Last time I used self-check, I had to wait for another human to verify my age, to purchase beer. The time before, I had to wait for a human to verify I had bagg

Last time I used self-check, I had to wait for another human to verify my age, to purchase beer. The time before, I had to wait for a human to verify I had bagged all of my items. I was a grocery store checker in 2007, when these devices were first announced. They are as capable as they were 10 years ago, handle the same edge cases as 10 years ago, and require the same human intervention as 10 years ago. And there are still human checkers at every store - usually they "turn off" the self-check at night, since the human that watches it goes home. All this AI is just a "mechanical Turk" - using AI to perform most of the tasks a human doesn't want to, and keeping a human around for the edge cases that are too expensive to automate. Humans have such a robustness of variety and ability that we can quickly solve most issues. After a certain point, it just makes sense to keep a few humans around for the really rare edge cases, like the when the grocery store is flooding.