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They'll be deprecated as soon as self driving cars become viable. The same goes for most jobs like this, technology will catch up eventually and make them obsol

They'll be deprecated as soon as self driving cars become viable. The same goes for most jobs like this, technology will catch up eventually and make them obsolote.

deanCommie 11y ago
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, that's precisely the problem with most jobs like this.
- deleted 11y ago
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ekianjo 11y ago
I'm still waiting to see cashiers disappear in supermarkets. Or bakers, since bread and cake production could be completely automatized by now. Strangely they are not going away. I wonder why... People who predict extinction of jobs are usually wrong.
- tokenizerrr 11y ago
  I don't know how it is in America, I live in the Netherlands, but I haven't interacted with a cashier in a supermarket for a very long time. Every supermarket has self-checkout, and still some cashiers for people who don't want it, of course. But a lot less cashiers than a few years ago. You grab a scanner at the entrance, scan all your purchages and then you put the scanner away and pay at a terminal. The terminal prints out your receipt, which you can scan to open the exit. You will sometimes (this has never happened to me, but I've seen it to other people) be picked by the system for a random check to see if you're not stealing anything. It is a really pleasant system.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    > It is a really pleasant system. It is making you a slave worker, since you have to scan items yourself :)
    - tokenizerrr 11y ago
      I scan the item and put it in my bag. This is less work than putting it in a cart, waiting for the cashier to scan everything and then I pack it in my bag. I'm done a lot faster and have never even thought of it being any more work on my side. It may help that we never had people to pack your bags for you, which some countries seem to have.
      - ekianjo 11y ago
        Well in Japan the cashier does a lot more things for you. First they scan stuff. Then they place the items in a different cart in a proper order so that nothing is squashed by whatever is up or down, which makes it easier for you to pack things before you go. They also cut the bread in slices if you wish, or cut some extremities of the larger vegetables for your convenience. And that's in a country known for automation.
        tokenizerrr 11y ago
        Ah. Here the cashiers have only ever scanned your groceries, and put them on a small conveyor belt that moves them to the side. You'll have to pack your bag yourself, and bread usually comes pre-sliced. I've also seen non-sliced bread being sold, but that is usually accompanied by a machine where you can have it sliced prior to purchase.
  - jschwartzi 11y ago
    In the US, our self-checkout is a machine that stops the transaction and complains if you so much as breathe on the scale. It's terribly awkward to use, and so I much prefer to use a live cashier rather than suffer the incessant blathering of a machine that doesn't even bag my groceries for me.
    - tokenizerrr 11y ago
      I've not seen those machines. The ones I've seen you just scan everything as you put it in your bag, and then you pay. No cashier will bag your groceries for you either, and they will laugh at you if you ask. You do that yourself here, either way.
      - shostack 11y ago
        That's interesting about the bagging. One of the bigger issues with this in the US is that people are just really poor grocery baggers most of the time compared to someone whose job it is. When there are only a handful of these self-checkouts, you end up with a situation where it is often quicker to wait for the line with the cashier and bagger because they just process customers SO MUCH FASTER. In college I knew someone who was a grocery bagger for a while, and when we'd go to the store he'd bag his stuff and I'd bag mine. The speed and thoughtfulness that went into the placement of various things in his bag was rather humbling...almost akin to watching an expert Tetris player in the zone. So ultimately more machines could help solve the long line issue, but that is still definitely a factor as it stands today. Given that grocery stores often leave most of their checkout lanes unattended, I'd love to see more converted to self-checkout to increase overall checkout speed.
  - Splines 11y ago
    That sounds like a nice system. In the US we don't have scanners you pick up at the entrance - it's more like you do the part the cashiers used to do. You pull up to a scanner, scan everything in your cart, bag everything, then put it back in your cart and pay at the machine. A scale underneath the bagging area keeps tabs on everything you can to make sure you're not cheating the system. (Still, I've heard stories of people checking out all produce as watermelons.)
    - tokenizerrr 11y ago
      That does sound less pleasant. Now that I'm thinking about that, I've encountered a system like that once. I think that was one of the first supermarkets trialing self-checkout. The system disappeared soon after and got replaced by what I've described. It is quite easy to cheat the current system, though the random sampling helps some. I think someone somewhere made a decision that it is worth it to improve customer satisfaction and deal with some losses, but I have no idea.
