People who predict extinction of jobs are usually wrong.
It's only a matter of time, for example, until Domino's pizza production is automated. The only reason we haven't seen this yet is because hiring humans is cheaper than solving the complex automation problem this presents. But technology continues to get cheaper. When that swings the other way, your pizza will get made by robots. Pizza delivery by robots is already a solved problem, just waiting for the costs to skew the right way. In short: at the speed at which technological problems get solved, it's unlikely we will have even adequately discussed the ramifications of the problem before it arrives on our doorstep.
You grab a scanner at the entrance, scan all your purchages and then you put the scanner away and pay at a terminal. The terminal prints out your receipt, which you can scan to open the exit. You will sometimes (this has never happened to me, but I've seen it to other people) be picked by the system for a random check to see if you're not stealing anything.
It is a really pleasant system.
When there are only a handful of these self-checkouts, you end up with a situation where it is often quicker to wait for the line with the cashier and bagger because they just process customers SO MUCH FASTER.
In college I knew someone who was a grocery bagger for a while, and when we'd go to the store he'd bag his stuff and I'd bag mine. The speed and thoughtfulness that went into the placement of various things in his bag was rather humbling...almost akin to watching an expert Tetris player in the zone.
So ultimately more machines could help solve the long line issue, but that is still definitely a factor as it stands today. Given that grocery stores often leave most of their checkout lanes unattended, I'd love to see more converted to self-checkout to increase overall checkout speed.
A scale underneath the bagging area keeps tabs on everything you can to make sure you're not cheating the system. (Still, I've heard stories of people checking out all produce as watermelons.)
It is quite easy to cheat the current system, though the random sampling helps some. I think someone somewhere made a decision that it is worth it to improve customer satisfaction and deal with some losses, but I have no idea.
It is making you a slave worker, since you have to scan items yourself :)
It may help that we never had people to pack your bags for you, which some countries seem to have.
And that's in a country known for automation.
The supermarkets I go to have greatly reduced their cashiers. In most cases by at least half, especially in small shops (3 cashiers has become 2-3 machines and one human).
As for bakers, they don't just make bread and cake.
Excellent video on the subject: CGPGrey - Humans Need Not Apply: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
yet it's still their main product and they are stopping making it even though industrial bread is cheaper. So your point is ?
yet bakers do not disappear. What's not valid about this example?
This seems relevant: "There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right."
Except that it does not make sense at all.
Take 200 years ago, most folks were farmers. Take 100 years ago, there were now much more folks working somewhat qualified jobs (where they needed some actual skills) in industries. Take 50-60 years ago, with the creation of the service industries and all the jobs that came with it. And now for the past 30 years, hipsters are getting coding jobs and getting pretty good salaries despite the fact we have been living in a past century of technological revolutions.
And we are far, very far from 100% unemployment.
So your horse analogy has no ground in reality. For the most part, humans have been getting more, and better jobs on the whole, and most people commenting here are holding such higher paying, better jobs around. Thanks to technology.
The qualitative difference between now and 100 years ago is that those hipsters gave brains to the machines. The shift to service industries occured because machines replaced human muscle power. The hipsters started with replacing human precision, and now they're replacing human cognitive capabilities. Services sector is not safe.
It's also important to note what kinds of jobs are being created nowadays. A lot of them are "bullshit jobs" - make-believe work or elements of zero-sum-games like (big part of) advertising industry. Work has been disconnected from benefit it brings, we're literally (although usually indirectly) inventing nonsense tasks because we need to have something for people to do and not starve.
You think bullshit jobs are something new ? Of course not, they have always existed. Even some coders have bullshit jobs - there is probably only a fraction of jobs that actually directly bring value, among a massive amount of noise from other jobs that support the other or have indirect value to the said business.
But on the whole, there are way more "non-bullshit" jobs that there were ever before, that's why I claim you are missing the big picture. There were no scientist jobs before. There were no engineer jobs 150 years ago. There were few doctors (very few) in the same time range as well.
> that those hipsters gave brains to the machines.
and
> now they're replacing human cognitive capabilities.
No, computers are still very much stupid, there is no autonomous AI in sight - we have just been able to make them do some specific tasks very very well and much faster than humans (deep learning and the like), but in terms of flexibility and learning abilities the most advanced computer program and hardware is far behind any life form on Earth. Are you not a member of the Singularity Church ?
