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by Novosell 843 days ago
I mean, we have self check out at every grocery store and fast food place in Norway. Automation is coming for all the jobs.
4 comments

Automation has been coming for all the jobs since at least the invention of the cotton gin. That's not new.

What's new is an LLM working in customer service and hallucinating a fictional version of reality that only it can see, and making decisions based on that.

(A self-checkout kiosk doesn't make decisions, so no LLM needed.)

Self-checkout kiosks seem to hallucinate how many items I’ve scanned just fine.
Self-checkout kiosks routinely refuse to let me check out for absurd reasons.

Maybe my last item was not heavy enough to cause the scale under the bagging area to register it.

Evaluating a two factors in a comparison (expected weight vs weight reported by scale) is not really making decisions, though, is it?

And even if you submit that this is decision-making: You're still going to be able to check out. The process will stall until a human comes to help, and you'll ultimately be allowed to pay for the things you're buying and leave with them.

The kiosk works like this: If the value is unexpected, then get help.

When this happens it is an inconvenience, and it's a very low-value inconvenience at that. You'll pay what you expect and move on with life. There's very, very seldom any negotiation at the checkout, whether at a kiosk or with a cashier.

But with AI in charge of complex things, it can go more like this: If the value is unexpected, then refuse the claim/loan/inquiry/whatever and tell the person to pound sand. (What human?)

Yeah but the self checkout hasn't and most likely wont' replace all human cashiers.
That came to the US like 15 years ago and there are still cashiers and nonself checkouts
Is there a 15 year deadline for it to disrupt the market or something? And there are markets other than the US. The big store near me has, I believe, 16 self checkouts and 2 tills, usually 1 being manned by the same person who handles all the self checkouts.
They start clerks at $25/hr here. If it was truly absolutely cheaper and always worthwhile they’d have turned them all over day 1.
Most kiwis do not have self checkout.