It is not freeing people to do more useful jobs. It is just making them unemployed. I like self checking, sure, but the employment result of it is not better jobs.
Only if the creation of jobs is slower than the displacement... Which I agree it is, with this tech (and our slow response in gov, universities etc.). But sometimes (sounds callous but just pondering this small part of the equation), maybe jobs need to dry up in order to compel workers to move on? And this tech will open up other opportunities.
Else we are just all herders/farmers/hunter-gatherers indefinitely.
Regardless, it's quicker for me to scan my goods than for someone else to do it (and with half the people, since I've freed someone up). Same for most other people around me, from what I see (1/4 or 1/5 seem to need help or prefer talking to the cashier). It's a net win for society in the long run - And I think that employment changes are very liquid in this industry, so I am not as concerned as if it were a coal miner for example.
(My concern is more that supermarket workers probably correlate strongly with hand-to-mouth living, and governments should ensure there are appropriate retraining/growth paths. Which they don't, at least to my satisfaction. Which loops us back to us both pretty much being in agreement, I would guess)
I don't want us to handicap ourselves (tying our bionic arm behind our backs to artificially reduce productivity, in the name of keeping jobs)
> maybe jobs need to dry up in order to compel workers to move on
Nah. This is just lying to ourselves to feel better. Workers do not need to be compelled and it does not help them at all. The changes may be helping overall economy in the long run or just be irrelevant overall, but individuals on the receiving end are just not helped.
"maybe jobs need to dry up in order to compel workers to move on" was meant to indicate a benefit to society, not the individual. I.e., society demands that they move on, for better or worse. I don't think anyone's pretending that they're doing the individual a favour, in the short run at least.
- self checkout was only thing going on in the economy, - cashiers represented overwhelming majority of employees.
Otherwise you are making overly large prediction from a single small data point.
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Let me say opposite theory: if self checkout would be "freeing people for more useful jobs", cashiers salaries would be raising prior self checkouts. As employers would compete for people, they would pay cashiers as much as those "more useful jobs".
That did not went on. These were and are minimum salary jobs.