

Spoken like a true New Yorker.

(... or some other big American city, but it's more impressive if that's right.)

The parent commenter describes something I immediately recognise as "very European"; there's room for both of you.

Evolve as a society, yet remove the social experience of shopping.

Interesting. I don't believe I want us to evolve in that direction.

Couldn't we just have more "greeters" and fewer cashiers?

welcome to costco, i love you

Social experience at a grocery store feels contrived and not everyone may want it. Maybe you enjoy talking to your cashier but not everyone does, so why should everyone be forced to just because some do? It makes much more sense to keep groceries for grocery shopping, and social places such as bars for socializing.

There are these other people at grocery stores besides the employees, I believe they are called "patrons" to whom you may also converse with...

This is a typical sales-y way of trying to fake an interaction people actually seek. People paid to "talk" with you are not the same as honest, casual conversation with hard-working clerks.

Paid to talk to you? What kind of dystopian grocery store do you go to?

That's how I understand your comment.

Shops in the place I live in are fine, but I've heard about "greeters" in America, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if there also were paid people to talk to...

haha no I've never encountered such folks. I was being sarcastic when I put "patrons" in quotes, because the GP seemed to imply the only people to socialize with at a grocery were the cashiers.

"Social experience at <x> feels contrived and not everyone may want it."

This pretty much sums up _everything_. So, why do we even try to have societies?

Edit: You use an example of going to a bar. You realize "... not everyone may want ..." to socialize at a bar? Some just go to drink.

I would hypothesize that wanting shopping to be focused on convenience over the social aspect is a much more common opinion (see: online shopping) than wanting to go to a loud, crowdy, noisy environment where you can pay a premium to drink alcohol and not be social.

I don't think that is a fair comparison at all. Somethings are inherently social, like going to a bar, where as others are much more of a grey area. I would argue that many of these have historically been social experiences out of necessity (no automated machines, no online shopping, etc.), not out of the need for social interaction.

My stepfather owned a bar for some decades. It's not quite as social as you would imagine. A great many people go there to drown "around" people, but not necessarily to drown "socially".

Doesn't that even more show the value of just being around other people? It's definitely a lot cheaper to drink your own booze at home.

And that's what people do when e.g. they care more about economic considerations than social stigma of drinking alone.

This is an excellent point. For thousands of years, the default was every interaction was social. The idea that you should be able to walk into a standardized store and converse with a clerk like they were an automated sales droid is only a fairly recent phenomenon. These faceless, purely functional transactions - they are exception, not the norm.

The point of a bar is to socialize, or at least have company. Otherwise why not buy a bottle and stay home?

Some people don't want to socialize, but just be "around" people. There seems to be a difference.

May be the stigma of drinking alone, where one is sometimes considered a drunk if one drinks alone.

> They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction

Not true for my grandmother and many other elderly people. Maybe it's loneliness. But maybe it's a generation thing, not sure. We need to question if it's best to not interact with people who sell us stuff.

If there's a large enough market for it, then someone will continue to build it.

People said the same thing about DVD stores -- yet the numbers didn't back it up. People stopped going.

What in your mind is 'the value of humanity'? If the ideal of humanity is to solve all problems, reach maximum efficiency, and eliminate all competition then we're probably going to design ourselves out of the system eventually.

People are inefficient sacks of meat with finite potential. When we have designed a black box that solves all problems, answers all answerable questions, maximizing all efficiencies for us, and protects us from any possible threat, what do we do next? What is left?

The value of humanity isn't a universal purpose, that's just how we fool ourselves into believing that there is a point to our lives. That's how we reason about pain, suffering, and hardship.

Human existence, our experience is existentially pointless. It is down to the individual to create a purpose. Perhaps you view the purpose as being something tangible and 'out there' to be had. Others see the purpose as simply just being, enjoying the small things, finding pleasure in the pointlessness.

No one can say what the value for another is. There is ultimately no value except that in which you find in yourself.

