Google Launches The Ultimate Jobs Killer | Hacker News Reader

Google Launches The Ultimate Jobs Killer

forbes.com

11 pointsbond31 comments

Pardon me if this question is stupid; I am not a native speaker and perhaps I am oblivious to certain nuances of English. That said, didn't the author mean this piece to be titled “Google launches the ultimate job killer?” Singular job?

Yes, "ultimate job killer" is the right way of writing it.

This is one of the situations where it could go either way. Normally, you would say 'ultimate job killer', yes... But in this situation, we're talking about jobs in the abstract. It isn't killing a few particular positions here and there, but actually killing those job roles altogether.

When the cotton gin was invented, it didn't just take a few jobs away, it eliminated the position of cotton picker. Nobody does that job any more because a machine was just too much better at it. (It probably invented a new position for the person who runs the machine, but that's a different point.)

The cotton gin (1793) separates the cotton fibers from the seeds. The cotton still needs to be picked. Machines were eventually built to pick cotton but didn't get good until the 1950s, well after many blues and early country and western songs could be written about picking cotton.

In a historical pre-echo, Ely Whitney spent a lot of time and money suing planters for making illegal copies of his cotton gin.

Using the singular would be standard, yes.

I think in this case, though, I suspect it's used semi-intentionally because the plural "jobs" is more of a political buzzword than the singular. The issue is jobs, not any individual's job.

This is supposed to be the dream behind RFID. Smart shelves know when they're under stocked. They can even tell if cart is in range to display ads. They can tell if you remove product A, eyeball it, put it back and get product B. They can track your cart's RFID chip throughout the store to make a heatmap on a per-store basis. Better yet, after a while they can make a heatmap for you, or more importantly <insert demographic>. Then you checkout and it ties that cart to your name and probably other info.

Checkout is the friction point this guy is focused on and probably will be how RFID is sold to consumers, but the real money in RFID is selling customer info to marketers.

With these sorts of things, I think people often lose sight of how cheap human workers can be. Automating a unionized factory, where the workers get a good salary and benefits, saves a lot of money. Automating away a $8/hr job by a system whose savings is lost as soon as someone takes advantage of it and steals a toothbrush, I'm not as sure.

Some fancy cart that has a built in scale and scanning mechanism to work as the self-checkout lanes do would help somewhat with theft issues, but would also be expensive, prone to breakage, etc. Why not just get a teenager or other low wage worker. Sadly, we have plenty of the latter.

The discussion about technology replacing jobs is worthwhile, but why does the premise need to be based on such a negative attitude towards food and grocery stores? The argument really loses it's effectiveness when it's based on a whiny attitude.

Personally I enjoy going grocery shopping, especially when a trip to a farmer's market is involved. However, I can see how it's a turn off to deal with food when your eating habits consist of frozen pizza and chips.

Self-service check outs did not catch on [http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2011/09/26/superm...]. I don't see how using your own phone would make it any better for the avg. consumer.

They did catch on in the UK, but I think minimum wage and other labour regulation had a lot to do with encouraging it.

My thoughts...

Supermarket clerk is hardly an ultimate job.

Tediousness of checkout is as much a psychological issue as a real one. I rarely spend more than a fraction of the time checking out as actually selecting the groceries I want.

Produce usually doesn't have a barcode, especially anything sold by weight. Bakery items often have no barcode either.

The problem of trying to buy an entire week's worth of groceries for a whole family in one shot isn't addressed at all by google wallet. It sounds like this guy should look into some sort of service that delivers groceries to his door. (Which could create jobs, incidentally)

I understand that progress is needed, and while I tend not to think of myself as a Luddite, this rekindles a thought I had about how automation/tech is replacing people. That question is since a lot of people have been replaced and a lot more people will be replaced, what low skilled jobs will be left for people in the near to long term?

Teenagers at the very least have not yet even had the time to be in the job market to acquire advanced skills. Will advances like this completely solidify the new life stage called 'adultolescence" while at the same time change the experience of what we now call adolescence?

This is the situation apprenticeships and education were made for. Loss of low-level jobs only worries those who are unwilling to learn a trade skill. In the old days, that wasn't a problem because you could apprentice to a master and end up with one. These days, we don't seem to do that any more. We expect colleges to teach newcomers instead. And not everyone can afford college.

We have interns, but by law, interns can't produce real output or you'll get your pants sued off. This prevents internships from being apprenticeships, where someone could earn a bare living and a learn a tradeskill, then move on to earning a good living with that new skill.

The industrial revolution keeps on destroying low skill jobs, for the benefit of everyone overall. There is always a group of people who lose these jobs initially but in the long term it's never been that big problem for society after about 200 years of doing this. However, it won't hurt to be more proactive in helping people get retrained and move into other kinds of jobs. There is even some opportunity in offering a path for people who lose their jobs in one industry to get trained to work in other industries which has demand. I think the people who suffer the most are those who insist on trying to hold onto a type of job that is disappearing, being the last group to lose their jobs and being behind others when it comes to retraining. I think it's the same as people who refuse to move away from a town when industry there is shutting down.

My parents' local supermarket already has a version of 'scan as you place in the cart.' This works ok for small trips, but two-cart food sprees are much better handled by the folks in the green smocks behind the cash registers.

How do they prevent theft? With the (Yo)u-Scan machines in my local super markets the approx. weight is used to verify your purchase.

Indeed. Google Wallet? As he described the scan-and-walk process, it sounds more like Google Shoplift -- but maybe that's just the first thing that came to my mind. Of course, if you had some kind of disposable "smart bag" to do an RFID scan of its contents, you might be getting somewhere with this.

