There's a lot of fear with automation going around. It'll be interesting to see how the next couple of decades to with it but the fear is over hyped, the looms didn't ruin textile industry neither did sheet music ruin live music.
Every time we've seen a major change in industry there's been massive leaps in safety and productivity. As we see regularly, artisan crafts remain popular and in demand. Home automation with IoT is a emergent field providing a market for many a start-up. There is still employment available, with any of these leaps in industry jobs have evolved out of what was new, there will obviously be a field for automation repair, work flow development and a perfect opening for kaizen process improvement.
Some benefactors of automation.
Agriculture:
High definition cameras in sheds save a farmer a lot of time in checking, similarly the user of drones checking livestock and searching for lost livestock, combined with RFID or similar the tracking could be made a lot quicker and easier.
Stock delivery:
Most large shops already use this, entering incoming stock in to there point of sale systems, tracking sold goods and triggering alerts when goods need to be replaced, but it could be expanding to when and which shelves need to be restocked. This can be extended to vending machines, using something small like the raspberry pi, stock can be monitored, fed back to a central server, where the person handling stock can download there orders and load their van with exactly what they need. This cuts back on excess fuel consumption and journeys to machines that don't need it.
Retail:
Very few 'bricks and mortar' retailers take advantage of reservations like Argos or Schuh. Whilst it's a natural extension of Argos' retail model, Schuh have blended convenience and consumers want to view, handle and try a product. This is a very simple integration into a shops POS and massively improves the consumers perception of a company whilst helping solidify there place competing in an internet environment.
The automation resistance seems like a reason to bring in universal basic income, UBI a rant for another post. I worry people will cheat themselves out of opportunity being co-opted in to opposing what should make there lives better.
Those who fight change will die out.
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