Cutting-edge retail experiences highlight the importance of humans over robots

Ever since Amazon.com debuted a grocery store without a checkout line, the world has been forced to ponder a jobless future. Located in the company’s home town, Seattle, Amazon Go looks every bit like a 7-Eleven, selling bread, milk, and cheese as well as pre-made snacks and fresh meals, except there are no cashiers or checkout lines. You walk in, pick up what you want, and walk right out. All purchases are charged automatically. It is one-click ordering, brick-and-mortar style.

The “just walk out” shopping is indeed backed by some real technologies. An Amazon patent filed in 2014 reveals just how shoppers are tracked and items counted via the extensive camera system – much like the driverless cars made by Tesla or Google that are capable of navigating busy streets. Combined with embedded sensors, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, the Amazon Go system is so nuanced that it can distinguish between two people reaching for the same item based on individual skin tones.

But it is exactly the sophistication of such a system that makes many observers squirm. “We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg. No office job is safe,” declares Sebastian Thrun, an artificial intelligence professor at Stanford known for his work on self-driving cars.

Already, machines are used to predict how we click, buy, or lie; companies have automated how they send mail, make calls, offer discounts, recommend products, show advertisements, inspect for flaws, and approve loans.

When IBM Watson beat former champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on the game show Jeopardy! in February 2011, Jennings, who came in second, reflected, “Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of ‘thinking’ machines.”