Andy Mitchell from Radio Wave - May 24, 2018

I read this week about the growing resistance to using those dreadful self service scanners in supermarkets. Not just because it’s a shop, and therefore we shouldn’t be serving ourselves, but because it’s obviously doing someone out of a job.

It got me thinking whether there’ll actually be any jobs for people to go to soon.

A shop in America (but of course) now has completely self service shops, I’m told. You use a swipe card to enter the store, browse the shelves while under constant surveillance from cameras, pay (with a card of course) and leave.

Driverless trains, we hear, are on their way. They bring with them their own fears. However, given that it’s taken Blackpool a hundred years after Morecambe managed electric trains, I’m not holding my breath that it will happen any time soon. Indeed I wonder if Northern have actually managed to find enough workers to run the existing trains so far this week?

It’s all very “Tomorrow’s World”, driverless this, automatic that and we see ourselves being in the digital vanguard to change in much the same way as the first Industrial Revolution led to massive job losses on a frenzied wave of modernisation.

However it does actually make you wonder exactly WHAT we will have left to do as a job soon. Yes that sounds lovely doesn’t it?...machines doing all the work, but has anyone actually stopped to think how we’re going to pay the ever increasing bills? We need to work to get the money to live, or have we forgotten in this great quest to be smart, that we are turkeys voting for our own Christmas?

I predict another mini revolution and resistance... modern day Luddites threatening not to “smash the looms”, but virtually “smash the computers”.

Mass disobedience might force change, you never know. I’m not against progress, but all I’m calling for is common sense.

Back in the supermarket, you can do your bit and save some jobs, while also acknowledging the niceties of shopping and remembering why you are paying the prices you are at the till, so the employer can employ people.

Don’t do their jobs for nothing. However convenient it may seem. Think of the long term implications, and never serve yourself in a shop.