What happens if you go in one of these stores and just start moving stuff around? Don't walk out with anything at all, but just fill up a huge cart full of stuff and then put all the stuff back in the wrong place?

Or even easier, what if you fill up a huge cart full of stuff and then walk out of the store.. AND THEN, someone else walks in and grabs a few items out of your abandoned cart and walks out of the store?

What if you pull two bananas off a bunch and only walk out with those? Or maybe they don't sell bananas there? What about anything sold by weight?

I wonder if their cameras are that good?

yeah I could google all this but I'm not actually THAT interested in any of these questions.

When robots replace us, how do we earn our keep?

Half of us jailers, half prisoners?
We could switch places every six months
and probably do okay.

Well, this development by Amazon will certainly disappoint everyone who ever enjoyed standing in a checkout line, everyone who ever eagerly anticipated working a shift at a cash register, the author of this post, and the commenters sympathetic to her point.

By my count, that’s currently a total of three persons.

@2,
I just like to push the envelope. The grocery store envelope. Keep 'em on their toes. You know what they say: "Anarchy is the mother of invention!" Or something like that...

@4 - the idea of never again having to answer a cashier’s “So, any plans for the weekend?” queries is reason to live for these things to conquer the world.

@1, @5: You could try doing some of those things, then report back to the rest of us how it all worked out for you. Because Science!

Eventually our society, and all modern societies are going to have to come to terms with the fact that there may not be enough appropriate jobs for a certain percentage of the population that has no real skills or any real desire or ambition to move beyond a job like bagging groceries.

So what to do with all these people who are willing to work to some extent, but automation makes it so they are simply not needed?

Because it is going to happen. It already is happening.

@8 - You keep them in pens and use them for cheap labor. I’m not talking prison - I mean squalid prefab houses in Roy, where they can log into Mechanical Turk and find gigs. Meanwhile, those of us who know how to use words like “pressure test” and “pivot” and “Q2” can finally live a life in the big city wherein we never need interact with other humans or experience an emotion again. Utopia!

No modern tech corporation institutes a business where labor costs are higher.

Fact: The entire point of this is eliminate jobs.

And no it’s not compatible to the elimination of the horse and buggy by the automobile.

One, automobile production introduce thousands of high paying union jobs. It was a substantial net gain for the economy. The jobs lost of blacksmiths, horse corals, and buggy makers etc were insignificant as those professions were small in number and auto workers were easily trained and high paying.

Two, the automobile displaced the cruelty and unhygienic conditions of the use of horses and donkeys. On any given day cities of the world were choked by animal waste and littered with dead carcases just left blocking streets.

The air pollution eventually caused by cars would take decades to accumulate and wasn’t near the direct risk to human health that the millions of working animals were.

In the absence of union labor what the tech industry disruption is doing is not a net positive for society. The benefits go to fewer and fewer hands than previous technological economic revolutions.

And just like Uber reinvented the gypsy cab. Amazon can now reinvent the Automat.

Such Disruption, So Innovation!

$15 minimum wage = automation of manual labor.
Pretty simple concept...

So simple that really simple minded morons keep repeating it despite the fact that automation is happening everywhere even in places with shit minimum wages.

"People who don't make anything cannot buy anything."

--Ross Perot