So let's not kid ourselves that we as a race are working toward some kind of ultimate design because that design is in our minds only and as such can't be 'ultimate' or significant to the 'other' in any way. Indeed it is likely to be a folly of our mind, a foolish solution to the non-problem of being.

I mostly agree. Take the parent's argument and replace grocery store clerk with gas station pump attendant.

"I know all the people who work in these gas stations. The attendant at the pump always whistles a quiet song while he pumps my gas. He knows my son and is always nice and friendly."

Yet, besides the completely weird laws in New Jersey and Oregon, society has moved on and people now pump their own gas.

I understand the parent's post point to some degree. I don't want a cold a sterile society where no one never interacts with anyone any longer. However, I also get stuck in grocery store lines all the time. It would be a net win for me to skip these lines all together even if the places I shop at become a little more impersonal.

At least in the United States, places have continued to staff less and less cashiers and have relied more and more on self-checkout. So, for many of these stores, it isn't like I'm missing out on any real connection. This just seems like a way less stressful self-checkout.

Apple lets you check yourself out using their app at the Apple Store but I rarely do this because I feel like I'm shoplifting or that people are watching me suspiciously. I'm curious if I would have that same reaction to these stores or not. I'm guessing not, because it is the only way to pay.

Looking purely at local transaction costs neglects externalities and can lead to very bad outcomes.

I don't see a huge difference between valuing interactions vs. having workplace safety standards or requiring that employers provide health insurance. Both of them raise transaction costs and eliminate at least some economic models because we as a society have decided we don't like the outcome. The sticking point is usually how to do it fairly.

Edit: clarification of point

<They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction

Not true. The giant store I work at has so many regulars that it's family. Often the store is one of only a few places customer's pasts are unknown or forgiven.

It's not all about increased producivity.

"People want groceries as cheap and fast as possible."

What evidence do you have for this claim? A study of some sort?

It is also obvious from reading the news that some people do not want this.

"They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction and forcing the majority of people to pay extra for something that only the minority get value out of is not a competitive strategy."

Again, this sounds like hearsay or a personal opinion.

> What evidence do you have for this claim? A study of some sort?

The fact that people go to supermarkets, to get their groceries faster and cheaper, instead of going to half a dozen small stores where the potential for fulfilling social interaction is much bigger.

I, too, enjoy many of my social interactions while shopping.

I think that, per the grandparent, current initiatives are not grasping nor addressing the entire scope of the existing... "paradigm" -- sigh, to try to find a word for it.

To reduce it severely but pertinently, in the news recently, "studies show" that people who feel valued and that they have a roll in society, family -- in life -- they live longer.

And what happens when we stop interacting with each other? When that daily communication between work domains and social classes ends? Again, reduction to the almost absurd -- but we're living it -- we get President Trump.

Trump may end up doing ok -- we'll see. But the shock on many maybe liberal, Amazon Prime shopping upper middle class faces? Try actually talking to, with, and not at, the people around you, serving you.

When people stop to think about it, I think most find value in the people around them, much more than the things.

Not all value is encompassed in the fastest delivery for the cheapest price. (Which Amazon seems to be increasingly falling down on, anyway, per my recent experiences.)

Does automation really remove jobs or just displace them? Honest question. I mean, in this instance, I see perhaps jobs of 10 cashiers in a store replaced with 1-2 monitoring the store and rest done by automation. But, then this gives rise to a whole set of new jobs and industries too, the engineers that design these systems, the ones that build these machines, industries supplying manufacturing of hardware for these system, software developers, maintaining hardware, maintaining software, customer support, servicing. So, if this is deployed in all stores in a city then will employment numbers add up to become a zero sum? Is it just displacing employment from one category(or location) of manual tasks to different tasks?

Besides, if most people lose their jobs to automation in the near future, there won't be enough people who can afford to buy stuff at these stores anyway, so won't it become uneconomical to run these stores?

It feels good to think automation doesn't eliminate jobs, but one thing is for certain, if it merely displaced them into higher salary jobs, no one would ever automate because it would eliminate profits.

