bump is absolutely correct - you can buy all the liquor you want at your local Target or Safeway in CA. There are no restrictions in place for alcohol content or type. And liquor stores continue to thrive. Small corner places do well wherever supermarket/box store penetration is lousy ( many poorer or remote areas ) and specialty stores like BevMo or wine merchants wherever there is cash to support them( everywhere in the Bay Area ). Might be a case by case situation, but liquor stores are not fading in permissive California.
Contrary to popular opinion, not everybody has a smart phone.
And the stations won’t be “expensive computer displays” – they’ll probably be $200 tablets, or something similar. The store could install several of those, and still recoup the money in saved wages in short order.
Eh…penetration in the U.S. is at 64% as of this year. Five-ten years from now I think you may have a point, but as of right now I think ignoring up to a third of the customer base would be a poor decision( even granting some percentage of non-smartphone users are probably underage ).
I’m not sure about manufacturing jobs disappearing due to automation and robots.
I work on an automated machine and I can tell you, it takes a LOT of maintance to keep running smoothly. All the joints and bearings running smoothly. Belts tight. The computer controls break down all the time. I’ve seen million dollar machines go down because of a piece of paper in the wrong spot. You also have to have someone feed in the raw ingredients and if those are wrong somehow, the machine breaks down and jams.
And then their is output. If the output goes into a bin, what happens when that bin is full?
Then you need people who are always doing quality checks to make sure the output is right. If it isnt sometimes you have to throw out a whole days run and recalibrate the machine.
Its sometimes easier and cheaper to do a job by hand.
There are plenty of travel agents and they do well - the internet has made it possible to fully plan your trip, but it is still diffiicult and timely to do it well. I wouldn’t use one to drive to another US city, of course, but for an international trip? I’d think about it.
If we continue to work long weeks swamped with emails, meetings and bureaucracy, then the market for PAs, both AI-based and flesh and blood could well grow significantly (and when I say PA I don’t necessarily mean personal; perhaps a facilitator can help a number of people).
I think already there is a market failure in this respect: the need is there, but culturally we don’t know how to define that role and/or associate PA only with top-level managers.
OTOH, if the final result of AI is to start to cut down the working week, then more jobs in entertainment and leisure. Jobs creating content for games, or VR / AR environments, might become commonplace and not just at the low level of doing the programming or artwork.
If you can get the traveling public to get on an autojet…
And first you need an airline to gamble that the public will get on an autojet…
“But won’t the technology be proven on freighters first?”
Probably not, because freighters tend to be old and cheap, not state of the art.
My contribution to the OP:
Aerial photography is already being done by drones, I expect this trend to continue until being an aerial photography pilot is almost unheard of. What will those pilots do? Most will just do other low end flying work, but some will be drone operators.
How will this happen? A drone find your house more efficiently than a human driver, but after a 10 mile flight, how does it handle the final 10 feet? How does it find the door? Does it just drop the package on your lawn?( if you have one).
Suppose the front door of your house has a covered porch, with flowering plants hanging overhead, and ivy growing on a decorative trestle on the sides.
Or suppose you live in an apartment building where the lobby door opens directly onto the sidewalk, (ie. a tall high-rise building in Manhatten, or a brownstone in San Fransisco? )
In my head, if I was using the service, I’d want to be able to click the exact spot (on a Google Maps type interface) that I want the parcel to be dropped. I live in a free-standing house, so I’d get parcels dropped in my backyard.
Yes, you’ll still need parcel delivery people if you want something dropped at your door and you live an apartment building, but even then, I see a business opportunity for someone to open a “24 hour parcel pick up service” in your local area, where you can drone-drop your parcel directly in to a locker or something.
Flying drones strike me as being an absolutely ludicrous way to deliver packages. If you said “Rick, I want you to design a way of delivering packages that is technologically super cool but ridiculously expensive and commercially insane” flyoing drones would be my #2 choice, just behind actually putting the packages in ICBMs and launching them through space.
The logistics and chaos of having an immense fleet of drones delivering packages is just crazy. I’m honestly trying to figure out how to make it sensible from a business point of view and every solution I come up with presents three more problems. You’re basically building a damn air force. What is much cheaper and easier than maintaining, programming and flying hundreds of drones from a drone airbase is one guy with a cheap van. Even if the van drives itself it’d be easier to have a guy in it to hand out the packages.
Aerial photography done by drones, now, that makes a hell of a lot of sense, but that is roughly .001% the industry that package delivery is.
You could buy liquor in almost any convenience or grocery store when I left CA in 2011. Has liquor been pushed out?
New England laws are pretty retro, CT’s especially. While the local super sells beer, everything else has to come from standalone stores that can’t sell anything else. Anything. They are limited to something like 5% of floor space even for things like mixers and chips.
Not sure where you are, but over my 25 year career in corporate USA, I’ve seen administrative assistants become nearly extinct. When I started, each department had an admin. Over time I’ve seen them laid off and not be replaced. Today in the last few companies I’ve worked for, only the Chief Executives have admins, and often times two or three chiefs share one. Everybody else in the company is expected to type their own letters, emails, do their own filing, order their own supplies, etc.
No one reasonable ever said that manufacturing automation would eliminate humans on the factory floor - well, maybe the Japanese have, here and there - but you’re talking a handful of supervision and maintenance people replacing dozens, hundreds, even thousands of hand workers.
There hasn’t been much talk about consequences in this thread and maybe that’s not what it’s about, but the bottom line is that the number of “good” jobs in most fields has been shrinking for decades, with only modest growth in the counter industries of maintenance, programming etc. (for these purposes). Nearly all job growth in the last 20 years has been “service” - and we’re pretty well serviced up, now.
That’s already being put all over the place in European countries. The first locations were heavily-touristy ones where the ability to have the menus in a ton of different languages is very handy, but they’re definitely spreading. First two I saw were McD Sagrada Familia and McD at the main Barcelona train station, last one I’ve used was in an industrial area in France.
In those locations there are several traditional lines, where you place your order, pay for it and get it, and a single line for the people who have used the columns. Your ticket gets a number, when the number comes up you go get the trays. The person handing you the tray checks that the number is correct, that the order is complete, and adds sachets of condiments as required.
I know several “concierge companies” which offer that service among others in Barcelona. You set their address as the delivery address and they either bring the package when you’ll actually be home or you pick it up from them.
It all goes back to Prohibition. Before then America had an alcohol culture that was astonishing by today’s standards, with a per capita alcohol consumption rate that was sky-high. Prohibition was a reaction to this. But when it turned out that abolishing alcohol was neither possible nor really wanted, after Prohibition was repealed the default was a series of state and local laws regulating the sale of alcohol. These include restrictions on when alcohol can be sold, liquor licenses for bars, rules about how and when restaurants can serve alcoholic beverages with food, municipal liquor monopolies, etc. In other words, making consuming alcohol just inconvenient enough to stem the tide of inebriation, to avoid going back to the old days of having almost literally a saloon on every corner.
).