Positions traditionally seen as starter jobs or bridge positions have become permanent ones for many people in the post-collapse economy, which is part of the reason you see the campaign for $15 minimum wage. Unfortunately, this type of low-skill employment is most easily replaced by Weak AI, which is developing quickly. If Toyota’s just-announced $1 billion investment in AI is any indication, that process will only speed up. What then becomes of the bellhop, shelf-picker and fast-food worker? 

From Heather Kelly’s CNN report about Tally, the inventory robot:

Retail stores typically have human employees who roam the floors, manually taking inventory with handled devices.

In a mid-sized store like a Walgreens, there are between 10,000 and 20,000 products for sale. Bogolea says it takes an employee 20 to 30 hours a week to audit all those items.

One Tally robot can scan 15,000 items in an hour.

Completely autonomous, Tally moves four feet at a time before pausing to take high-resolution photographs of everything on store shelves. It tags the images with metadata, like an exact location, and uploads them to the cloud. The system then matches those images against a store’s files of what exactly that shelf should look like and instantly creates reports.

If Tally sees the cereal aisle is low on Cheerios, an employee can quickly restock that shelf.•