5.15 /// Automation: Convenience vs Experience & our changing habits

Hello and welcome to Infinite Prattle , Unscripted , unedited prattle on everything Hosted by me , Stephen , Listen like , share , subscribe and enjoy the show . Thank you very much for joining me today . Hopefully you are well and you've had a good week and you enjoyed the last episode , which I can't even remember what it was about .

These things are a blur to me , you know . I think it's not a lack of effort . I do think about what I want to talk about to a degree , but I don't really do a lot of research , as you probably find out . Sometimes I do .

Sometimes I have my computer on when I'm when I'm talking , just in case I want to google something , um , and you can probably tell when I'm doing that , because my speech will slow down . I can't do two things at once , um and uh . Oh , I've actually set my arm today as well .

My , my mic arm is back set up , although I am kind of scared at some point it will fall off the desk because I kind of made like a weird wooden block attachment a little bit of a steve-o diy bodge job when I first got this elgato arm , not a sponsor , um although elgato , join me in my three listeners .

Um , it could be lucrative , um , and the block is failing . Uh , I wrapped it in green , um , because of the green and the logo of steven speak when I started off and the green logo . Now there is still green in there , you may have noticed um , and wrapped in duct tape to like .

It was just like plain wood and I didn't have any paint really to paint it . I couldn't be bothered painting it , so I wrapped it in duct tape and , uh , yeah , but it's kind of loosening away from the side of the desk that I drilled it into .

So if you hear a big crash , bang , wallop , firstly it's not going to be too far from a normal episode and secondly , that's probably what the , what the noise will be . And you'll probably hear me swear quite a lot If you're new to the podcast . Welcome , by the way . But yeah , I don't really prepare too much for episodes .

I try to a little bit more , but I'm always thinking about what I can do next . So once I've done an episode , it kind of goes out my brain a little bit about what I've done . I generally can't even think about what that episode was . I know I did a Timu one . Was that the last one or was that the one before ? That sounded like I was in a shed .

I can't remember . Um , I feel like I need to check now . I feel like that . I need to need to kind of remember what the hell I've actually been up to ? Um , oh yeah it was , it was Tim . Oh yeah , it was Teemu .

Yeah it was , because the one that sounded like a shadow was the film revelation one where , like you know , reveals in films that I wasn't expecting . Oh , there you go , my brain isn't completely knackered .

Anyway , today's episode is about like automation of things , you know , you know kind of society and the world making things easier , uh , scientists making things easier , inventors making things easier , um , but also , does it make things nicer ? I suppose is is the , is probably the .

The thing here , um does having a lot of conveniences , like like , for example , like one of the big ones is like self-service checkouts . I I find in in shops nowadays , and I'm sure this happens all over the world , but a lot more in shops .

Even local convenience stores now , uh , in in the uk have self-checkouts and they've been , they've been around for a long time . But you'll you'll get like a bank of maybe 20 self-services which have replaced uh , five manual , like traditional kind of I don't know . You would call them servers , servers , desks , like cashiers desks .

That'll probably be the one on it , um , and and yes , I use them . So , before I start ranting about how crap they are . I will admit that I do use them , but for my own convenience . I use them as a convenience , like for me they are there if you've got only a few items .

Like , say , you pop in for a meal deal or something at Tesco's and you know there's a queue for the people queuing up for petrol or something and you can just nip in and out . For doing anything more than that I don't think they're convenient . They have got a lot better .

I remember when they first came out and you'd put something on the scales or you'd scan it and it'd put it on the side and it'd be like put something . Either it would be like you've not put the right thing in the basket or it would not register . And I think that we're kind of getting past that now .

Obviously things have improved a little bit , but it's still not great . It's still not amazing like these things do still like not work . For example , I went to there's a shop in in britain called matalan . It's a clothing shop uh , kind of cheapish , it's like high street brand and does some good deals and they've got self-service .

And I was in there with my wife and her mum and I decided to wait for the human person to serve me with my shirt that I wanted to buy , and my wife and her mum went to a self-checkout and I won , even though there was a bigger queue . There was a queue for the actual cashier . There was no queue for the self-service .

I got there first because of all the process that you have to go through . You still have to wait for a person to come and remove the security tags and to make sure that's been done properly . Then the system didn't work properly and then they couldn't scan the Malang card . They had to put it in manually or search their email or something like that .

So , even though I had to stand in queue for a few moments , I actually finished , probably about a minute before they did so . For me that's , that was a win , that was a justifying people .

Um , and I think probably one of the biggest things in all this like removing um , kind of adding convenience , potentially reducing cost for the people that own the shop remember in general , like you're kind of taking people's jobs away and you're replacing it with a machine that doesn't need brakes or anything like that is is the workforce .

