Humans Trump Robots at the Grocery Store, Yet Corporations Still Earn Money out of This

 Self check-out machines are slower than check out clerks and many think that the race against robots is not lost. Yet, the race is not humans vs. robots, but customers vs. corporations. The argument ignores a simple thing: slower check out “robots” still make corporations money, since the longer time it takes to check out his or her purchases comes out of the customer’s time budget. The only extra expense for the corporation is that of churning less customers within a unit of time…  Which can be solved with more wage-free check out machines. As for why check out machines are slow, this WSJ article points to a couple of studies.

In a recent research paper called “Dancing With Robots,” the economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane point out that computers replace human workers only when machines meet two key conditions. First, the information necessary to carry out the task must be put in a form that computers can understand, and second, the job must be routine enough that it can be expressed in a series of rules.

Supermarket checkout machines meet the second of these conditions, but they fail on the first. They lack proper information to do the job a human would do. To put it another way: They can’t tell shiitakes from Shinola. Instead of identifying your produce, the machine asks you, the customer, to type in a code for every leafy green in your cart. Many times you’ll have to look up the code in an on-screen directory. If a human checker asked you to remind him what that bunch of the oblong yellow fruit in your basket was, you’d ask to see his boss.

via Humans Trump Robots at the Grocery Store – WSJ.com.