Amazon And The Future Of Retail
In a world where real interaction has been replaced by shallow online interaction, where the satisfaction of a communication is often a muted and channeled response that lacks the complexity of real human communication, some people’s human contact is limited to the interactions they have with people in the service industry. That particular subset of the human experience may be counting down to extinction.
I like technology, but at the cost of weakening societal links? That is something we should think a little more about, given the already obvious results of having a society fractured by algorithmically driven data sets that have broken apart the narrative of what the world is, and have divided people into two incommensurate groups that in no way share the same reality. I know that a lot of people are wanting to substitute too much time on social media for real life interaction, but now I wonder how many of them think about what it would be like to operate in a space where you don’t see human beings ever?
If you have nobody in a supermarket, why do you need anyone in a bank? Aren’t machines just more efficient? Why do you even actually need to speak to another human being when you can have an AI analogue to talk to? it will be interesting to observe the psychological effects of living in a world like this.
Amazon, as an online retailer, was one of the driving factors that lead to the closure of a lot of brick and mortar stores that couldn’t compete with the tech giant. It’s purchase of Whole Foods was met with similar worries. Now it has opened its first checkout free, and person free, store.
Other stores have been talking about similar moves — cutting down the friction that allows someone to move through a space with minimal interaction. Look at the reviews a place receives online though, and aren’t a lot of the things that we love about places the human interactions that result from them?
I think this may be one of those things that trends for a while, but I think the equal and opposite reaction may be that stores which have a more human feel to them thrive more — driven by that sense of disconnection that people are going to end up feeling.
It feels like it took a while for people to become aware that there was a qualitative difference between their Facebook life and real life (sure some people got it early on), but I think people enamored of the technology on display in the Amazon stores are going to go through a similar evolution. If they don’t then they are at least going to go through some subtle psychological shift that it may take time to unpack where they start to feel the impact of less people in their environment.
I’ve written before about how it is going to affect the workplace, and how Universal Basic Income may not be the necessary psychological crutch it is being pitched as. From within the industries that are driving us all to a more machine run culture, one has to wonder how much they are looking at the effect on human society, beyond the notion of killer robots, which is at the extreme end of the spectrum of how robots might replace us.
Bladerunner with its stratified class structure, enshrined as much in the access to technology, as any other kind of qualifier may be closer to where we end up than these movies with their violent endings. The broken thing about these futures is the main characters humanity, which has been buried under layers and filters of technology. John Donne may have been right when he asserted that “no man is an island” when he was talking about their native state, but he can make one of himself.
Slow encroachment, in an unevenly distributed wave of change, that wraps up an invasion of machines, in the soft attack of a seeming solution, is something we might truly only be able to combat by taking more care to nurture human contact, to build better human relationships, and to be less social media driven, and more social. So, I want to try and hang on to the interactions with people, and I am going to start with keeping the checkout girls.
