nbcnews.com asks: When customers can skip the cashier line, what happens to the nation's 3.6M cashiers?

linky

When a rock falls in a pond, where will all the ripples go??

It's hard to say exactly, right? But that doesn't mean you're worried about it.

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You could also think about that conveyor belt, and how much more employment there would be if we needed someone to twist it manually.

The great Peter Schiff, when he's not busy being wrong about Bitcoin, would remind us:

The point of an economy isn't to have jobs, it's to have the stuff that the jobs produce.

Doing the labor is a means to the end of having the stuff (the house, the food, the car, etc).

Specialization disconnects us from this a little bit, because when you do your day's work, you're not growing food or building a house. But you're doing your specific task and in effect trading your labor for those things.

That's all an economy is, is an infrastructure of producing the things people want.

And while "less cashier jobs" is one aspect of automation, "lower prices" is another.

So now at the end of the day, there are less hours of labor needing to get done to end up with the same amount of stuff.

It's more hours that can be spent on something creative or fulfilling or with your family or on the beach, for the same amount of stuff.

Or, the same amount of labor for more stuff, or better stuff.

This is progress. This is being better than we were before.

And isolating the "no more cashiers" side of the coin is totally useless, because it doesn't get here without a different landscape and different options happening alongside it.

Supporters of automation point to historical patterns dating back to the Industrial Revolution.

It's more like historical patterns dating back to the dawn of man. Or really just use your mind and be conceptual.

That when we create a pulley and an axle and a wheel and a net, we start to be able to produce more at less effort. (And in turn use that infrastructure to create new tools and gadgets that help even further. And thus the exponential growth pattern of technology.)

I blame control-freak economics for why people fog this up, but an advancement in infrastructure that helps us produce things at less effort is an improving economic condition.

That's what you're going for. That's what economic growth is, fundamentally.

Being better at producing things is a better economy.

(And then there's political rules and treaties etc which have their various effects. But all else being equal, you improve by improving.)

It's like if you want a better baseball team, having better hitters and pitchers in your lineup is what you're going for. That's what it means to have a better team.

So make no mistake-- if you want to say there's something questionable or worrisome about automation, you're saying a better economy worries you.

(You can rationalize it as "wut about teh cashiers tho!?", but the smart money knows what's really going on.)

What ABOUT the cashiers tho??

Sure, it's true that one aspect is there will be less cashiers.

And even accepting everything I say, you can still wonder about the displacement and what it looks like.

First I think it's important to remember how gradually it plays out. Self-checkout has been a thing for, what, almost two decades now?

With varying degrees of usefulness.

If I have enough items (and especially if it's produce 🍌 🍎 and you have to weigh it and blahblah), self-check isn't that appealing.

Old people probably never want to use it.

It will keep getting more user-friendly. But it isn't like you flip a switch and suddenly it's different and the cashiers are cut loose and have to scramble.

Even just consumer expectation lingers gradually.

And so what happens in practice is it's more like they don't hire new ones as often, rather than "mad scramble of cashiers getting cut".

The people who want to keep their current jobs aren't up against a tidal wave 🌊 of pressure from the mounting AI 🤖, as much as nbcnews.com just wants to conjure up that idea.

If nothing else, if you've been at your job so long that technology has grown to replace you, the store would be likely to know that you're reliable and want to retrain you where you can help. "Sorry Jeanie, the robots made some big strides last week, we gotta let you go" just isn't how it works.

With the new landscape there will be a different range of jobs and possibilities, and less remedial busy work needed to meet our ends.

"You can't just keep saying new work is created where old work goes away," said Phil Fersht, chief executive officer of HFS Research. "It becomes an issue of when these lower-end jobs go away. Where do these people go? We don't know."

Maybe people wouldn't "keep saying" it if you didn't keep not getting it and keep asking 👄 , Mr. CEO research man.

Where did the horse-and-buggy 🐴 🐎 makers go exactly? WE DONT KNOW!

No idea. 💭

They could be anywhere. It was dynamic and unpredictable, and impossible to pin down 📌 who went where and when and why.

Scary 😱, isn't it?

(To a psychotic tyrant.)

Even 💯 years later, with hindsight, we don't know and will never know, because there's no way to know, because tracing out the complex movements 🚶and curiosities 💡of people (and who did exactly what based on X thing being different) isn't possible to know or a reasonable thing to be concerned with.

People will go wherever is economically viable. Dynamically and without fuss, just like we've always done as economic conditions change.

And in a better economy, they'll generally go somewhere better.

Would you rather they try their luck in a worse economy?

What will happen to the people spearing fish 🐟 now that we have nets????? 😮😮

They'll do other things, of course, and now we have way more fish and the price 💰 goes down and obviously it's better and we want the nets even tho there was no way to answer your weird question.

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So stop being a micro-managey little mini tyrant, would be my primary response to this.

If you think you need to be able to know where people will go, then you don't want anyone going much of anywhere.

Hellish 🔥 quack.

The low-end worker

There's also an aspect of demeaning the "lower-end" worker in here.

As tho there's a tier of people who are fundamentally incapable of much more than scanning groceries.

People are cashiers now because the current situation of our economy dictates that this work needs to be done, so it pays.

To whatever extent some people seem bound to always be on the lower tier of jobs, it has to do with their work ethic and attitude and level of commitment relative to everyone else.

It isn't that cashiering itself marks the outer bound of what they're capable of.

If the tide changes where the lowest rung involves different stuff, the people currently doing cashier work would just learn the new and different things instead.

To whatever extent the work is leveled up and more interesting, perhaps they'll enjoy it more and have a healthier relationship with their day. And they'll do less work for more stuff.

Projection

So like anything, it's not just a little wrong, it's totally backwards.

I'm sure Fersht sees himself as like a champion of the lower-end...

🤔

but really he's out of touch and viewing them as like pet rock imbeciles, and can't imagine what they would do beyond scanning groceries.

And the people who disagree with him are the ones actually empathizing and wanting a better arrangement for the people doing these jobs.

(Even tho Fersht would likely rearrange it in his mind where we're the haters.)

People like Fersht will often worry that automation and AI is anti-human. What's anti-human is wanting people to use their life's energy on remedial tasks, and not seeing how it could work otherwise.

Two models

It's almost like there are two models of reality floating around, and the people who are on the wrong track will sometimes need to think XYZ bizarre thing to prop up their other ideas.

That's why I feel a lot of love for people like Peter Schiff and @stefan.molyneux, whether or not they're perfect or you agree with everything.

If more people are on the right track, the littler issues get gobbled up really easily.

Increasing at an increasing rate

Some people will say that a difference between "then" and "now", and why it's unique now, is that the changes are happening at a faster rate.

Technically it's always been at an increasing rate. It's just even more faster now. It gets steeper the further you go. I don't see why you can just pick a point where it becomes different or something to worry about.

One thing to remember is that our tools and automation help people do things better. Cashiering is only easy because we have computers and mechanical conveyor belts.

And as it gets into the territory of really hardcore AI and really fast changes, one thing the technology can do is help people learn new skills and help analyze what you're good at and where you're needed.

So whatever level of technology would make cashiering obsolete, or would make anything obsolete, would simultaneously be helping us do other things that are effective in this new situation.

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tldr; some guy named Fersht seems pretty sucky, and if it has to do with like the growth of humanity or anything interesting, nbcnews.com is probably kinda dumb lulll