At the profit levels usually seen in retail supermarkets, you can't stop paying all those people minimum wage and suddenly start paying them software dev salaries without an enormous hit to the income statement.

"won't it become uneconomical to run these stores?"

Essentially these stores are already smart vending machines stocked by humans occasionally at night. In the long run that might be where fresh food comes from. "Go to the vending machine and pick up a head of lettuce".

It's definitely not going to be one to one job replacement, not even close.

Software can be write once, run everywhere. You could replace thousands of cashiers with software written by a team of 10 software engineers.

Maintenance of hardware/software could be taken care of by a few people running to multiple stores throughout the day. Example would be Starbucks in San Francisco. There is a Starbucks nearly every block in the inner-city. You could just have two guys walk from store to store to perform checks/maintenance.

So yes, I see big possibility of thousands of service workers being out a of a job due to automation. Which is why a lot of people are saying we need to seriously consider something like universal basic income for the near future ..

That big decrease in cost allows the company to capture more market with a lower price, increasing profit. The profit goes to repay the investors that up-fronted the money to develop this. But the savings in everybody else's pockets eventually boost the economy, creating jobs.

Have you considered that life isn't all about efficiency? People shop because of the experience. This is why book stores are coming "back," eBooks just aren't cutting it for people. This is why "smart lights" won't ever truly take off, people don't want to log onto an app to turn their lights off.

If people really shop "because of the experience", then this technology is nothing to worry about as it will fail in the market.

> This is why "smart lights" won't ever truly take off, people don't want to log onto an app to turn their lights off.

They will, one day, when companies stop with the vendor lock-in bullshit. An app - a siloed, sandboxed program that cannot meaningfully interact or seamlessly share information with any other program on the device - is a very crappy interface for doing anything. But we're stuck with it, because it's easier for companies to make money off apps, and cooperation is hard.

I have to disagree with this one. I have Hue lights and I rarely ever use the app to turn them on or off. When I come home and it is after sunset the lights come on automatically based on geolocation. When I leave they turn off.

Also, I can walk downstairs and say "Alexa, turn on the living room lights" and my Amazon Echo turns them on. Same thing to turn them off again. That's extremely convenient...way, way more convenient than walking around and turning 4-5 lamps on and off.

They have come way down in price to the point to where you can either pay $20 for a smart bulb versus $10-12 for a standard LED.

Will be interesting to see what happens though...I do agree that life isn't just all about efficiency. But people certainly do enjoy convenience.

Hopefully people also don't like the idea of their lights participating in a DDoS.

What are you in such a hurry to do? Get home and post on HN?

How much of our lives do we want tech to live for us? Part of what makes life awesome is meeting random people standing in lines.

> What are you in such a hurry to do?

> Part of what makes life awesome is meeting random people standing in lines.

By all means go search for lines to meet random people. But spare me because for me that time is wasted, and I rather recover all of it to spend it with my friends, or doing sport, or even watching TV with my wife. This thing won't make lines disappear altogether, so you'll be fine: you'll be able to find them in the post office for example.

" People want groceries as cheap and fast as possible. They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction and forcing the majority of people to pay extra for something that only the minority get value out of is not a competitive strategy."

crazypyro, you may want to do as Brian Regan said (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8kThoZpF_U ) and pick up some Montana brochures. If you don't have 3-5 minutes in the day to talk to your neighbors, you either need new neighbors or a career change. Life is a lot of things, but it ain't all GSD all the time either.

> They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction

Yes, they do. It's a human need. Many people satisfy it that way.

Indeed, separate from the question of livelihoods (which could be supplemented via ideas like basic income), and less some meaningless greetings, the engagement I would up having would be far more meaningful if employment was a matter of satisfaction rather than utility.

Because societal evolution can be directly measured by how quickly you can buy your pizza pockets, and also how few other members of society you have to interact with while doing so?

TIL politicians are the most efficient ways to solve political problems..

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