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Re:Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 st... by jdietrich on Thursday October 26, 2017 @08:51PM (#15564664)
Robots aren't going to replace all of the service jobs, but I think they're going to replace more than we might imagine.

Over the last 30 years, more than half of bank branches in the UK have closed. Many older customers have been substantially inconvenienced by these closures, but they're on the wrong side of economics. Beyond a certain point, it's just no longer financially viable to keep a branch open. A lot of older people prefer DVDs to online streaming, but good luck finding a rental store in most towns.

The social effects may well be very ugly, but I think that most businesses will be quite ruthless about their deployment of automation. They clearly have no qualms about the impact on jobs and I don't think that they'll care if some proportion of their customer base is marginalized.

Re:Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 st... by nitrogen on Friday October 27, 2017 @12:07AM (#15565649)
There's good reason to prefer a disc over a stream, especially if you use player software that lets you skip the unskippable previews. The audio is better, the bitrate is higher, and you can rip the disc and store it somewhere safe.