      - jonknee 11y ago
        How does that system handle produce? That's one of the big reasons why automated checkout works like it does in the US (using checkout stations and scales).
        tokenizerrr 11y ago
        Most (all?) supermarkets require you to weigh produce yourself, even when making use of regular checkout. There are several scales with a bunch of buttons in the produce section, you put your produce of preference on there and press the button to identify it. Then you get a sticker with a barcode/price based on the produce type and weight.
    - knowaveragejoe 11y ago
      Giant and other grocery stores have handheld scanners, but it's not the greatest user interface. There is definitely room for disruption there.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  And people who refuse to see it are usually blind... The supermarkets I go to have greatly reduced their cashiers. In most cases by at least half, especially in small shops (3 cashiers has become 2-3 machines and one human). As for bakers, they don't just make bread and cake. Excellent video on the subject: CGPGrey - Humans Need Not Apply: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    > As for bakers, they don't just make bread and cake. yet it's still their main product and they are stopping making it even though industrial bread is cheaper. So your point is ?
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      My point is it's a pretty terrible example for you to pick. Baking is not a low-skill menial job. It's certainly not first in line in the "jobs that will get replaced by a machine" domino line.
      - ekianjo 11y ago
        It's actually a pretty good example because bread making can be completely automatized starting from ingredients mixing, to baking, packing and delivery to your supermarket. yet bakers do not disappear. What's not valid about this example?
        scrollaway 11y ago
        You seem to be under the impression that baker and industrial bread maker are the same job. They are not. And the latter has long been (mostly) done by machine. This seems relevant: "There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right."
- ousta 11y ago
  cashiers are getting extincted little by little, supermarkets all have self checkin, macdonalds rlies heavily on it, train systems in many countries have automated lines, bakers have long been replaced by industrial ovens and breads in EVERY supermarket and they are now low qualified workers helped by electronic ovens who unfreeze breads instead of workers. don't make any mistake as technology evolves it becomes cheaper to replace a low-skill worker by a robot and this trend will likely raise until it is much much much more cheaper to get a robot than a worker (this is probably already cheaper to have all selfcheckin than cashiers but companies are keeping them for social and ethical reason, my thinking being that those ethical bareers tends to get slimmer when cost difference increase)
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    > cashiers are getting extincted little by little, Cashiers are still alive and well in Japan, thank you for asking. > Supermarkets all have self checkin Not everywhere and even where there is i see way more people queuing for the cashier queue than going for self checking but maybe it's different the Californian world or wherever you are living. > ovens and breads in EVERY supermarket I'm obviously talking about local breadshops in cities. they are alive and well, once again, and not going bankrupt. Quality still matters. > train systems in many countries have automated lines Yes, but how many have automated trains ? it's technically possible for a long time yet trains are still driven by people. It's way more simple to automate a train than a car yet it's not happening. Strange, huh ? I'm just making observations based on real life - the world has not massively been robotised since the 90s (it has certainly happened in many manufacturing plants but the "worker"/"human face" is very resilient when it comes to local services).
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      You keep making wiiild claims based on "I don't see it happening (as much as you)". Don't you travel? > I'm obviously talking about local breadshops in cities. they are alive and well, once again, and not going bankrupt. Quality still matters. There's less. There's less of all these jobs you mention. You say in another post "but it won't go extinct" - well no, probably not, they'll still exist in some form. Horse carts also exist, but nobody's here saying "Cars have not fully replaced horses". > It's way more simple to automate a train than a car yet it's not happening. Strange, huh ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation This is in effect all over the place. When I went to Berlin I didn't find a single subway train driver. "It won't happen" is talk from people who didn't want to accept an eventuality a decade ago. Today, it's happening - putting your hands over your eyes is very much unproductive.
- tokenizerrr 11y ago
  I would also like to add that large scale bread production is already mostly automated. You will still have local bakeries because fresh bread is nice, and the automation needs large factory halls that are unlikely to be near your home or match your schedule.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    Indeed, but the point is that man-made bread > industrial bread in the end. It's not because you can automate something that it create better goods in the end. If that was the case we would replace cooks with robots for a long time as well. And of course the list goes on for many, many other professions. It's obvious that the ones who predict massive automation of most jobs are thinking WAY AHEAD of their life. It's not going to happen anytime soon, no matter how much software and hardware is "eating the world". Making predictions is always a risky business... after all we were all supposed to have flying cars by 2015 and whatever, yet the best piece of tech we have is just a tiny computer in our pockets - that's a great achievement, but it's a little short of the dreams we had 30 years ago.
