Based on a lot of articles about tech, business and the future of both, one could believe that we are heading toward a fully automated future where AI and robots handle everything. We’ll just float around on hover loungers, à la WALL-E, or become a society of socially maladjusted recluses. (Hikikomori, as the Japanese call them.)
It’s actually a lot messier down here on the ground where humans live and work.
Amazon has been rolling out Amazon Go stores for a year or so. The future of retail is fully automated! Imagine – no lines, no price checks, no old ladies counting out change...
Sure, there are still a few bugs to work out. From the Reuters piece:
But there have been challenges, according to a person familiar with the matter. These included correctly identifying shoppers with similar body types, the person said. When children were brought into the store during the trial, they caused havoc by moving items to incorrect places, the person added.
In Canada, at least, necessary winter attire would likely cause widespread issues with “correctly identifying shoppers with similar body types,” seeing as we all look like the Michelin Man.
I also can’t imagine it would go over well to discover a bunch of inaccurate charges on your credit card because your kids kept bringing you stuff that they wanted to buy. Not that your kids would ever do that…
Many people I know don’t even like using grocery store self-checkouts. (I admit I’m a fan. I like the challenge of bagging Tetris.) Despite the above-mentioned drawbacks of traditional checkout lanes, folks still prefer to deal with a human cashier.
Is it hard-wired in the human brain? This idea that dealing with another human will get the job done or solve a problem better or faster than any other option. After many years of customer-centric work, I’m inclined to believe that it is one of our default settings.
Given the rise of social isolation and loneliness, small talk with a cashier or barista might be a warm spot in someone’s day. Taking that away doesn’t seem so much like progress, in context.
We already tried and failed at automating restaurants. The last Automat restaurant closed in 1991, decades after the heyday of the concept, and no other form of humanless, automated restaurant has really taken its place. We’re just too dedicated to our sassy diner waitresses, I guess.
Sure, there are sushi joints where the food is delivered by a charming train, and places where you order from iPads, but people still bring the meal and take away the plates and check how you’re doing.
Some companies in the AI space are working hard to develop solutions to automate customer support. I have a professional curiosity about how this will develop, but as long as I regularly have customers insisting on a phone number to call to talk to a “real person,” it doesn’t cause me a lot of job security worries. (No one has ever demanded to speak to the manager chatbot.)
AI-driven customer support could end up with a legacy similar to that of the outsourcing/offshoring craze. Seemed like a productive idea, looked like it would save lots of money. Buuuut... didn’t quite work out as planned.
Recently some folks I know booked a trip to France this summer, using a travel agent. Weird thing is, these folks are at the younger end of Millennials. Sure, my parents usually use a travel agent, but I thought Millennials were supposed to be busy killing off these kinds of legacy industries and institutions?
But given they haven’t been to France before, and are planning to travel around a bit, a human’s input would be a lot more valuable there than just trying to navigate Expedia.
Some commonalities among the work I’ve outlined above are a distinct lack of sexiness and that it doesn’t tend to be very lucrative. It would seem that as long as we have humans around to facilitate business and provide service, beyond that we don’t care about them.
We expect some of the longest hours and hardest work, broadest competence and endless enthusiasm, for roles that receive low pay, lack benefits, are poorly trained, and have the least security and advancement opportunity.
We insist that these jobs exist, but we treat those working them like they don’t deserve any better and we don’t even want them there. We start up companies to try and make service work extinct, regardless of what consumers demand.
Ain’t capitalism a bitch?
But unless human nature randomly decides to take a hard turn some time soon, there will continue to be a lot of those jobs, AI research be damned. Existing service industry people may even have to compete with the white-collar workers that AI is also supposed to make obsolete.
That would not bode well for remaining worker protections. (Oh hi, gig economy!)
I don’t know what this means for the tech industry. I don’t know that spending a couple of summers working at Tim Hortons or Sobeys as teenagers is enough to qualify future tech captains of industry to tackle these issues.
And if you are one of those folks who’s more than happy to do everything via apps, how do you make decisions to weave tech into good business models that account for others’ non-negotiable desire for human interaction? Some preferences and problems can’t be “fixed” by throwing more computing power at them.
There are people who actually like helping, people who choose service work for their careers. And even for those who just need a job, surely we can do better. Given, as established, that many people insist on access to such folks, it would seem like making that work to mutual benefit wouldn’t be that hard.
We would just need to shift the core of what we value – in business and otherwise – to human connections, and shift tech’s focus to enhancing work, relationships and service, rather than replacing it. We would just need to remember and rebuild respect for people doing hands-on work, regardless of whether or not we understand it, would want to do it, or how much it pays.
Just a few little issues for humans to get together and talk about.
