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The Guardian view on the automated future: fewer shops and fewer people The Guardian view on the automated future: fewer shops and fewer people
(6 months later)
Automation may put a third of a million retail employees out of work in the next eight years, according to the British Retail Consortium. Across the sector as a whole fewer people are now working, and are paid less, than in 2008. Competition, the move online and the welcome rise in the minimum wage are all accelerating the job losses. But it is the rise in technology that will go furthest. Robotics and artificial intelligence are moving to eliminate all kinds of work that had seemed reserved for humans, even those tasks that had appeared too personal or lowly paid to be vulnerable. Most of the automations of the 20th century eliminated unskilled male labour. Now it is the turn of unskilled women. The process is already under way. Salespeople are increasingly regimented and scripted in their interactions, a process that might be called artificial stupidity, while ever greater intelligence and ingenuity is demanded of the customer who tries to navigate an automated checkout. That “unexpected item in the bagging area” is your vestigial humanity.Automation may put a third of a million retail employees out of work in the next eight years, according to the British Retail Consortium. Across the sector as a whole fewer people are now working, and are paid less, than in 2008. Competition, the move online and the welcome rise in the minimum wage are all accelerating the job losses. But it is the rise in technology that will go furthest. Robotics and artificial intelligence are moving to eliminate all kinds of work that had seemed reserved for humans, even those tasks that had appeared too personal or lowly paid to be vulnerable. Most of the automations of the 20th century eliminated unskilled male labour. Now it is the turn of unskilled women. The process is already under way. Salespeople are increasingly regimented and scripted in their interactions, a process that might be called artificial stupidity, while ever greater intelligence and ingenuity is demanded of the customer who tries to navigate an automated checkout. That “unexpected item in the bagging area” is your vestigial humanity.
Related: UK retail sector predicted to cut 900,000 jobs
Retail banks provide a foretaste of this future: tellers have been replaced by machines, and the humans visible in the branches are there to sell products, not to help you. With a lot of shopping, there is no need for human salespeople. That is the principle on which self-service supermarkets were founded, and now it is being extended online. There’s still a great deal of conscious effort to sell in supermarkets, as there is on Amazon’s websites, but it is all done at one or two removes, by the designers of the layout and the programmers of the experience.Retail banks provide a foretaste of this future: tellers have been replaced by machines, and the humans visible in the branches are there to sell products, not to help you. With a lot of shopping, there is no need for human salespeople. That is the principle on which self-service supermarkets were founded, and now it is being extended online. There’s still a great deal of conscious effort to sell in supermarkets, as there is on Amazon’s websites, but it is all done at one or two removes, by the designers of the layout and the programmers of the experience.
Analogue, mammalian verbal persuasion has been abolished. The humans you speak to are far more likely to be apologising for the failure of computer systems than to be helping or encouraging you to buy things.Analogue, mammalian verbal persuasion has been abolished. The humans you speak to are far more likely to be apologising for the failure of computer systems than to be helping or encouraging you to buy things.
Even online, where all of the effort is made by the shopper, the giant companies regard wages as they regard taxes, as a legacy problem to be eliminated in the frictionless and almost post-human future. Amazon workers presently walk anything up to 11 miles a day in the warehouses to stock their trolleys, but the company is hoping to produce robot pallets that will steer themselves to the workers who need them. Then, outside the warehouse, there is the hope of robot delivery vehicles, whether in the air, or on the ground. Even if wholly driverless cars and lorries may never be seen on the road, the human driver will increasingly become a supervisor rather than a hands-on controller. We already have cars that parallel park better than most people. Soon, automation will mean that one driver can direct half a dozen lorries down the motorway, and a cost saving like that will be hard for any haulage company to resist.Even online, where all of the effort is made by the shopper, the giant companies regard wages as they regard taxes, as a legacy problem to be eliminated in the frictionless and almost post-human future. Amazon workers presently walk anything up to 11 miles a day in the warehouses to stock their trolleys, but the company is hoping to produce robot pallets that will steer themselves to the workers who need them. Then, outside the warehouse, there is the hope of robot delivery vehicles, whether in the air, or on the ground. Even if wholly driverless cars and lorries may never be seen on the road, the human driver will increasingly become a supervisor rather than a hands-on controller. We already have cars that parallel park better than most people. Soon, automation will mean that one driver can direct half a dozen lorries down the motorway, and a cost saving like that will be hard for any haulage company to resist.
Our own greed as customers is propelling this development. It’s already clear where it is going. Poorer communities will be left without shops at all, or with a poor choice of bad ones. Pleasant and prosperous enclaves will become more pleasant and more prosperous, with food, drink and even clothing produced in small, artisanal batches for anyone able and willing to pay a premium for human service and even human flattery. This process, too, is already well under way and can be expected only to accelerate. The rich get richer, and their lives get more enjoyable. Poor communities grow poorer and more hollowed out. It’s another example of the way that economic efficiency, narrowly measured, increases inequality.Our own greed as customers is propelling this development. It’s already clear where it is going. Poorer communities will be left without shops at all, or with a poor choice of bad ones. Pleasant and prosperous enclaves will become more pleasant and more prosperous, with food, drink and even clothing produced in small, artisanal batches for anyone able and willing to pay a premium for human service and even human flattery. This process, too, is already well under way and can be expected only to accelerate. The rich get richer, and their lives get more enjoyable. Poor communities grow poorer and more hollowed out. It’s another example of the way that economic efficiency, narrowly measured, increases inequality.
An optimist might say that this kind of change has been constant for the past 200 years. The jobs that automation has replaced have mostly been dirty, dangerous, or disagreeable. There have never been as many people employed in Britain as today, and certainly never as many women. Nonetheless, change has seldom been quicker and more vertiginous than today and we’ll need human intelligence to reach a better future. We can’t trust the computers to get us there on their own.An optimist might say that this kind of change has been constant for the past 200 years. The jobs that automation has replaced have mostly been dirty, dangerous, or disagreeable. There have never been as many people employed in Britain as today, and certainly never as many women. Nonetheless, change has seldom been quicker and more vertiginous than today and we’ll need human intelligence to reach a better future. We can’t trust the computers to get us there on their own.