Has No One Seen WarGames?
Every other Wednesday I go to therapy. The office is close to the grocery store, so I often do my big shopping on Wednesday evenings. There are two benefits to this: 1) I’m already in the neighborhood and therefore save gas, and 2) there are fewer humans at the store on Wednesday evenings. Less crowded is always a win.
Until this past week I have always been a “put the grocery cart back where it belongs” type of shopper. Since I shop when the store is not crowded, I park right along the side of the building. From there it is easy to just push the cart back inside the store where all of the carts live. It is actually closer to do that than to walk to one of the cart returns in the parking lot. If I want to get more steps, I go to the cart return; if not, I just push the cart back inside.
This week as I was rolling up to my car and unloading my groceries from the cart, I realized that by pushing the cart all the way back into the store I was technically doing someone else’s job. We’ve all seen the people pushing a long line of carts back from the parking lot of all kinds of stores. In bad weather I feel bad for these people, but really for the most part it doesn’t look like a bad first job. You get to go outside, don’t have to talk to people, get to move around. I can see the benefits of this work.
It is also a job that would be difficult to replace by robots. Inside the grocery store almost all of the manned checkout lines are closed these days as most people choose to go to the self checkout. (This is based on my observation, but keep in mind that I try to go to stores when the least number of people are there. It is possible that there are still lots of cashiers during busy times and I just don’t see them.) Some fast food restaurants have switched to ordering through a kiosk rather than a person. You almost never talk to a real person when you call a support line; a lot of companies provide support through AI chatbots on their websites (though they are almost never helpful). Stores are even cleaned with the assistance of robots; Stop & Shop literally has a robot named Marty that roams the store looking for spills.
This whole situation raises many questions for me but two rise to the top as most important.
1) If so many jobs are taken over by AI, what are teenagers supposed to do for their first jobs? When I was in high school so many kids I knew started working at one store or another as a cashier. That was basically the perfect entry level job for someone with the limited schedule of a high school student. Now I almost never see teenagers working a cash register in a store. Where have they all gone? And never mind the teenagers, what about the people who work retail and registers full time? Have they gone part-time due to lack of demand for their services? Do they have to work multiple jobs now? I am actively concerned about the availability of work as it truly seems like the robots are taking over. This is why we have so many YouTube and TikTok influencers and content creators and podcasters: there isn’t anything else for them to do in the real world.
2) Why are people so fired up about Artificial Intelligence? First of all, it seems to me that the last thing we need is another way to replace a human being who is capable of and available for work. The fact that real people are being replaced by machines is a little scary economically. Because where are the boundaries? When will it stop? How far will we get into AI taking over before we realize, “aw crap! We’ve got all these people who are out of jobs now! How did that happen?”
The thing that really hacks me off about AI is that it is now being used to write original content. As a writer myself I naturally find that a little uncomfortable, for surely how could anyone prefer AI content to my beautiful and majestic prose? (<—- that is me being facetious, in case that isn’t clear.) I guess if it saves time in creating first drafts of things that’s not terrible, but I have heard numerous people rave about ChatGPT as if it were the second coming of Christ. You’re really that busy that you cannot write your own email? More importantly, you’re really that happy to brag that your work is replaceable by AI? Interesting choreographic choice, friend.
The biggest question is this: seriously, has nobody seen WarGames? Are we all not at least a little bit afraid of giving too much control over to a computer/robot/any form of artificial intelligence?
I will admit that at the grocery store I tend to go to the self checkout. What can I say? If I’m shopping by myself I prefer to not have to make small talk with a cashier. It saps energy out of my introverted brain and those tanks run low real quick. But as of this week I have decided that I am no longer a cart returner. While I will still try to be courteous and not leave a cart in the middle of a parking space or blocking the entire sidewalk, I will not push my cart back into the store anymore. I will now leave my carts either in the cart return or somewhere in the parking lot. I used to think it rude but now I see this is a chief way to keep at least one more human being employed.
