As clear as if it were yesterday, I recall a high school civics class discussion where we imagined what it would be like to live and work in the 21st century. We concluded that there would be a lot more “living” because technology eventually would render work moot, or at least close to meaningless.
We would be living a life of 20-hour workweeks and retiring by age 50 in a world where the mundane and hardest work would be accomplished by a combination of machines, robots and other unimagined faceless entities.
Essentially, we would have a life of leisure with little or no occupational responsibility (work) unless we chose to. The best and the brightest would be employed to continually improve technology so as to keep the leisure lifestyle intact. They would be paid very handsomely for their efforts by an appreciative “average” class. (We never got to how the “slacker class” would pay its bills.)
The bell sounded, and the picture of our utopian future faded into a reality of dealing with boys, girls, teachers, rock ‘n’ roll and what colleges would accept a mediocre 3.0 grade point average and SAT scores below 1,000.
Until it came rushing back last week. I found myself bagging my own groceries at one of those scan-and-bag stands that promise for a few button punches and self-executed electronic scans to check me out of my newly remodeled grocery without having to endure clerk Maria’s latest adventure with her nieces or clerk Barb’s weight-loss campaign update.
I realized then that with a plethora of new and not-so-new self-service machines and blazingly fast computers, we are coming ever closer to the life as envisioned by a fourth-period sophomore civics class 45 years ago.
Americans seem increasingly content to do business with machines, and businesses are eager to accommodate them.
Close to 13,000 self-checkout units will have been installed in American retail outlets such as Fred Meyer, QFC and Home Depot by year’s end, according to Christopher Boone, retail program manager for IDC, a market research firm.
Fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s and Jack in the Box are testing automated ordering stations. Alaska Airlines, first in the nation to offer online ticket purchases (1995) and online check-in (1998), became the first this year to offer checking in using a Web-enabled cell phone or hand-held computer. Already, one-third of all Alaska customers check in electronically, and more than 5 million have used electronic check-in at airport kiosks.
This great autoimmunization of America may be turning out to have an even bigger impact on limiting job growth than the well-publicized outsourcing of manufacturing, electronic and banking jobs overseas.
As The New York Times observed recently, self-service machines “are already beginning to eliminate jobs and increase productivity.”
As with outsourcing, businesses see major cost-cutting potential by replacing people with machines or Web sites that can self-sell most products and services at a fraction of the overhead. Increasingly efficient machines that operate much like superpowered computers with as much or more reliability than human clerks are powering the trend.
While self-services machines clearly are obviating the need for many lower-paid McJobs, more powerful computers and lightning-fast broadband Internet access pipelines are attracting the attention of office workers away from interacting with their human counterparts.
Dealing with office politics and people they didn’t particularly like was regarded as “a complete or major waste of time” (62 percent) than surfing the Internet (39 percent), a Dale Carnegie Training survey office workers disclosed.
Finding the results “astonishing,” Dale Carnegie Training CEO Peter Handal said, “We presumed that in our increasingly technology-dependent work environments, surfing the Internet would rank high as a time drain, but we were surprised at how high office politics ranked in the poll.”
Although no big fan of office politics myself, I do worry about the increasing reliance on machines and their convenience vs. dealing with people.
I probably can’t wean myself from making airline reservations and buying books and CDs online or having my paycheck deposited automatically. But having tried the self-checking stand at my local QFC, I’m going back to Maria and Barb. Let them do the work. At least they smile while rattling off about whatever.
Write Eric Zoeckler at The Herald, P.O. Box 930, Everett, WA 98206 or e-mail mrscribe@aol.com.
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