People who predict extinction of jobs are usually wrong.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
It is making you a slave worker, since you have to scan items yourself :)
It may help that we never had people to pack your bags for you, which some countries seem to have.
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
yet it's still their main product and they are stopping making it even though industrial bread is cheaper. So your point is ?
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).
> 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
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.
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 :).
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.
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.