> because we need to have something for people to do and not starve.
People don't work anymore to bring food on the table. Food has never been cheaper. Even homeless folks have smartphones these days - the amount of excess cash that people get out of work far exceeds the money needed to get food.
They transform. "Bakeries" become just a pick-up point, where you buy bread that was baked in scale (probably in industrial ovens) and delivered to the store. Bakery employees nowadays have less to do with baking than McDonald's employees with frying fries (they still do something to them).
Cashiers are still alive and well in Japan, thank you for asking.
> Supermarkets all have self checkin
Not everywhere and even where there is i see way more people queuing for the cashier queue than going for self checking but maybe it's different the Californian world or wherever you are living.
> ovens and breads in EVERY supermarket
I'm obviously talking about local breadshops in cities. they are alive and well, once again, and not going bankrupt. Quality still matters.
> train systems in many countries have automated lines
Yes, but how many have automated trains ? it's technically possible for a long time yet trains are still driven by people. It's way more simple to automate a train than a car yet it's not happening. Strange, huh ?
I'm just making observations based on real life - the world has not massively been robotised since the 90s (it has certainly happened in many manufacturing plants but the "worker"/"human face" is very resilient when it comes to local services).
> I'm obviously talking about local breadshops in cities. they are alive and well, once again, and not going bankrupt. Quality still matters.
There's less. There's less of all these jobs you mention. You say in another post "but it won't go extinct" - well no, probably not, they'll still exist in some form. Horse carts also exist, but nobody's here saying "Cars have not fully replaced horses".
> It's way more simple to automate a train than a car yet it's not happening. Strange, huh ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation
This is in effect all over the place. When I went to Berlin I didn't find a single subway train driver.
"It won't happen" is talk from people who didn't want to accept an eventuality a decade ago. Today, it's happening - putting your hands over your eyes is very much unproductive.
I'm not talking about subways, I am talking about normal intercity trains. NONE of them are automated. Anywhere. Check it out.
> "It won't happen" is talk from people who didn't want to accept an eventuality a decade ago. Today, it's happening - putting your hands over your eyes is very much unproductive.
I'm not saying this is not happening, what I am saying is that it's happening at a most slower pace than what all the hipsters on HN claim it's happening, and just like everything else, we are going towards fragmentation and not complete removal of most of these jobs. So the "singularity" dream of some people here that the human race will see all of its jobs done by robots in 20 years, and that we need to think right now about income without jobs (UBI and the like) is pure delirium. Society won't change so fast.
You must be (un)lucky to have avoided the wave of self-service checkout points :). As for bakers, I don't remember when was the last time I saw a bakery that acutally baked anything - the ones I see all have bread and cakes delivered several times a day by whoever owns the franchise.
Also, automation is not a binary proposition - if your central bakery uses big dough machines and industrial baking ovens, it already counts as half-automated, as it employs much less personnel per unit of output as bakeries used to few decades ago :).
If that was the case we would replace cooks with robots for a long time as well.
And of course the list goes on for many, many other professions.
It's obvious that the ones who predict massive automation of most jobs are thinking WAY AHEAD of their life. It's not going to happen anytime soon, no matter how much software and hardware is "eating the world". Making predictions is always a risky business... after all we were all supposed to have flying cars by 2015 and whatever, yet the best piece of tech we have is just a tiny computer in our pockets - that's a great achievement, but it's a little short of the dreams we had 30 years ago.
For automation to be a success it doesn't have to replace 100% of the market, and it's unlikely for it to ever truly reach 100% for the reasons you mention. But that's fine, it'll just slowly keep growing.
Then I hope you will also agree that "extinction" is too strong of a word, and we use it too often around here while in reality most jobs have a hard time disappearing completely, if at all.
On top of that, not sure about where you live, but some supermarkets also have reversed their trend about industrial bread and hire "baker-workers" who actually bake bread on-site (from industrial paste) instead of it being purely delivered for consumption, which is slightly better and fresher, and require human workers.
I'm from the Netherlands, and I haven't heard about the industrial paste thing. I don't think it happens, but maybe it does. In any case, if they do do that, there is no doubt in my mind that they need less workers to perform these tasks than to bake the bread from scratch. So that is still a win for automation.
Oh, I totally agree with you. I was just mentioning that they were reintroducing workers in a process that used to be fully automated.