Amazon Go

Look, I know this might not be a popular view here on HN, but I think this is useless. And bad.

I'm not talking about the technology behind it (I think it's an amazing achievement)..

I live in Barcelona and I have at least 5 medium-sized supermarkets within 5 minutes walking distance from my home. Plus there are several smaller shops that sell fruits and vegetables.

I know all the people who work in these supermarkets. The cashier in the supermarket downstairs always sings a quiet song while she scans my products, she knows my daughter and she's always nice and friendly.

The cashier in the other store talks to the customers. She stops scanning and starts talking while the line waits. Some customers might join the conversation. I know she has an old cat that eats an unlimited amount of food if allowed to do so...

There are similar stories about other shops in the neighbourhood - they come to work, they serve the people in the neighbourhood, they go home. They do this until they retire.

These people like their jobs because we respect them for what they do, so they feel useful and they work hard.

I don't mind waiting in line for 3 minutes. Or 5. It's never longer than that, even if the cashier discusses the latest news with the old lady.

The humanity of it has value for us here and that value is greater than the time we'd save by removing the people from the shops.

Trying to save jobs that are no longer the most efficient way of solving a problem is not the way to promote the value of humanity, in my opinion. People want groceries as cheap and fast as possible. They don't go to the grocery store for social interaction and forcing the majority of people to pay extra for something that only the minority get value out of is not a competitive strategy.

If humanity were to take your opinion, we'd never evolve as a society, lest we remove a need in society and with it, someones job.

I am unsure we are evolving. We have evolved in many areas that solve real problems, like healthcare and such, but I'm not sure today's society is any better for all the technology that allows us to save a couple of minutes in a queue.

To improve the efficiency of a particular group, we create problems elsewhere. The result may not be net positive. In fact, I think it isn't, since those saved "couple of minutes" will probably be spent browsing Facebook.

The point isn't that we save 2 minutes, it's that there's now 10 less job we need. And that may seem as a negative at first, but the idea is that as more and more job get automated, prices should go down until the point where people will not have to work full weeks anymore, or rather, focus on learning and reaching higher education, rather than doing dummy work all day (aka just scanning items non stop for 8 hours).

It might be worthwhile to re-frame it. Rather than say "10 fewer jobs," say "10 people are no longer forced to spend eight hours a day sitting in front of a cash register."

That assumes we can find something better for them to do, of course. But man, we have to try! Forcing people to do things a machine can do is inhumane.

>That assumes we can find something better for them to do, of course. //

In practice what [is and] is going to happen is that the jobs of the poor are removed, because they are more easily automated and the capitalists will retain much of the revenue that would formerly have been spent on wages.

Nothing is going to be done politically until there is either civil unrest or until there is so much impact to those with lowest wealth in society that the capitalists start getting poorer returns because too few people can afford to purchase the goods produced. In either case the situation is going to be very dire IMO before we get there.

This on top of the apparent existing inequalities and the increasing pay gap that the gig economy is creating (the efficiencies don't appear to be improving pay for the workers nor reducing costs as much as they could), and things like zero-hours contracts are pushing [in the UK] makes for a bleak outlook for those who are not already rich IMO.