    - tokenizerrr 11y ago
      It's also more expensive, and I am fine with industrial bread. I know many, many people who only buy their break from the supermarket and that is all industrialized. Bakeries still exist, but many less do than several years ago. For automation to be a success it doesn't have to replace 100% of the market, and it's unlikely for it to ever truly reach 100% for the reasons you mention. But that's fine, it'll just slowly keep growing.
      - ekianjo 11y ago
        Good, then I agree with you. Then I hope you will also agree that "extinction" is too strong of a word, and we use it too often around here while in reality most jobs have a hard time disappearing completely, if at all. On top of that, not sure about where you live, but some supermarkets also have reversed their trend about industrial bread and hire "baker-workers" who actually bake bread on-site (from industrial paste) instead of it being purely delivered for consumption, which is slightly better and fresher, and require human workers.
- mavrc 11y ago
  Even in the tiny rural community I live in, cashiers are being replaced by automated systems in large stores. Smaller stores will probably continue to have cashiers until forever, but we're not talking about 100% of cashiers going away, we're talking about some percentage of that. If half of the available jobs in a market vanish, that will have significant and devastating effects, regardless of how they're lost. Especially for jobs like cashiering, because there are limited places for cashiers to go, and this problem will eventually effect lots of jobs that have no up front professional training requirement (and perhaps many that do, but that's its own discussion.) It's only a matter of time, for example, until Domino's pizza production is automated. The only reason we haven't seen this yet is because hiring humans is cheaper than solving the complex automation problem this presents. But technology continues to get cheaper. When that swings the other way, your pizza will get made by robots. Pizza delivery by robots is already a solved problem, just waiting for the costs to skew the right way. In short: at the speed at which technological problems get solved, it's unlikely we will have even adequately discussed the ramifications of the problem before it arrives on our doorstep.
- deleted 11y ago
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- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > I'm still waiting to see cashiers disappear in supermarkets. Or bakers, since bread and cake production could be completely automatized by now. Strangely they are not going away. I wonder why... You must be (un)lucky to have avoided the wave of self-service checkout points :). As for bakers, I don't remember when was the last time I saw a bakery that acutally baked anything - the ones I see all have bread and cakes delivered several times a day by whoever owns the franchise. Also, automation is not a binary proposition - if your central bakery uses big dough machines and industrial baking ovens, it already counts as half-automated, as it employs much less personnel per unit of output as bakeries used to few decades ago :).

They'll be deprecated as soon as self driving cars become viable. The same goes for most jobs like this, technology will catch up eventually and make them obsolote.

deanCommie 11y ago

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, that's precisely the problem with most jobs like this.

deleted 11y ago
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ekianjo 11y ago

I'm still waiting to see cashiers disappear in supermarkets. Or bakers, since bread and cake production could be completely automatized by now. Strangely they are not going away. I wonder why... People who predict extinction of jobs are usually wrong.

tokenizerrr 11y ago
I don't know how it is in America, I live in the Netherlands, but I haven't interacted with a cashier in a supermarket for a very long time. Every supermarket has self-checkout, and still some cashiers for people who don't want it, of course. But a lot less cashiers than a few years ago. You grab a scanner at the entrance, scan all your purchages and then you put the scanner away and pay at a terminal. The terminal prints out your receipt, which you can scan to open the exit. You will sometimes (this has never happened to me, but I've seen it to other people) be picked by the system for a random check to see if you're not stealing anything. It is a really pleasant system.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  > It is a really pleasant system. It is making you a slave worker, since you have to scan items yourself :)
  - tokenizerrr 11y ago
    I scan the item and put it in my bag. This is less work than putting it in a cart, waiting for the cashier to scan everything and then I pack it in my bag. I'm done a lot faster and have never even thought of it being any more work on my side. It may help that we never had people to pack your bags for you, which some countries seem to have.
    - ekianjo 11y ago
      Well in Japan the cashier does a lot more things for you. First they scan stuff. Then they place the items in a different cart in a proper order so that nothing is squashed by whatever is up or down, which makes it easier for you to pack things before you go. They also cut the bread in slices if you wish, or cut some extremities of the larger vegetables for your convenience. And that's in a country known for automation.
      - tokenizerrr 11y ago
        Ah. Here the cashiers have only ever scanned your groceries, and put them on a small conveyor belt that moves them to the side. You'll have to pack your bag yourself, and bread usually comes pre-sliced. I've also seen non-sliced bread being sold, but that is usually accompanied by a machine where you can have it sliced prior to purchase.
