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I already choose grocery stores with ample self checkout, which is so much better to me than waiting in line then interacting with a clerk. I for one welcome our robot service providers.

Interesting - after the "new shiny toy" factor wore off, I've deliberately gone through the staffed checkouts where at all reasonable to do so. This way I feel like I'm keeping someone's job relevant and maybe even keeping them employed.

I admit this isn't a very rational response, though, because I'm fine with self-service airport check-ins and generally pretty happy to talk to a machine rather than a human.

I use staffed checkouts for a different reason -- it is vastly faster if you are purchasing more than a few items.

All I have to do in a staffed checkout is remove items from my cart and place them on the belt. The cashier scans them, and can begin this task while I'm still emptying the cart. And most of the time, the cashier is practiced at this task and can do it quickly. When I'm in a self-checkout I see seconds wasted per item as people turn them over and around one-by-one to find where the bar code is.

And the staffed checkout usually has another person to bag the items, and again can begin doing this while the cashier scans more items, collects payment, etc.

At a self-checkout I'm doing all these tasks myself, stepwise because the computer insists that I bag each item before I scan the next one.

I always choose a cashier because they are, without fail, more efficient at getting me checked out than having me fumble with a checkout machine. And that's without having any sort of fresh produce. If I have fresh produce then the machine is even worse. Making me do the job you once paid someone to do? No thank you, grocery/bigbox store. Maybe once in the last 10 years when I had a single item and it was holiday season -- even there express checkout is usually faster.

It does raise the question of what jobs are worth saving? So a robot takes someones job, but it was a crappy job that they hated anyway. But they needed the money. Tough.

That is a generic end-of-work question. Ideally, everyone would have jobs they liked, and all the dull stuff would be automated (Star Trek outcome). Pessimistically, the machines will become better than humans at everything and we will just become obsolete (Terminator outcome). If automation picks up, we will have to deal with these questions sooner rather than later, but it will happen eventually.

I have a friend who is happy to do the dull work. Smart guy, just content. At first I encouraged him to move up, then I began to understand that not everyone views the world the same way that I do.

Let's be optimistic and hope for the Wall-E outcome instead of the Terminator outcome. The robots will keep us around and take care of us as pets.

There's a middle ground portrayed in the Culture Series novels. Everything is run by machines for the most part, and in some situations humans just tag along for the ride. At the same time though humans can basically get whatever they want whenever they want it, and do whatever.

Erm, if we create robots better than us, they are our legacy, our homo superious, why should Homo sapiens continue? You don't see Neanderthals running around today for a good reason.

It’s easy to look back fondly on genocides that have already happened. No one shed a tear for the long lost Neanderthals. The Estruscans were wiped out by the Romans with almost no recorded history left behind. Native Americans, First Nations, and Aborigines suffered horribly at European hands, but we never entertain the idea of moving back to the Old World.

Things are different for genocide that hasn’t happened yet. If people have left the UK and formed the United States which is far more successful currently, why not just kill all the citizens of the UK? Obviously the US is homo superious.

Would no one shed a tear?

It wasn’t necessarily genocide in the Neanderthal case, just basic species out competition. Yes, many people today are trying to “save the panda” even though it is quite non adaptable, but if the pandas go extinct because they cannot compete for the resources they once monopolized, that isn’t genocide.

At least in my mind, genocide is unnatural.

Playing devil's advocate: Is there actually a difference between genocide and survival of the fittest? If the Etruscan people were a superior culture with a superior fighting force, they would have defended themselves from the Romans and they'd still be around. Likewise if the panda was better adaptable, we wouldn't be struggling to save the species.

If the saber-toothed tiger died out because they were out-competed by the other species around them, we call that natural selection. If the Carthaginians died out because their neighbors had a better fighting force, we call that genocide. But the only difference is... what, exactly?

It's not a linear outcome space. There's also the outcome where automation enables tons of new dull (but in different ways) jobs, currently embodied by the so-called gig economy. I think this area is nacent and has a lot of potential[1].

Also, incidentally, this outcome is consistent with a couple of centuries of economic history.

1: No, these jobs aren't great compared to classic middle class jobs. But going from shelf stocker or check out clerk to Instacart shopper and/or Uber driver isn't obviously a step backwards on net.

I hope for the Culture outcome. The machine minds gets better at everything, and they choose to keep us around as pets. (Well tending to all of our Mashlow levels, as a point of pride between themselves.)

Skynet is just sloppy though. The easiest way to get a practical human extinction is to make entertainment so fun that people forget to have children, then just wait.

