Rise of the Machines

By PoliPundit ~ November 17th, 2003 @ 7:37 am

Striding into the airport here one recent afternoon, Kimberly Ward did not so much as glance at the two ticket agents waiting at the counter. Like most of her fellow travelers, she instead claimed an automated check-in terminal, touched its screen a few times, and took the proferred boarding pass with a quick smile of thanks.

Ms. Ward, 37, pays for gas only at the pump. She shops at Marsh, a supermarket in her neighborhood that has machines that let customers scan, bag and pay for groceries themselves. Her favorite bank teller is her A.T.M.

Dealing with humans in such situations “just slows you down,” she says. “This is a lot more convenient.”

My sentiments exactly! One of the most annoying little things in life is the lady in front of you at the supermarket checkout line who gossips with the cashier, then searches for her checkbook, slowly takes it out and carefully writes the store’s name…. Aargghh! So these days I only shop at supermarkets with automated checkout machines. No more checkout lines.

Of course, critics will inevitably carp about how the machines are stealing jobs:

“The types of jobs now amenable to displacement by technology is really something we haven’t seen before, said David Autor, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If you don’t have one of those jobs, you’re a beneficiary, because the lines are shorter and your airline ticket price won’t go up as fast. But it’s going to have a significant impact on the people in these jobs now.”

But this kind of change has always been inevitable. Once, most Americans were farmers. Now only about 3 percent of Americans are farmers. They produce all the food we need and more. What happened to all those farmers who “lost their jobs?” Well, they started making cars and refrigerators. And, when those jobs were taken by robots, they became computer engineers.

The beauty of the capitalist, free-market system is the constant change it produces. In fact, a society without disruptive change is a dying society. By that measure America has never been more vibrant.

Leftists, however, always complain about the disruptive changes caused by a dynamic society’s evolution. From the environmentalist who complains about “sprawl” to the union leader who bemoans “lost jobs,” leftists hate the visible manifestations of the finest economic system mankind has ever produced, free-market capitalism. That should tell you where leftists stand – firmly on the side of stasis, stagnation, decline and marxism.