Are we all Luddites in one way or another?
Technology is not always welcomed, as there are some nasty side effects, and one of my issues is with the self-serving tills in the supermarkets. Not only do they want to automatize the process, of getting off the shift with less staff than before, but more often, there are unintended consequences when you are doing your shopping and packing.
What did I do wrong? Well, this is a funny story, as per games theory, given that a suite of 7 consecutive mistakes will have a catastrophic failure as a result. This is something else, a story of two consecutive errors that managed to bug me for one entire day. Even if I shouldn't, from time to time I reward myself with a Relentless Cherry drink, as the Apple-Kiwi one seems to be discontinued, in favour of some horrific no sugar - full of sweetener alternatives, that taste somehow like the London copper water pipes, you know, the ones installed in the Victorian period. Metalic taste and the rest of it. So, the best price is offered at the shop from the corner of the street - the corner shop, which is £1.19, as opposed to the general price of £1.40. But as I was wandering through Morrisons, I noticed my favourite drink with the price of £1, with a red label, instead of the normal white ones, which will be relevant later in the story. So, I take one can of the Cherry ones and I go to the self-serving till, put it in and surprise, it is $1.40. So I asked one of the few employees about it, telling her that the price of the shelf is $1, and the price of the till is $1.40. She told me that the red label ones were the prices with the Morrisons card, and, as I did not realize that, I already scanned the drink without the card (I do have one somewhere in my pocket, but I never use it as it is only giving me something like £5 discount for £100 spent, and I only spend few Pounds in this shop, maybe once or twice per month). I was told to go to customer service and tell them about my issue, but, the second error, I realised I never took the receipt with my drink, so, basically, I have no way to prove my complaint. And I go home spending more than usual on a drink that was supposed to be cheaper.
Now, the problem was that they are not telling you clearly in the shop that you need their card to get the discounted price, showing that nobody there really cares about the customer, and yeah, while I understand the staff, young people working for a slightly above average minimum wage, I do not like the fact that the supermarket as an entity did not label it clearly, so my first issue was that I blame them for not making me understand the situation. Second, and this was my fault, as I tried not to ask for a receipt usually trying to save the planet, one bit at a time, I am sometimes a little robot, doing things automatically, so no receipt, no complaint.
And while I know this is not a great story or a funny one, sometimes the lack of interaction with humans, and this trend of doing everything more or less automatically, is pissing me off. Technically, it is not as automatic as you wish, as it is that you do the scanning and the packing instead of their staff, unpaid, spending your own time. So, another trick into the corporation's basket, trying to save some money and steal a bit more time from you. This has been the main issue all along.
Are robots and the perfect automatization the future? Will the AI steal thousands of millions of our jobs? We don't know yet, but the fact that the companies will try to work with as few people as possible, making as much profit as possible, in some immoral but perfectly legal ways, is annoying. And this is not a new trend, as you can observe it even a few centuries ago when the first machines were built.
What do you think about it? What is your opinion about AI, being good or bad for humanity as a whole? Will we lose some of our jobs or all of it? How do you see the future?
All the best,
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) (Upland - real-life virtual land) (Holozing - Pokemon-like game)and (Rising Star - Music creators game).
...Get ETH while writing on Publish0x blog, using Presearch search engine to maximize your income with PRE tokens. Use Torum instead of Twitter . I am also writing for crypto on Read.cash and Hive.
