By: The Guardian
October 27, 2021
When customers in the London borough of Hackney shop in the new Amazon Fresh store, they no longer pay a checkout operator but simply walk out with their goods. Amazon describes “just walk out shopping” as an effortless consumer experience. The rise of automated stores during the pandemic is just the tip of the iceberg. Floor-cleaning robots have been introduced in hospitals, supermarkets and schools. Fast-food restaurants are employing burger-grilling robots and chatbots. And delivery bots are being rolled out at an accelerated pace. As Anuja Sonalker, chief executive of Steer Tech, a tech company specialising in self-parking, ominously said last year: “Humans are biohazards, machines are not.”
With the realisation that machines are immune to viruses and social distancing, we have seen the return of an apocalyptic consensus: according to one recent prediction, as many as half of all work tasks are at risk of automation by 2025. Such gloomy forecasts conjure a world where robots do all the work and humans are consigned to history’s dustbin.