All automation is predicated on a machine being cheaper and more reliable than a human. As the cost of energy rises in coming decades, I'm expecting that we'll discover that some forms of automation only make sense in a world where conventional petroleum is dirt cheap.

Automatic checkout only takes electricity, so that'll probably be with us for quite a while. But manufacturing jobs will return to North America once it no longer makes sense to ship in consumer goods from east Asia. And I expect that as agriculture becomes more locally-oriented, there will be a lot of labour jobs associated with that—especially for tasks that might have been automated at the industrial scale, but are cheaper done by human hands at a farm 1/100th the size.