Its kind of ridiculous to paint the future as binary. Computer augmented humans, better than robots, are also a clear possibility.

I can't agree with this enough. Taking it one step further: I actively _avoid_ grocery stories that don't have ample self-checkout. If I have to deal with a human clerk once, I'm way less likely to return to that store.

Trader Joe's is excellent about this. I'm not sure if it's explicit policy but every single time I've asked an employee where something is they dropped what they were doing, walked over to the exact spot and literally handed me the item I was looking for. I guess that's only possible in a small store though.

This is absolutely standard in the UK in all the supermarkets I'm aware of. If a member of staff doesn't know where the item is, they'll go and find someone who does.

I've found that too. TBH I just want them to tell me which aisle it is, and will ask "which aisle are eggs on, please?" or whatever. But they insist on walking you there and done are seemingly instructed to hand you a product too (which usually I replace).

Mind you, if they didn't insist on moving everything to increase customer circulation ...

All grocery stores I have been to are like that. They will drop what they will tell you where to find it off the top of their heads and offer to take you to it. Publix, Piggly Wiggly, Winn Dixie. This is why I still do most of my grocery shopping in grocery stores and not big box.

Wegmans employees do the same thing, and my Wegmans is bigger than some Walmarts.

Walmart used to do this, back in Sam Walton's day. (I grew up and live in Southwest Missouri, and remember Walmart as our small, regional competitor to the big national giants like Kmart :)

Many stores do this. Our local grocery store, QFC, frequently does it, Home Depot does it, etc.

I have the opposite experience. Pretty much any store around here, Walmart included, the employees are very willing to help you find stuff, and if they don't know where something is, they will find or call to an employee that does know.

I am very impressed with folks at home improvement stores. I walk up, ask them where X is and they say 'ahhh, it should be over in aisle 17, towards the end past the Ys.'

Home depot lists aisle and bin numbers of inventory on their website once you've selected a local store as you're default store. After asking an employee and them pulling out their phone to check online for a products location, I've never had to ask an employee again. Surprised they don't advertise this on in store signage

Item location could be provided by a phone app today. My feeling is that they don't do it because they don't want you to know the exact location because they want you to browse the aisles in hopes that you'll throw something into your cart that you weren't planning to. Same reason that supermarkets put milk and eggs at the farthest corner away from the door.

The Home Depot app is how I find everything when I go there. I think the other stores didn't do it yet because the isles and bays in most stores don't have visible numbers. And without that they need to wait a few years for deployed internal location technology to improve a bit.

Walmart actually used to list exact shelf location for items on their site. Maybe they still do, maybe desktop only?

I've been in a retailer hackathon. This is true. (ratailer is a worldwide actor french born)

An aisle number is all I'm really looking for when I ask imo. I can scan a shelf about as fast as I can walk.

But if I’m asking, it’s because I already looked on the shelf and I didn’t find the thing after looking for at least five minutes. I want to know, at that point, whether they carry the thing at all; whether it’s just in a crazy place (e.g. honey in the bakery in a little spreads display, instead of in the baking or condiment aisle); or whether my eyes are failing to do their jobs properly and I’ll need to look again.

I can't find it if I'm looking at it. I long to photograph the shelf and then search it with OCR.

Part of this has to do with demographics. We prefer to deal with robots and order stuff on web interfaces. I was talking with my aunt and uncle the other day. They were telling me that they prefer to bring their paper checks to the bank and interact with the teller rather than scan it in the app from the comfort of their home.

That blew my mind.

I think there's a huge age gap when it comes to preference for human vs mechanical interface. Until the older generation dies out these sort of redundant service jobs will exist. As they say, sometimes progress only happens one funeral at a time.

It's not really human vs mechanical in the teller example despite what they say. They are just keeping their long running habit rather than having to learn how to scan it on their phone which is work and risking that their money will disappear.

Keep in mind this requires a smartphone. Some seniors don't have them. They may not even have dumb cell phones. Some don't use computers at all. Some are using the old CRT TV they bought ten years ago because it still works fine.

There's a point where your life works fine and you don't particularly need to change it or learn radically new things unless you have no other option at all. In some ways, the old actions have their own benefits. The senior goes to cash her paper check at the bank because it gets her out of the house and in front of people; she saves the money on a cell phone that she doesn't use much because she stays home more than travels at her age.

Even with computers...she doesn't feel helpless or at the mercy of technology she doesn't understand. She might even reduce her vulnerability some that way; a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

I think you could easily be wrong here.

