You are seeing what the impact of rising labor costs can do to employment opportunities, and legal liabilities for employers.

What is a good balance? Unionization, minimum wages, medical costs, work place safety ----?

More and more, automation and robotics are taking over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLVCGEmkJs0

It will take no time for McDonald to go full automation. What will the unskilled do to make a living?

dcarch

McD's has been testing automated kiosks instead of workers for some time, and amazon has been using robots for ages (google amazon kiva). I don't think this reflects rising labor costs, just the fact that if they can do it they will, even if labor went back to 22¢ an hour like it was before WWI. (ETA Amazon kiva is a good example of why this isn't more widespread yet. They still tend to run into each other and repeat the same already completed task, but once that's fixed… I think the main thing holding back McD's is that they'd like to also 3-D print your burger, but people aren't sufficiently familiar with that already existing technology yet.)

And it's a very outdated idea that only unskilled labor is affected by this. Everyone will be affected by this, much sooner than you realize. Why do you think all those otherwise-libertarian techies advocate universal income? People are already buying music created from scratch by AI, paintings painted by AI and so on, and they like them just as well as human-created art as long as they don't realize.

There won't be any management level jobs when there's no one to manage, you know. And robots can already do many repairs to themselves. And a lot of younger people I know would actually rather deal with Watson than a human doctor, given the choice.

Sounds like being able to wander the Amazon warehouse

You are seeing what the impact of rising labor costs can do to employment opportunities,

People have to learn the skills to run a place like this, or a coal mine, etc

That's where the jobs will be

I think this would be great if a whole airport concourse were like this. The calculus of how late is your plane vs. how long it will take to get something to eat makes one stressed out and cranky, as well as hungry. If you could just walk up to a display wall, grab a few things and walk off, how great would that be? If Amazon were able to get a contract that allowed them to sell magazines and toothpaste as well as food, how much the better! I'm guessing it would work well in train stations, too, and the lobbies of giant office buildings.

OTOH, do they even have fresh produce? I suppose it can all be preweighed and sold by the bag or box for the convenience store concept. Whole fruit sold by the piece. My "convenience store" is Trader Joe's. :)

I can't see using something like this for "shopping". That is for a whole cartful of groceries that fills five large bags. Self checkout doesn't even work well for that as there's always something that isn't coded right. Besides which, the grocery clerk is usually a shiny spot of pleasant human interaction, and I see slow, old folks brightening up when talking to the clerk, like it's their only society. It would be a shame to take that away. They'd have to replace them with greeters!

There will still be upscale markets with humans to interface with customers, if that is what the customers want. I like the service I get at Gelson's and Bristol Farms. Also, they always have plenty of checkers (who are paid well), and they do not have self check-out aisles like cheaper stores such as Ralphs. I never use the self check-out at Ralphs, but we do at Home Depot. I buy a good percentage of my produce at farmers' markets.

If I were going to buy groceries from Amazon, I would want them delivered - otherwise I would not bother.

I can't get past the rows and rows, shelves upon shelves, of plastic containers.

Artificial intelligence and robots are the greatest change facing our society today. We are going to have huge numbers of people who are not capable of performing the nonautomated jobs that are left. Is anyone in charge paying attention? It doesn't seem so,

Come on! This is ridiculous!

We don't even need drivers for cars anymore.

And Alexa is your 24/7 automated friend/servant.

The heck with automation and Amazon. I am going to grow my own vegetables. :-)

dcarch

The heck with automation and Amazon. I am going to grow my own vegetables. :-)

You go, dcarch!

The more humans we have on the planet, the lower the value of human labor. The only way to survive is to try and stay on top of the skills pile. I personally find computers quite inept and annoying, but that is because we invest in the machines but not the people to program, run and fix them. Almost every time I go through the self check out line at my local grocery, I need assistance and I see the checkout person assisting other customers too. Their system is glitchy and they don't fix the glitches. The quality of Amazon items has dropped dramatically. I can find less and less quality items in real stores, but Amazon is not where the quality is going, that's for sure.

No one has to use this kind of technology. Vote with your spending power. If No one uses the automatic tills, they'll soon be removed.