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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

> I still have not downloaded an AI app of any kind to my phone.

If he has an iPhone, there’s no need to download it. It’s already there.

That said, he has some good points.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), we won’t be able to “opt out,” forever. At some point, ML is bound to become endemic.

It’s like those stupid scan-guns that supermarkets in my area are starting to ask customers to use. They are scan guns that you pick up, as you go in, and scan each purchase. When you check out, you just scan a barcode on the cashier stand, and Bjorn Stronginthearm’s your uncle.

I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers.

Sooner or later, however, I am unlikely to be able to avoid them.

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> I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers.

That's great, why would I pay someone to do something I absolutely don't mind doing myself, and even save some time while doing it. Do you also still pay someone to pump fuel into your car?

> Do you also still pay someone to pump fuel into your car?

In my town, you actually have to let them. There's a law. I think it has something to do with smoking morons blowing themselves (and others) up.

Like I said, I do it on a human principle; not because it's not a good idea.

They are annoying, though, because they chirp at you with ads, as you pass items on the shelf.

> Do you also still pay someone to pump fuel into your car?

Until like two years ago I did (now-rural Oregonian). Now I pay the same for gas, getting it no faster and having to do the work and even sometimes I now even have to deal with loud commercials they put on the pumps. The only upside is it's easier to fill up late at night, yay.

I don't voluntarily assume legal risks that come in to play if I make a mistake.

That and I've been in public restrooms and seen how few people wash their hands. I hate having to touch public screens. Touch public screens and then handle my food? Pass.

If I'm expected to start doing something that they formerly paid employees to do, I'd expect to get something in return, like a grocery discount or something.

It's like if restaurants started making you cook your own food. Why even bother to go?

> if restaurants started making you cook your own food. Why even bother to go?

Ever been to a Korean steak house?

;)

You pay a fair penny to cook your own food.

> I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers.

This reminds me of when the bus company of my hometown transitioned to having a driver + cashier to only having a driver that takes cash. Half of the workforce just gone overnight. Of course the writing was on the wall with electronic ticketing, but still.

It makes me feel I'm part of a "First They Came" situation. Sure maybe these people found other jobs for themselves (or so I tell myself) but still.

People get shitty about bullshit jobs and then when they do get cleaned up by ATMs or some other efficiency turn around and pine for them.

That’s not entirely fair. Jobs automated out of existence weren’t bullshit jobs.

Bullshit jobs are HR and project management. Made up fluff nobody really needs.

That's a huge blanket statement. Bullshit jobs aren't tied to any specific industries, and all jobs in HR and project management aren't bullshit.

If they can be easily automated they should be. Keeping a human doing a job that doesn't need to be done by a human is a bullshit job. It might not have been a bullshit job twenty years ago, that doesn't matter. Things change.

No the bullshit jobs I see people complain about are often linked to "Couldnt someone automate this" like taking notes from inbound phonecalls and simply relaying messages inside the office.

This is a strange example because have you heard of the combine harvester. It made, together with other farming machines, useless what 90% of people used to do

The combine wouldn't have been useful without monocropping practices, and those are only possible due to chemical pesticides and herbicides.

I'd point to the poisons we're willing to dump on our fields as the primary reason for so many jobs being replaced. The combine is just what replaced them, not the root cause of why they could be replaced.

Yeah, I happen to own washing machine AND a dishwasher (luxury!), so I totally understand.

My point is that it's still weird seeing people getting fired.

In most cities, public transport service frequency and coverage has expanded massively. So they halved the workers per bus and doubled the number of busses.

I wish this was true for my hometown. :/

"I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers"

But that's not a great job in the first place and I am not a fan of keeping jobs for the sake of it. So we do need to figure out a way of income for those who cannot make a transition, but my mission is not to keep cashiers.

Right. Let’s eliminate all the online access to government services and make people go into eg DMV offices like the good old days.

> Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), we won’t be able to “opt out,” forever. At some point, ML is bound to become endemic.