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  In the US, our self-checkout is a machine that stops the transaction and complains if you so much as breathe on the scale. It's terribly awkward to use, and so I much prefer to use a live cashier rather than suffer the incessant blathering of a machine that doesn't even bag my groceries for me.
  - tokenizerrr 11y ago
    I've not seen those machines. The ones I've seen you just scan everything as you put it in your bag, and then you pay. No cashier will bag your groceries for you either, and they will laugh at you if you ask. You do that yourself here, either way.
    - shostack 11y ago
      That's interesting about the bagging. One of the bigger issues with this in the US is that people are just really poor grocery baggers most of the time compared to someone whose job it is. When there are only a handful of these self-checkouts, you end up with a situation where it is often quicker to wait for the line with the cashier and bagger because they just process customers SO MUCH FASTER. In college I knew someone who was a grocery bagger for a while, and when we'd go to the store he'd bag his stuff and I'd bag mine. The speed and thoughtfulness that went into the placement of various things in his bag was rather humbling...almost akin to watching an expert Tetris player in the zone. So ultimately more machines could help solve the long line issue, but that is still definitely a factor as it stands today. Given that grocery stores often leave most of their checkout lanes unattended, I'd love to see more converted to self-checkout to increase overall checkout speed.
- Splines 11y ago
  That sounds like a nice system. In the US we don't have scanners you pick up at the entrance - it's more like you do the part the cashiers used to do. You pull up to a scanner, scan everything in your cart, bag everything, then put it back in your cart and pay at the machine. A scale underneath the bagging area keeps tabs on everything you can to make sure you're not cheating the system. (Still, I've heard stories of people checking out all produce as watermelons.)
  - tokenizerrr 11y ago
    That does sound less pleasant. Now that I'm thinking about that, I've encountered a system like that once. I think that was one of the first supermarkets trialing self-checkout. The system disappeared soon after and got replaced by what I've described. It is quite easy to cheat the current system, though the random sampling helps some. I think someone somewhere made a decision that it is worth it to improve customer satisfaction and deal with some losses, but I have no idea.
    - jonknee 11y ago
      How does that system handle produce? That's one of the big reasons why automated checkout works like it does in the US (using checkout stations and scales).
      - tokenizerrr 11y ago
        Most (all?) supermarkets require you to weigh produce yourself, even when making use of regular checkout. There are several scales with a bunch of buttons in the produce section, you put your produce of preference on there and press the button to identify it. Then you get a sticker with a barcode/price based on the produce type and weight.
  - knowaveragejoe 11y ago
    Giant and other grocery stores have handheld scanners, but it's not the greatest user interface. There is definitely room for disruption there.
scrollaway 11y ago
And people who refuse to see it are usually blind... The supermarkets I go to have greatly reduced their cashiers. In most cases by at least half, especially in small shops (3 cashiers has become 2-3 machines and one human). As for bakers, they don't just make bread and cake. Excellent video on the subject: CGPGrey - Humans Need Not Apply: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
- ekianjo 11y ago
  > As for bakers, they don't just make bread and cake. yet it's still their main product and they are stopping making it even though industrial bread is cheaper. So your point is ?
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    My point is it's a pretty terrible example for you to pick. Baking is not a low-skill menial job. It's certainly not first in line in the "jobs that will get replaced by a machine" domino line.
    - ekianjo 11y ago
      It's actually a pretty good example because bread making can be completely automatized starting from ingredients mixing, to baking, packing and delivery to your supermarket. yet bakers do not disappear. What's not valid about this example?
      - scrollaway 11y ago
        You seem to be under the impression that baker and industrial bread maker are the same job. They are not. And the latter has long been (mostly) done by machine. This seems relevant: "There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right."
ousta 11y ago
cashiers are getting extincted little by little, supermarkets all have self checkin, macdonalds rlies heavily on it, train systems in many countries have automated lines, bakers have long been replaced by industrial ovens and breads in EVERY supermarket and they are now low qualified workers helped by electronic ovens who unfreeze breads instead of workers. don't make any mistake as technology evolves it becomes cheaper to replace a low-skill worker by a robot and this trend will likely raise until it is much much much more cheaper to get a robot than a worker (this is probably already cheaper to have all selfcheckin than cashiers but companies are keeping them for social and ethical reason, my thinking being that those ethical bareers tends to get slimmer when cost difference increase)
- ekianjo 11y ago
  > cashiers are getting extincted little by little, Cashiers are still alive and well in Japan, thank you for asking. > Supermarkets all have self checkin Not everywhere and even where there is i see way more people queuing for the cashier queue than going for self checking but maybe it's different the Californian world or wherever you are living. > ovens and breads in EVERY supermarket I'm obviously talking about local breadshops in cities. they are alive and well, once again, and not going bankrupt. Quality still matters. > train systems in many countries have automated lines Yes, but how many have automated trains ? it's technically possible for a long time yet trains are still driven by people. It's way more simple to automate a train than a car yet it's not happening. Strange, huh ? I'm just making observations based on real life - the world has not massively been robotised since the 90s (it has certainly happened in many manufacturing plants but the "worker"/"human face" is very resilient when it comes to local services).