I think that's overengineering. Why not just use weight, like they already do in the self-checkout line? Weigh the shopping cart full of groceries, subtract the weight of the cart itself, and compare to what they're paying for. If it seems wrong, investigate.

I've thought about that and I still don't have a good answer. My guess is that it is only marginally more theft-prone than the self checkout stations. It probably helps that the store is in an affluent suburb. They won't be setting up such a system in Baltimore where I live any time soon.

When I lived in the area I only used the system once because it just took too long. My mom stopped using it because she found on one trip she had effectively stolen two items by forgetting to scan them and was so horribly embarrassed she gave up on it.

A lot of Stop & Shops here in the Boston area have that too. Someone will randomly audit your shopping cart once every 10 trips so or to prevent theft, which is a hugh time-consuming PITA. Personally, the novelty wore off after the first use.

Is the US that far behind the UK in retail grocery?

A UK supermarket did scan-as-you-pack maybe 15 years ago. They've since been bought out and that option no longer exists, but it's hardly revolutionary or something that's only just becoming possible thanks to Google Wallet.

What seems bigger though is the next step possibility. SAYP allows you to save on headcount at the tills alone (and even then not by much as you still need some form of check-out procedure to manage the exit handover), which is hardly where the majority of the staff load comes. No; surely the bigger retailer benefit comes from moving away from these huge edge-of-town barns altogether?

If I signed up with Tesco Clubcard, they'll already populate an online shopping basket with a regular shopping load that's typical of my purchasing habits, automatically, and deliver that to my door. (I mention Tesco because I know this from others, not that no rivals exist). Ocado operate as an online-only grocery business with picking and packing systems as sophisticated as any to ensure speedy delivery of intact groceries without packing cases of mineral water on top of soft fruit.

What the author is describing is frankly a primitive system. Go the whole hog, be the grocery Amazon. Eliminate the need to have a retail barn that's kept attractive, temperature controlled and has a small army constantly stocking shelves. Eliminate the need for each town to have so many large presences per retailer with a constant feed of large trucks keeping them stocked and operate primarily out of regional distribution hubs. Then you'll see the real retailer cost savings.

I believe Google sending you an email asking..

  Can Google Wallet schedule your weekly/monthly/periodic shopping list 
  for the following items from <your-regular-store>?

  - <item-1> - <quantity>
  - <item-2> - <quantity>
  - ..

  [Yes, schedule now] [No] [Change item-list and schedule]

..should be the eventual evolution of such a service.

Well, I guess my digi-wallet asking me if I want to order groceries is slightly less weird than my internet-fridge going ahead and doing it without asking.

Still, I'm not convinced that it makes sense for my 'wallet' to be doing this.

I expected from the title a story about the future where Google uses purchase history collected from its Wallet service to predict items to be purchased next time, and even sends them to the home. Certainly that will kill many retail jobs.

Amazon does this, though imperfectly, and in fact it suggested me a periodic purchase plan of diapers after I bought it from them a couple of times.

My local Giant has this already, but isn't tied to my phone. You just scan as you go, and then pay at the end. It is cool, but I'm not sure it's much faster.

Also, I have to wonder about theft. How many people are just throwing things in the cart, and not scanning?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite_fallacy

And let me explain how Barcode Scanner (or something like it) combined with Google Wallet will make my life as a consumer more productive

Yep, this will really speed things up.

Instead of scanning items on the way out, (i.e. "beep...beep...beep...beep...beep") people will scan as they shop "okay... just line up the cameraaaa... hmm it's not seeing it, turn the phone a bit... oh i beg your pardon hang on [moves out of the way of another shopper who also wants a can of baked beans]... [phone grabs barcode]... ah finally... beep." - one can of baked beans purchased.

Can't wait!

Also, given how fragile self-scanning checkouts are - presumably calibrated to prevent shoplifting - how will scanning stuff yourself and then walking out with it be acceptable to supermarkets?

Have you tried the app in question? Even with the low quality cameras on the first Androids, it worked really well. On my 8MP camera now, it's insanely fast. And since everyone would be doing it as they picked things up, the lines to check out will be limited to making sure people didn't steal.

Having said all that, I think elimination of the traditional supermarket is more in line with what I want in the future. There was a startup on here that talked about having no customer-accessible store. The customer orders from home, drives up in their car, the store loads the order in the car and collects the money, and the customer drives home. Eliminating the customer's driving is a logistical nightmare, but I expect that will eventually be solved, too.

Have you tried the app No I haven't - I've just used the 'standard' Android barcode scanner. So now I feel a bit sheepish given that I may have over-egged the pudding with that little scenario!

I've used internet supermarket shopping in the past, when I didn't own a car. It was reasonably good, and you paid £5 for delivery within a 2 hour window. You would tend to sometimes accidentally buy a weird size of some item though.

I suppose they could use the scales that are integrated into current self-checkout stations to compare the aggregate weight of your purchase against what it should be.

Seems like a lot of hassle.

This article doesn't make any sense... This is NOT the future, Self-scanners have been around for a long time and have never caught on anywhere to my knowledge.

Self-scanners have been around for several years. Market District in Pittsburgh had them in 2005 when I lived there (http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/09/01/review-grocery-stor...). They never caught on, and ultimately the company stopped using them in 09 (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09226/990741-28.stm note: this article doesn't provide any details).

The problem is theft prevention and time. Every so often (appx every 10 customers), they would randomly check every item on your receipt. You think you're done, but you aren't, they need to check every item on your receipt.

The thing that IS potentially a game changer in this regard (which the article doesn't mention) is RFID. With RFID combined with Google Wallet, the theft prevention problem can be solved much easier (ie alarm goes off if you are stealing)

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