I don't hear people wanting to opt out of ML though, they want to opt out of AI.

Beyond just the bad name of these tools though, one absolutely can opt of out then. It just depends on how far one is willing to go to avoid using them and what all they will give up in the process.

> I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers.

Jobs are not supposed to exist for the sole purpose of generating paychecks. There is supposed to be real work that needs to be done.

A "dig a hole and fill it in" job is a symptom of a society unable to benefit from it's own progress.

Other animals don't do busywork as a means of survival.

Other animals can just eat the food they find and sleep wherever. Humans have decided other humans should just die if they don't work.

>I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers

They are a much faster, more convenient experience than standing in line waiting for a cashier lane, scanning items after picking. It's just great, as the customer.

I'm glad they still have 1-4 cashier lanes for refuseniks, pensioners and people without the loyalty card (etc) who don't want to deal with it. Everyone's happy.

Yup. They are more convenient.

But they still exist to fire cashiers.

Thanks for the "broad-brush" of folks that you don't agree with.

Why should we protect the existence of jobs that are both unnecessary and make the customer experience worse? Aren't we still in the situation that there are more positions for unskilled labor than applicants?

Because we still live in an economic and societal system that requires everyone to have a job and spend more of their money on useless shit.

If we want to truly want to automate away jobs, we should also change our economic system such that people don't have to work like they do today. Without that we'll just create more jobs for everyone to fill, automating away some while cresting others and all we really sis wash shake things up and stress out those involved.

Make work jobs will keep us all poor.

Unless you're in emergency services, your job is a make work job, too.

But less poor than not having a job.

You only have to hear "place the item in the bagging area, and then scan the next item" 100x and sometimes extra aggressively random. Oh, and then something scans twice and you have to wait 5 minutes because they only have one human helping with 8 different scanning stations. Or the scan gun starts beeping really loudly and not scanning anymore for some reason, and you have to return it to the dock, take it out again and hope it starts working. Or you're left handed or standing in a way the system doesn't like and the camera thinks you're trying to steal something so you have wait, again for the one human to come over review the footage look puzzled and tell the computer that yeah everything is okay

Are you from the UK?

I travel a lot for work(200+ days a year) and so I see the best and the worst. In every country I've been, the self checkout is implemented differently. Only in certain countries, low trust societies, do you have to wait for the scale to calculate the weight of the goods to prevent shop lifting

In Switzerland as an example, self checkout is a breeze. There is no such scale at all. Fast, highly efficient with good software.

Same in Sweden, though for some reason some grocery stores in Sweden insist on being a member before you can use the self checkout lanes. I think because they were early adopters of the technology and weren't sure they could trust their customers(hint: they could). Another annoying thing is that you have to scan your receipt to exit the store. This you usually don't have to do in Switzerland.

I've seen the same type of inefficient system you're accustomed to in the UK at pretty much all the stores over there and in Rimi in Riga. Frankly it works a lot better in Latvia than the UK, though still annoying and disrupts the workflow.

That describes most of them around here (suburban NY, USA).

The [REDACTED DRUG STORE CHAIN] ones are the worst. They get confused at the drop of a hat, and have some employee, constantly intervening. I suspect they run “brogrammer” code.

They’re maybe more convenient for the shop but the lines seem equally long where I am as people aren’t as fast as a cashier. I don’t notice any difference in efficiency other than I now need to scan and look everything up myself. So a net loss for me.

They also don’t work well for large orders or things that aren’t bar coded. They’re mostly good for a small number of bar coded items. And some stores have probably excessively trimmed human cashiers.

> It's just great, as the customer.

I don't agree at all. I think they're a terrible customer experience. I stopped using them a while back and am much happier for that. I'm not alone -- some stores have already started staffing more checkout lanes and removing some self-checkout kiosks.

They are a much faster, more convenient experience than standing in line waiting for a cashier lane, scanning items after picking.

