Maybe it’s the dumb tech humans should be worried about
Generative AI may or may not throw lots of professionals out of a job. But simpler technology is already eliminating many pink-collar positions
You’ve almost certainly never given it much thought, but if you’re of a certain age you’ve spent a large chunk of your life interacting with cashiers. You go to the newsagency to buy lollies as a kid and the newsagent, or one of their employees, takes your coins and hands you your bag of sugary treats. You go to the video store and the video store owner, or one of their employees, enters the name of the video you’ve chosen in the computer system and grabs the bank notes you proffer. You go to the service station and the owner, or one of their employees, scans your card to pay for the petrol you’ve put in your car. You buy the weekly groceries and… well, you get the idea.
While cashiers are more or less invisible – try to remember anything about the last one you interacted with – they were once also omnipresent. Chances are that you, dear reader, have held a job at some point that involved you accepting payment for goods and services provided by your employer. Indeed, more Americans are employed as ‘retail salespersons’ or ‘cashiers’ than anything else. I presume it’s a similar situation in many other first-world nations with large service sectors.
The rise of the (stupid) machines
As you may have noticed, cashiers are increasingly being replaced with machines. When I took my kids to a food court last weekend, I was shocked at how common ‘self-serve kiosks’ have become.
Granted, most eateries were still doing things the old-school way. But seemingly overnight, a substantial minority of businesses had installed some sort of giant iPad customers were expected to input their orders into. Given businesses are always keen to reduce labour costs, and especially keen on minimising any costs they can in a tough economic climate, I’d expect to see self-serve kiosks displacing humans at an even more accelerated rate over the next 18 months. Given the iron laws of capitalism, any business that keeps employing humans to take customer payments will then be at serious risk of being driven out of the market by its more automated competitors.
If they are under the age of 10, your children may never experience the rite of passage that so many young Boomers, Gen Xers and Gen Yers did – a job manning a cash register at a bottle-o, boutique, cinema, corner shop, supermarket, fast food outlet or service station.
We are also seeing the evaporation of what might be called ‘cashier-adjacent’ jobs. You’ve no doubt groaned inwardly when you’ve sat down at what you thought was a classy establishment and realised you’ll be expected to faff around with your phone for several minutes scanning a QR code, navigating an online menu, entering your email address and credit card details and making sure you tick the right box to avoid being deluged with marketing messages.
I assume fancy restaurants will continue to employ wait staff, but you should expect to also see waiters disappearing from restaurants at an accelerated pace over the next year or two. Especially if growing underemployment and unemployment means diners are increasingly willing to trade a bit of upbeat human interaction for a cheaper meal.
(If you’re wondering how plates will get from the kitchen to the table in the absence of waiters, that’s easily fixed. Restaurants will either make diners collect their meals, or they will invest in Dalek-like robots to ferry meals to the relevant tables. Especially after such robots, which are still rare and expensive, start to be mass produced and become more affordable.)
Bartenders don’t have much more reason to believe their jobs are safe than wait staff do. A self-service bar that employs no bartenders recently opened in my neighbourhood. A handful of staff – cashiers of a kind, ironically enough – issue patrons with a card that they deposit money on. Once they’ve done that, the patron simply taps the card on the card reader above one of the 30 taps dispensing beverages, and the appropriate sum of money is debited from the card as the amber (or otherwise) fluid spurts into their glass.
I’m not expecting bartenders to disappear quite as quickly or comprehensively as cashiers or waiters. After all, for many centuries going to the pub has been all about human interaction, including interacting with a personable bartender. But licensed premises, especially those catering to low-income and middle-income consumers, will be sorely tempted to automate away much of the grunt work of pouring drinks and accepting payment for them. A pub that once employed 10 bartenders might only employ one in future. Mainly to make sure the machines are all functioning properly, but also to walk around briefly engaging drinkers in conversation so they still feel like they are getting something approximating the old-school ‘pub experience’.
