"Why I hate using the supermarket self checkout"

[mark_m]

Equally a comment on

The Future Economy and its Jobs

As first world economies shift from production to services, governments struggle with unemployment and increasingly underemployment noting a job is defined as working one hour a week for the purposes of employment statistics. What are your thoughts on protecting, not protecting, and paying the increasing number of new service fees we face day to day if they address real jobs that pay the bills? This post might set the stage for thought.

@phb

I remember the same dooms day media about computer age in the 1980s.

So we should all welcome unemployment because we will all be better off? There is no proof either way. Past performance as they say is no guide as to future performance.

Technology change has not caused mass unemployment in the past therefore it will never cause it in the future?

@phb

In this case, it may be more security personnel in store (or monitoring cameras watching each customer)

150,000 of them new security staff! Should “I feel better now”?

P.S.
Fact, jobs will go, and there is no plan to replace them. Our system is very ad hoc.

A second fact is the technology and jobs used to deliver it will mostly be overseas products. Someone will get new jobs, just not Australia. We stopped being that sort of clever country many decades ago. What chance a few thousand will be Australian? Small change for the tens of thousands lost.

Note: Continual expansion is not sustainable when the resource base is finite. Computer Nerds (endearingly) have been playing with “predator - prey - food source” models since the 1960’s. The answer is always the same. Apologies to those who do not see an analogy to the relationship between resources, consumers and enterprise ownership.