this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
1447 points (96.4% liked)
memes
10427 readers
2988 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- [email protected] : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- [email protected] : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- [email protected] : Linux themed memes
- [email protected] : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
We can't feasibly stop automation, nor should we. We SHOULD be taking the profits back from billionaires that they've stolen since time immemorial. Automation means less work overall. But we need to ensure the workers actually benefit from that.
Self checkout is not automation. It's making the customer do the work.
Automation would be: Stick an RFID-tag to all your items, make me check in with my phone at the entrance. Automatically "scan" all the items when my cart and my phone leave the store at the same time. Bill me.
Yeah. That's like saying a buffet automates waiters.
As the customer you're already taking stuff out of your cart and putting it on the counter. Maybe automation isn't the right word, but it's certainly more efficient than having a human clerk. It removes a bottleneck.
But it’s not a bottleneck. It’s the opposite. An experienced human checker will tap in the code for oranges way before you find it in their stupid menu.
It is a bottleneck, because the experienced human checker is only entering orange codes for one person at a time. There could be ten people all checking themselves out simultaneously. Even if one or two get slowed down by a menu, it's still a net decrease in average time spent at checkout.
And introduces others: “unexpected item in bagging area”
True, but isn't that an implementation issue that can be fixed, rather than an inherent issue with the concept?
Or a fuckton of cameras: https://youtu.be/NrmMk1Myrxc?si=olYDaZnChc4LN47k
Those Amazon just walk out stores like you’re describing are extremely expensive to setup though. Even a spall space requires tons of cameras and sensors, all items to be placed on shelves a certain way, lots of networking backend, etc. Most business are unable to do so right now and I’d say most buildings can’t accommodate it. My work looked into putting one of those in one of our spaces as a test and the cost/work to make it happen in even a small area of our business wasn’t worth it
So it will take more time until the tech is cheaper. Or, hear me out, this one is crazy: We employ cashiers!
I went to a gas station that had this… it was kind of incredible. Put like 10 items on a sensor and it recognized all of them. Then put them in a bag.
I think in terms is control, more people feel as though they can stop/protest automation more than they can take profits back. I think that was the luddite mentality? I speculate, it's been a while since i learned it in school.
They tried the latter, and when that failed, they tried the former.