[pkulak]

What you named are NOT BS jobs. A BS job is one that, if it disappeared tomorrow, no one would even notice (or things would become _more_ efficient). Your examples would result in carts piling up in parking lots, people with $500 of groceries clogging up self-checkout lines for hours (plus a whole lot of theft) and public spaces looking like hell.

[threatofrain]

I think the stronger version of this argument is that if we did things Costco style then we'd have more metaphorical Costcos, including the distribution and number of positions within a Costco. Even with pallets, does Costco still have people managing the shelves? Probably. But also probably far less. Are we okay with that?

We are probably heading towards a world where unexpected slices of labor here and there are about to be automated away. Which ones exactly? I don't think that's the right question. Also, early automation is unlikely to categorically wipe out positions. Instead we'll just see fewer positions. Are we okay with that?

Another perspective of the same problem is you're doing a startup. You don't hire DevOps for a whole year and instead rely on sst.dev or Cloudflare hosting. Are we okay with that?