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I get where you're coming from, but I whole-heartedly disagree. People have bound themselves to employment for too long. The entire idea that you need to contribute to someone else getting wealthy to have any value to society is stupid. People need to remember that they have meaning and purpose and value without having a job. And that's where we're heading.

Technology like this will make a lot of jobs obsolete. And, in the short-term, there will be a lot of problems with unemployment or underemployment. But, ultimately, a system of universal basic income (or something like it) will be implemented, allowing people to disassociate their identities with their jobs. It will free up their time to do other things, like help out in their communities, create art, or pursue their other passions. They can still work if they want to, but they won't need to. And they'll be able to choose jobs that they're passionate about instead of the jobs they have to do to pay rent and provide food.

Stores like this won't remove the interactions you have with your neighbors - those interactions will just change locations. Instead of seeing the cashier at the supermarket, maybe she'll be giving your daughter singing lessons because she was allowed to focus on something she loved doing instead of something that paid the bills.

The problem is that, everyone responds by saying "people don't HAVE to work now", but whenever you talk about people not being able to earn incomes, there isn't much thought put into how they will live. All of the effort is going into things that will eliminate earning opportunities for people, and little or none going into how to support the people who can no longer find work.

I'm not going to argue that we should hold back innovation to preserve jobs, or that we should have people working 40+ hours per week as our goal. The simple fact is, however, that attitudes and government policies are really far away from supporting a 'post-work' society, and are actually getting further and further away.

People who control capital in western societies - and are the primary beneficiaries of automation and other techniques that are causing many jobs to disappear - already feel like they pay too many taxes, and are generally good at finding ways to make sure they pay less. Even a level of basic income that would provide a poverty-level standard of living for people feels politically impossible right now.

I don't fully disagree with you, but I find a lot of these "post-work" responses to be really hand-wavy.

That's true. The details of how the system will work have yet to be nailed down. And, in the short term, things are going to suck HARD. It's basically going to be us riding the edge of societal breakdown. People are going to lose their jobs without a safety net that protects them. There will be a lot of people out of work, the income gap will increase, and government programs are going to be stressed to the point of breaking. But, perhaps this is the idealist in me, I believe that we will figure it out before our economy, country, and society collapse.