I am not saying that we will necessarily go down the road to fully automated luxury, or that if we do that the journey there would go smoothly. The current “AI” bubble is an unsustainable mess which is causing a lot more problems than it solves. In the long term, we are looking at the development of incredibly powerful and dangerous technologies that can potentially reshape society.

I mainly just wanted to highlight the weird, shortsighted reasoning behind this post. The argument that we need to keep cashiers so that we have a human connection feels a lot like arguments for going back to an agrarian lifestyle. It’s a losing argument that requires glossing over a lot of downsides and ignoring much better alternatives.