You know you're taking people's jobs . Take my job , um , as south park uh hilariously did in one episode . Um , and I think this is this has been industrial wide for a long time . I mean this . This is not a new thing . Obviously , you have ticket machines at train stations now so you don't have to queue for a ticket .

Um , it happens so much like factories etc . Most of the stuff that probably I have in my room was hardly touched by a human and that's sad in some sense , but it reduces cost and it reduces cost but it massively increases profit margins . I think the biggest thing is human impact , so it's the job losses .

It's the five people you just replaced on the self-checkout .

You maybe kept one of them to monitor the self-checkout , but fundamentally you've replaced a load of staff with machines and they either will have to go on to a different job , maybe have a different job in the store , maybe lower paid , or be out of the job completely , and I think I don't know how we're going to address this in the future .

I think that's what's scary , especially with the advent of AI recently , and I must admit I use AI on my podcast , not for me , I am real , as you can probably tell by the chaos , but just when I upload stuff , I pay for a facility that it basically scans my podcast and it produces a synopsis , synopsis and and um , a transcript etc .

Which isn't always spot on . I quickly briefly read it . If you do ever see any massive faults in it , then let me know . But um , it's just , it helped me kind of streamline my process .

So it takes a while for it to like go through everything and actually produce it , so probably like sometimes up to half an hour , I guess it's depending on how busy the servers are . But then , once it's through , it kind of gives me an idea for a potential name for the podcast , because I have to name every episode and that's kind of hard .

Like I don't want to just put it . I kind of want to put something catchy . The whole idea of trying to increase viewers to a point is to have some sort of catchy tagline . But I also want it to be something that I want . So there's a compromise there . So to generate ideas the AI thing it generates like six or seven names for the episode .

That's really helpful . But I'm not employing anyone to do that . For me that's kind of created a job because someone's got to maintain that system and and and service I suppose . Uh , whereas I wouldn't in a , in a small scale operation like me , which is me .

I'm not employing anyone , so I'm not taking anyone's job way as far as I can see from my viewpoint , whereas in a supermarket or any establishment where they start taking tills away and replacing them with self-service and it's happened a lot In the UK some places have started putting people back again , which is good .

I think it was the supermarket chain Waitrose actually decided to reinstall cashier desks and employ more people , because it's basically one nice segue into what I'm coming to . Next is human interaction . As much as we go , oh , bloody hell , don't want , don't talk to anyone and I can be like that as well .

I can be a very , very social person and I'll talk to anyone strangers , etc . Um , but I can be very , very like , focused in my I do not want to talk to anyone as well . So I think that the human interaction when you go to a service outlet , it doesn't matter where it is .

I mean God , you can check into an airport now and fly a plane and hardly have to speak to anyone , which is insane really , if you think about it , Because you don't really speak to the security staff , they literally just point about where you need to go . So you can really do lots of things .

You can buy a car online , like online shopping , like Amazon , you know , you don't have to have any interaction , you don't have to go out to the shops , which is another thing probably driving the cost savings in these places , because obviously , with the advent of , obviously , online shopping , it's , you know , killing the high street .

And I must admit , I'm a massive advocate for high street shops , but unfortunately I shop online a lot . It for high street shops , but unfortunately I shop online a lot , um , because it's so convenient . It is so convenient , um , and I I do miss going into town , but our town is , unfortunately , where I live , in Crewe and Cheshire .

The town is dead , uh , partly due to jackasses like me shopping pretty much exclusively online . But it it's all that balance , isn't it ?

Because I know that the , the fees that they charge shops are so astromon , astronomically high that , um , they have to keep their prices higher and obviously wages go up and it's it's all a big shift then that you know they have to then try and cut corners or have smaller shops , which then don't you know .

You can't then have the stock , you can't still sell it at the same price and you're expecting people to come to you .

Like , the kind of ideal thing of online shopping is the inconvenience of sitting at home waiting for your delivery to arrive , which has kind of been kind of cut out with , you know , pickup points and Amazon lockers , because we're quite lucky , we have an Amazon locker literally about 50 feet away from our house , which is dangerous as well .

But yeah , you'll probably never get a high street shop that's as cheap as online . What I want to do when I go to the high street shop is see the thing , and that's the thing you can't do in your online shop . You can see the thing and I will pay a slight premium for that experience .

If it's something that I really need to see or it's something that's a bit more bespoke , like , I don't mind paying a few extra quid to actually have seen it and got that customer service and actually pay for that .

Um , but for most things in life , especially because , like online , shopping's got so easy now you can see everything , you can do little videos , you can read reviews , see people's pictures , you can google it from all these different research like viewpoints , that it's non-essential really to go somewhere . I don't know if I'd buy a car online .

Let's face it , I'd like to sit in a car and drive it , but it's not essential now to go and visit these places .