Bright shiny object theory
Especially if they have a background in tech, many people are now familiar with the Gartner Hype Cycle. This holds that people overestimate the short-term impacts of a new technology while underestimating its long-term consequences.
The Gartner Hype Cycle theory has a lot going for it, but I would humbly suggest it should be supplemented by Bowen’s Bright Shiny Object theory. This holds that the general public frequently often gets monomaniacally obsessed with a new technology that promises revolutionary change while ignoring less attention-grabbing technologies that are slowly but surely changing the world right now.
The media is presently full of stories about cutting-edge technology that is putting people out of work. In recent days, I’ve seen lots of coverage about Singapore introducing giant robocops to Changi Airport and Bild, Germany’s best-selling newspaper, automating the news-gathering process. (It’s not clear who is getting the arse. But the message to staff bluntly declared the company would “unfortunately part ways with colleagues whose jobs will be replaced by AI and/or automated processes in the digital world, or who do not find themselves in this new line-up with their current skills” and that “roles such as editors, print production journalists, proofreaders, photo editors and assistants will no longer exist like they do today”.)
Robot law enforcers and AI newshounds are always going to attract more media and public attention than yet another retailer introducing self-serve kiosks. But it’s the latter trend that should most concern anybody who hasn’t resigned themselves to living on a Universal Basic Income (UBI) stipend.
Replacing airport-patrolling police officers or the small number of extant newspaper journalists isn’t going to impact labour markets profoundly. Eliminating cashiers, waiters, bartenders, doctor’s receptionists etc will. What’s more, replacing cashier and cashier-adjacent positions rarely involves pricey and sophisticated technologies. It essentially just means turning the till in the opposite direction and having the customer input the information they previously verbally relayed to a human staffer.
Resistance is futile
There are two things to note about what might be called ‘creeping automation’.
First, there’s little that can be done about it. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is currently on strike. One of its chief demands is that human writers not be replaced with ChatGPT. For obvious reasons, my sympathies lie with the WGA. But the idea professional associations, unions, pressure groups, political parties or any other entity will be able to prevent businesspeople replacing human workers with AI (or some other established or emerging technology) is lunacy.
The always astute
recently noted that trying to ‘shape’ AI innovation to protect workers is an understandable impulse, but a counterproductive one. Smith asks what would have happened if our great-grandparents had tried to ‘shape’ the emerging technologies of their era – “mass production, railroads, electricity, automobiles, telegraphs, telephones, water supply, airplanes, and so on” – to prevent humans from losing their jobs.First, it would have been impossible. For instance, even if the UK had decided to ban automobiles to keep buggy-whip-making humans in a job, it couldn’t have stopped other countries, such as Germany, from embracing the promising new technology. (Replace the UK and Germany with the US and China if you want to estimate the likelihood of any ban on generative AI being proposed, let alone honoured.)
Second, even if ‘shaping’ Second Industrial Revolution technologies hadn’t been impossible, it would have been foolish and short-sighted. Millions of business owners and workers around the world were displaced by the move from a horse-powered to an automobile-powered economy. Nonetheless, does anybody now suggest that humanity should have remained reliant on beasts of burden?
Few people are thinking seriously about what happens when a combination of quotidan technologies – and, yes, sexy cutting-edge ones – progressively shrinks the number of jobs available over the next 5-10 years.
Optimists, such as Marc Andreessen, insist that new technologies will create plenty of interesting, well-paid jobs to replace the ones being automated away. I’m not an optimist. But I’m not sure what can be done about the situation, rather than politicians suddenly developing an appetite to redistribute wealth away from our tech overlords to the jobless and soon-to-be jobless.
If you’ve got any better ideas, please leave them in the comments.
I'm still staging my personal protest by refusing to use automated options if I can possibly avoid them.
Argh! For some reason it makes me very sad that my kid may not experience the grind of a job as a Kmart check-out operator / McDonald's worker, earning $15/hour. It's a bloody rite of passage!