I can self-checkout, or at some supermarkets self-scan (using a handheld scanner), but I chose the human checkout operator. It's partly economic, the supermarket doesn't discount my shop if I do the checkout work myself, so I extract a modicum of their takings towards wages for a local person rather than have it go to shareholder profit. People here need jobs.

People do need jobs. I wasn't talking about grocery stores. It was specifically the behavior related to depositing checks.

Also there is a difference between a rationalization for a behavior and the actual behavior. Usually the rationale is actually created afterwards. Although certainly some people must have created a deliberate policy to support employment or simply out of preference for human interaction. But my supposition was just about the check depositing.

Regardless, keeping people in menial jobs is not optimal for them or for consumers and almost certainly not a policy that will generally persist when more capable AIs are available.

>Regardless, keeping people in menial jobs is not optimal for them or for consumers and almost certainly not a policy that will generally persist when more capable AIs are available. //

"Keeping" people in menial jobs isn't the issue. When the robot takes over it's because the owner-capitalists can make more profit by cutting the proles out of the loop.

It's not the job, it's money to pay for water+food+shelter that's the issue.

If rich capitalists are happy to give up their profits to make an equal society with few menial roles then your way s works. There's no evidence that's the case and lots of evidence against it.

Robots aren't going to replace all of the service jobs, but I think they're going to replace more than we might imagine.

Over the last 30 years, more than half of bank branches in the UK have closed. Many older customers have been substantially inconvenienced by these closures, but they're on the wrong side of economics. Beyond a certain point, it's just no longer financially viable to keep a branch open. A lot of older people prefer DVDs to online streaming, but good luck finding a rental store in most towns.

The social effects may well be very ugly, but I think that most businesses will be quite ruthless about their deployment of automation. They clearly have no qualms about the impact on jobs and I don't think that they'll care if some proportion of their customer base is marginalized.

There's good reason to prefer a disc over a stream, especially if you use player software that lets you skip the unskippable previews. The audio is better, the bitrate is higher, and you can rip the disc and store it somewhere safe.

I've almost always had the opposite response, ranging from briefly informative directions to someone guiding me all the way to the item I seek.

(Edit: But I don't shop at Walmart...)

> Would you like me to take you there?

You see another robot going in the direction of aisle 7, but forget it immediately as unimportant. While following the robot something catches your attention (slight disorder in neatly ordered merchandise? You don't reflect on that because...) you see a thing you didn't bothered to search for, but... To the robot: "Organic food is healthier, right? Let's go."

Yes, I think the social factors are underestimated. I actually believe that most people by default would prefer to interact with a robot rather than with another human. Humans have different speeds, moods, knowledge and expertise. When you shop, you dont do it to have a social experience, you do it to get a very specific job done and in my opinion this makes humans a variable that is desireable to be removed.

Walmart employees used to be trained to always escort the customer when they ask for help finding something.

That's if you can first locate a warm body in your geographical vicinity in the first place.

I wonder if we could use a dewey decimal system style lookup service for stores?

What's worse is that a lot of Walmart employees don't speak English. They can barely understand what you are saying, much less, conjure up a response. Usually they have to go and fetch a much smarter or knowledgeable person to help out.

Terribly inefficient.

So Walmart Employees, if this is you:

I'm sorry but if you want to keep working at Walmart, time to step up your game, learn some English and be more responsive. Otherwise, I'll happily accept a response from the robot over your indifference if it helps me get to the product I need to find quicker.

You're being junked because most of the folks in the US haven't experienced what you're referring to. Here in the US everyone speaks English. I understand it's a little different in Canada because there are many more immigrants working at grocers and stores like Walmart that may not have mastered English yet.

I think it's more because "smarter and more knowledgeable" is being conflated with "speaks English." That kind of casual ignorance doesn't elevate the discussion here.

So someone speaking English is "a much smarter or knowledgeable person" than someone who may have immigrated recently. Yeah, makes perfect sense.

> I'm sorry but if you want to keep working at Walmart, time to step up your game, learn some English and be more responsive.

I'm sorry but it's not your place to threaten Walmart employees. You'll have to leave that to Walmart management.

What Walmart do you go to? The one in my town, everyone seems to speak English fluently

Calgary Alberta.

Any Walmart in town.

What's actually happening is a combination of the fact that that they are probably in the middle of stocking and/or immediately detect your racism and arrogance and inability to get to the point and realize they need a supervisor to deal with you.