Amazon is testing/using automated warehouse robots to stock their shelves- I imagine it would be a while until we did grocery stores with robots as it is a much less controlled environment and human beings are unpredictable. Plus running over a kid with a robot would be bad for all parties for a very long time.
This is the nature of technological progress. The loom, the cotton gin, the automobile. They were thought exercises, then flights of fancy, then the differentiator between visionary adopters in the market, and then sometime later- the absolute bare minimum for being able to stay in the market.
AI everything/everywhere isn't that realistic- not because of feasibility necessarily, but because of the perceived value or lack their of for any given application. But as a means to replace rote, occasionally hazardous and/or arduous tasks, I feel like that would be a great place to start. No workman's comp when someone falls off a ladder or makes a mistake. No father or mother that dies on the job when an improperly placed load shifts and collapses on someone. 24/7 shifts that don't involve working people to death or mental failure.
We're probably a few decades out at least, but we'll get there. Hopefully gracefully enough to figure out what to do with a swathe of society that's been made redundant.
Cars do have a high level of automation, but much of the interior still has a human operator. The AI puts a seat or door flap in roughly the right position, then the human centers it and triggers the drill motor that turns the screw and secures it in place.
Sure, it's not AI. It's not a deep reinforcement learning neural network trained with Nesterov subgradient momentum.
But robots are robots. Whatever it is, my cashier's out of a job.
I was a grocery store checker in 2007, when these devices were first announced. They are as capable as they were 10 years ago, handle the same edge cases as 10 years ago, and require the same human intervention as 10 years ago. And there are still human checkers at every store - usually they "turn off" the self-check at night, since the human that watches it goes home.
All this AI is just a "mechanical Turk" - using AI to perform most of the tasks a human doesn't want to, and keeping a human around for the edge cases that are too expensive to automate. Humans have such a robustness of variety and ability that we can quickly solve most issues. After a certain point, it just makes sense to keep a few humans around for the really rare edge cases, like the when the grocery store is flooding.
So instead of 2 people to a register (one to bag, one to scan), you can have one person man 12 self checkouts? Sounds like an amazing reduction in labor. Even if self-checkout were half as fast as traditional checkout, that one employee is effectively serving way more customers per hour than they would be doing traditional checkout.
Sure there are edge cases but on an average you still save a lot of time/money.
The job's just as lost, of course.
We've had ATMs for how many decades? And yet we still have staffed bank windows, for the edge cases the ATM can't handle, such as rolled coins. Sure, some rolled-coin ATMs exist, but they're more expensive. It's usually cheaper for a human to handle the rolled coins and other bank edge cases. Same with self-check and alcohol age verification. Same with last-mile driving for self-driving cars and trucks.
But no, that's not happening soon. It seems to be a weird dream of certain left-leaving people for AI to advance as they get minimum wages to rise, so that unskilled human labor becomes no longer cost-competitive with machines. Thus, they create an unemployable underclass that has to be kept alive with welfare systems/basic income and thus are captive votes.
There will always be some problems that are trivial to have a human solve, but very difficult for anything else. The Butlerian Jihad, and the underlying fear that robots will take every single job, is as much science fiction as hard light or teleportation.