The robotic grocery store

It was the cry of mid 1900's industrial laborers that their jobs were being replaced by machines. They however gave no reason that their jobs shouldn’t be, beyond of course their livelihoods; which the state and capital-holders of course did not feel obliged to provide them.

This is the only point I will side with the capitalists and state on. Technology is not the enemy, and the application of technology capable of replacing labor should not be foregone to placate laborers whose skills have obviously been obsoleted.

Imagine this. One day, you walk into a grocery store and pharmacy and are greeted with 40-50 laborers, all being paid minimum wage or superficially more to keep the operation running. You need certain products, and the laborers help you locate them, check them out so that you pay their slave-master the correct amount, and send you out of the door. You have just contributed to their exploitation, the capital-owners cache of capital, all for your own welfare.

The next day, you walk into a grocery store and greeted with no people, but a completely automated, interactive interface that locates all your necessary items, accounts for all of them, collects your payments and roboticly says “thank you” when you leave.

What change has occurred? Those interested in the welfare of the grocery store have taken a tip from the unmanned laundromats, and decided that their labor could be performed by machines instead of people. Those interested in the welfare of laborers, though their hearts are initially in the right place, are outraged at the lost jobs.

What they are not considering is that these laborers were not taken out behind the dumpsters and shot dead(hopefully)- they are somewhere else. Those 40-50 laborers are now in coffee shops, bookstores and bars waiting for discussion. They are in groups plotting and scheming how to make a decent living. They are playing guitars and drums in the street to supply petty cash. They are 40-50 more people who no longer have to perform obsolete labor for a capital-holder who would gladly exploit them for longer.

Labor is not our friend. The less labor that needs to be performed by actual people, the better. Because some labor still has to be performed, it ought to be compensated justly and accounted for. But if a machine can do it, than a person doesn’t have to. This is something that should be embraced by leftists, not fought. If the mindless leftist, hater of technology, vague primitivist with unspecified anger had his way, the laborers in the grocery store would remain employed unnecessarily, perhaps being paid the full value of their labor- but at what physical cost, and why?

These displaced laborers are available to do something that is still necessary for people to do, join radical movements, or get drunk with at a bar. In all cases, they are doing something better for society than wearing out their muscles and minds on something a well-oiled machine could do.