Walmart is piloting Shelf Scanning Robots in 50 stores

[HughBeaumont]

51. Mother Jones offers a more stark and alarming picture.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/you-will-lose-your-job-to-a-robot-and-sooner-than-you-think/

So who benefits? The answer is obvious: the owners of capital, who will control most of the robots. Who suffers? That’s obvious too: the rest of us, who currently trade work for money. No work means no money.

But things won’t actually be quite that grim. After all, fully automated farms and factories will produce much cheaper goods, and competition will then force down prices. Basic material comfort will be cheap as dirt.

Still not free, though. And capitalists can only make money if they have someone to sell their goods to. This means that even the business class will eventually realize that ubiquitous automation doesn’t really benefit them after all. They need customers with money if they want to be rich themselves.

One way or another, then, the answer to the mass unemployment of the AI Revolution has to involve some kind of sweeping redistribution of income that decouples it from work. Or a total rethinking of what “work” is. Or a total rethinking of what wealth is. Let’s consider a few of the possibilities.

Of course, since this is America, where we have an economic system that's awesome in CREATING wealth but incredibly piss-poor when it comes to DISTRIBUTING that wealth, I don't feel anything's going to change and it's going to become Mad Max.