Comment by pavanred | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavanred | Hacker News Reader

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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'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.

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".

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