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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.)

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.

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