See Kellogg's Stretford cereal factory in the BBC Documentary Inside the Factory (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07mddvr), four people plus a fleet of roughly 30-50 robotic fork lift trucks manage all the product egress.

Personally, I welcome this, but it has to go hand in hand with some sort of universal income. We need to give everyone the chance to pick the job they /want/ to do, rather than the job they feel, economically, they have to do.

Researcher with masters degree on 21k/year? You could easily get double that from a programming job with a few years of experience if you have the aptitude.

I'd much rather receive a universal income, while working on things that I feel make a difference, rather than what I have to do to feed my family.

This is how one local grocery store does self checkout. One attendant for about 10 machines, only a few people working the classic checkouts.