I'll have to start shopping in your town.

At every supermarket in my city, there is a long line of people waiting to use the self checkouts. I keep an eye on the last person in that line, and I'm almost always done first by using a human cashier.

People just buy into the "tech=better" meme without even thinking.

I also noticed this. I think we just want to avoid human interaction, I also do this myself, but I have no illusions that the self-checkout is faster, or that I'm doing the right thing.

sir why dont we dig the trench with spoons instead of shovels, that way we can hire ten times as many men for twice as long!

"We do what we can because we must."

Endure, don't embrace. Or whatever, I'm a random on the internet - not a cop.

> If he has an iPhone, there’s no need to download it. It’s already there.

Google is also replacing Assistant with Gemini on Android: https://gemini.google/assistant/

> I refuse to use them, as the only reason they exist, is to fire cashiers.

I use them because it lets people not be cashiers and they can be stocking the store and doing something more useful than being a glorified barcode scanning robot.

How is stocking shelves more fulfilling than being a cashier? Cashiers at least interact and talk with people.

I have nothing against people using self-checkout, but making it sound like you're doing something good for people seems absurd and is only there to make oneself feel better when, in reality, jobs WILL be lost because of it. No need to sugarcoat it.

The people stocking shelves can sit down in the US, cashiers can't because of some fucked up reason.

I haven't heard anyone being "fulfilled" by being a cashier in a large supermarket, the kind that usually has self-checkout.

It's not like the mom&pop corner bodega is installing them.

I use them because I wind up having to bag my groceries anyway.

Also, I am less rushed because I can go at my own pace.

> If he has an iPhone, there’s no need to download it. It’s already there.

only if youre on ios 18

I think that ML stuff has been in place for many Apple apps (like iTunes and Siri), for a lot longer than that. A lot of it is server-based, though.

The main thing about 18, is moving into the hardware, and adding a lot more of it.

AI is not only LLMs or other generative AI. There is also FaceID, Siri, even the camera uses AI. The author also doesn't make this distinction, sadly.

Actually the main reason they exist is to reduce shoplifting.

Why do the cashiers (that still work there), call them "scan and steal," then?

From what I have seen, they actually make shoplifting much easier. It's just that the product loss is less than salary and benefits of the cashiers, and I'll bet that the company has some way to recoup the losses.

Oh yeah. This is the big open secret. Theft is way up with these. It turns out that when you take people out of the equation and combine that with prices going up, a lot more shoppers figure it is only natural to compensate themselves a little. Just some little things you can plausibly explain as having overlooked them if someone finds out. Buy three chocolate bars, scan two.

I have no idea what the next iteration will be, or if this is considered acceptable in terms of profits.

Admittedly, it's been a while since I've gone, but I used to simply not stop for the door-checkers. They'd want to look in the cart/at the receipt and I'd keep a nice brisk pace about my business.

You think I stole it? Get the real cops. I actually paid for everything, enjoy.

Why'd I stop going? Armed private security with more ego than training. Much better options. Absolutely not advice, but usually the right look/pace does wonders. It helps to be defensible.

This is highly location specific.

In "better" areas where people are by default more honest (or have money to spend), the losses aren't that bad.

But stores in less affluent areas have dropped self-checkout completely because it isn't worth it due to theft losses.

Of course that's an issue - but I don't think it's the main reason.

If you go back in time to when the original super market designs were made, prices where on items with printed labels and the person at the checkout actually did the adding up by entering the numbers!

ie checkouts originally existed because adding up to total cost was a non-trivial job, and then you had to hand over cash and somebody needed to calculate the change, work out how you split that into the notes and coins and count it out.

Overtime these steps were automated way - first with barcodes for cost totalling and then both electronic payment methods and payment machines that take cash and automatically give change.

Then the job just became swiping the items across the barcode scanner and pressing a couple of buttons to enable the electronic payment and it took a while for people to realise the original reason for the job had gone and customers could do it themselves.

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