The moment I saw iPads on the tables of a restaurant, Loft Kitchen & Bar, in JFK, I knew exactly what they were doing, exactly who they had replaced: the waiter. As a consequence, I was thrown back to a conversation I had a year or so ago with an employee at the Safeway in University Village.

I will not name this employee, nor specify his/her sex. What needs to be known is that s/he at that time was about to retire, had been in the business longer than s/he cared to remember. One other thing that’s important to know: The Safeway s/he worked in had no self-checkout machines, which wasn't the case for the QFC that's practically next door—its main area had 11 machines and 9 live service stations. (Kroger, the corporation that owns QFC, made a huge investment in self-checkout technology and has maintained over the years a very closely relationship with a major maker of these machines, Japan's Fujitsu—the product line is called U-Scan Genesis.)

“You know what’s it’s all about?” the Safeway employee said while looking at a customer bantering with a cashier, and making sure that I noticed this human moment, a moment you could never have with a machine, “It’s our kind of economy and the way it is deteriorating... I watched America become a service economy. I saw people leaving the factories, which were closing down, and entering things like retail. For a moment, it was all about service and customer satisfaction. But we have now entered a new world. We are now becoming a service economy with no services.” This is the kind of deep insight that only long experience in this industry could provide.

The US economy wants to become a no-service economy. After shipping factory jobs to poorer countries in the 1970s and 1980s (watch Roger & Me), the managers of our times want to relocate the remaining jobs in the service sector. One way to relocate such jobs is the old way: send them to poor countries (call centers for American companies are contracted to businesses in India and the Philippines). The other way: transfer service work from employees to customers.

These machines must not be located in the same sphere as robots or washing machines and tractors but as a part of consumer activities and products that have their root in self-service gas stations, the true ancestor of the no-service economy. Also in this sphere are ATMs and self-checkout terminals at airports. And these iPads in the restaurant, which will certainly be taken more and more seriously as $15 Now movement makes gains. (You also do not have to tip the iPads.) What all of these devices have in common is that they remove work from the worker and replace it with work by the customer.

The horror of the self-checkout machines is they represent the exhaustion of human innovation in the post-Space Age. In the past, we made things or dreamed of things that actually helped us—that warmed the house, brought light to our bedsides, that washed our dishes, that kept food cold, that baked our cakes, that blended our fruits, that removed dust from our carpets, that alarmed us if there was a fire or an intruder, that powered screws into the wall, that stapled our papers, that connected us with people who lived across the street or in another part of the world, that recorded the message of those we had missed, that entertained us, and so and so on. By the 1970s, we had everything. Our homes were so stuffed. There was not much more we needed. At this point, you saw a shift away from appliances that helped consumers to machines that made consumers work—self service.

We crossed that line in the 1980s, at around the time the economy departed real production and financialized. Money became virtual, and factories became virtually empty. This is what happens when a country can no longer grow along standard lines, when it stagnates. To return to profitability, it has to flee reality (or the real economy, whose growth is not blocked by scarcity but by overcapacity and the resulting collapse in profits) and enter the realm of speculation (see The Big Short) supported by a low-wage service economy.

But now that the service sector dominates the job market, and many workers in that sector are organizing and making the sort of demands that the complacent ears of capital haven't heard (higher pay, better benefits) since those distant days of unionized industrial labor, we are now seeing a big push by management to displace a large number of those jobs with machines and also apps. Expect a good amount of human innovation to go in this direction: the no-service economy.