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    You keep making wiiild claims based on "I don't see it happening (as much as you)". Don't you travel? > I'm obviously talking about local breadshops in cities. they are alive and well, once again, and not going bankrupt. Quality still matters. There's less. There's less of all these jobs you mention. You say in another post "but it won't go extinct" - well no, probably not, they'll still exist in some form. Horse carts also exist, but nobody's here saying "Cars have not fully replaced horses". > It's way more simple to automate a train than a car yet it's not happening. Strange, huh ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation This is in effect all over the place. When I went to Berlin I didn't find a single subway train driver. "It won't happen" is talk from people who didn't want to accept an eventuality a decade ago. Today, it's happening - putting your hands over your eyes is very much unproductive.
tokenizerrr 11y ago
I would also like to add that large scale bread production is already mostly automated. You will still have local bakeries because fresh bread is nice, and the automation needs large factory halls that are unlikely to be near your home or match your schedule.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  Indeed, but the point is that man-made bread > industrial bread in the end. It's not because you can automate something that it create better goods in the end. If that was the case we would replace cooks with robots for a long time as well. And of course the list goes on for many, many other professions. It's obvious that the ones who predict massive automation of most jobs are thinking WAY AHEAD of their life. It's not going to happen anytime soon, no matter how much software and hardware is "eating the world". Making predictions is always a risky business... after all we were all supposed to have flying cars by 2015 and whatever, yet the best piece of tech we have is just a tiny computer in our pockets - that's a great achievement, but it's a little short of the dreams we had 30 years ago.
  - tokenizerrr 11y ago
    It's also more expensive, and I am fine with industrial bread. I know many, many people who only buy their break from the supermarket and that is all industrialized. Bakeries still exist, but many less do than several years ago. For automation to be a success it doesn't have to replace 100% of the market, and it's unlikely for it to ever truly reach 100% for the reasons you mention. But that's fine, it'll just slowly keep growing.
    - ekianjo 11y ago
      Good, then I agree with you. Then I hope you will also agree that "extinction" is too strong of a word, and we use it too often around here while in reality most jobs have a hard time disappearing completely, if at all. On top of that, not sure about where you live, but some supermarkets also have reversed their trend about industrial bread and hire "baker-workers" who actually bake bread on-site (from industrial paste) instead of it being purely delivered for consumption, which is slightly better and fresher, and require human workers.
mavrc 11y ago
Even in the tiny rural community I live in, cashiers are being replaced by automated systems in large stores. Smaller stores will probably continue to have cashiers until forever, but we're not talking about 100% of cashiers going away, we're talking about some percentage of that. If half of the available jobs in a market vanish, that will have significant and devastating effects, regardless of how they're lost. Especially for jobs like cashiering, because there are limited places for cashiers to go, and this problem will eventually effect lots of jobs that have no up front professional training requirement (and perhaps many that do, but that's its own discussion.) It's only a matter of time, for example, until Domino's pizza production is automated. The only reason we haven't seen this yet is because hiring humans is cheaper than solving the complex automation problem this presents. But technology continues to get cheaper. When that swings the other way, your pizza will get made by robots. Pizza delivery by robots is already a solved problem, just waiting for the costs to skew the right way. In short: at the speed at which technological problems get solved, it's unlikely we will have even adequately discussed the ramifications of the problem before it arrives on our doorstep.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> I'm still waiting to see cashiers disappear in supermarkets. Or bakers, since bread and cake production could be completely automatized by now. Strangely they are not going away. I wonder why... You must be (un)lucky to have avoided the wave of self-service checkout points :). As for bakers, I don't remember when was the last time I saw a bakery that acutally baked anything - the ones I see all have bread and cakes delivered several times a day by whoever owns the franchise. Also, automation is not a binary proposition - if your central bakery uses big dough machines and industrial baking ovens, it already counts as half-automated, as it employs much less personnel per unit of output as bakeries used to few decades ago :).