Which is driving all this faceless um automation ? I know it's been the same in factories for years , like robots building cars etc . But there's still people supervising that probably not as many people as would have been building the cars originally . Um , even where , where I in Crewe , bentley's are made . It's one of the biggest Bentley factories .

I think most Bentleys are actually made there or finished there . It might be exclusive I can't remember now because I know they moved some operations to Germany when Rolls-Royce kind of become Bentley , but they do a lot of stuff by hand still . They still hand-stitch the seats etc . So you know there's still stuff and craftsmanship like that .

But I can't afford a Bentley . You're paying for that craftsmanship and I think that that's kind of the juncture where we're at at the moment . I think the people that are realistic and want to save money . That kind of outweighs the need to go into a shop and that's sad .

Even when I was a kid , I remember Crew being a thriving place and you didn't have the option to online shop because the internet wasn't a thing . Yes , kids , that's true , and you had no option . If you wanted a CD or a tape as it was when I was a kid or a record or um , anything , literally anything there was . There was very few deliveries .

Pretty much the only thing I remember being delivered on as a kid was , um home shopping stuff . So like your avon , uh , which came by the Avon rep and couriered stuff from catalogue purchases . If you bought something off a catalogue , they used to come via courier . I can't remember many things when I was growing up that we got delivered .

Stuff came through the raw mail , which was generally normal post , just letters , et cetera but we never really had nothing delivered . It's crazy how that shift in like technology and culture has has driven like humanless jobs , um , and it does make me wonder . It really does make me wonder what it's gonna be like in like 20 years time .

Will we have a high street ? Will high streets be dead ? Will it all be like I was gonna say people , places , I meant like apartments and homes and offices and will we have lost that local handmade business kind of structure ? And , yeah , and companies always get bigger and bigger , uh , as they move to online .

And the weird thing is my I have a convenience store next door , uh , which is , um , it's currently in asda , which are owned by walmart , walmart , uh , and it's a petrol station as well . So , uh , gas station , you few american people , um , and I never go and get fuel there , really , unless I really really really desperate or I'm in a rush .

There's another petrol station I always go to because I can collect points and , uh , it's normally cheaper , uh , so I I use that shop as a convenience store more than a petrol station , which , fundamentally , when it opened , it was a petrol station , it wasn't a convenience store .

Uh , and these , these , these are the places that , to be fair , it kind of annoys me when you have a petrol station with a shop , because for me , petrol stations are petrol stations and I think they should have .

Um , that's one of the only times I don't actually mind using self-service exclusively as a petrol station , because they've kind of shot themselves the foot with the fact that I , if I want a shop , I'll go to a shop , I'll go to a supermarket or I'll go to a convenience store .

Um , if I want petrol , I'll go to a petrol station and I , when they mixed the two , that kind of annoyed me because you'd be in a queue waiting to pay for petrol and there's literally someone in front of you and they've done a whole week's shop in the freaking convenience store and you're like , really Like , firstly , this has cost you a lot more money

because there's a premium on these products because of convenience you don't have to drive to the big supermarket and secondly , it's meant to be a petrol station . I've bought petrol , I want to come in here and just pay for my petrol . That used to annoy me .

The one I go to is a is a chain called sainsbury's and I I drive a few miles to go to that one because save a bit of money and you get your next card points , which is a incentive scheme in the uk not sure they have it anywhere else , to be honest , and I'll drive there and film my car up .

But the shop next door to me , which is a petrol station I use as a shop , um , I'll go and steal bargains they've got they always have like reduced items and stuff and I'll just go and get milk and and and . Um , just you know last minute bits if we're cooking and we've run out of something or we need some extras , that's that's what I use it for .

Um , and it is a shop to me . That that's . And it shows that like kind of like weird juxtaposition , the fact that , um , petrol stations have become convenience stores but it's then no longer to be , it's no longer convenient to get petrol there because of everyone buying all these offers they've got .

And well , the one next to me is pretty much a mini supermarket it's . It's quite small but it has loads of stuff . So I don't mind at petrol stations when they have self-service on the actual petrol pumps . Um , it's probably the only time I pretty much exclusively use that .

But if I go in somewhere , like say , the shop next to me does have one self-service thing and I've never used it just because there's a person there and there's never really a queue and the only thing is you can't use that self-checkout for the petrol , you have to go to the person . So it's a weird like missed opportunity there .

And I think that I was listening to Michael Palin's diaries . He's released a new diary and , if you like Michael Palin or the Pythons or anything like that , it's a great list and he literally has documented his life .

I did an episode about me writing a diary and it did not last very long at all , but the quote that he came from from the 1999 diaries kind of really struck a chord in me .

It's kind of related to this , but he said he felt like he was living in a living in a world with less rules and formalities , and I think that kind of like goes into this scope of kind of what I've been talking about with like human interaction , um , and also kind of the thing I was talking about like people's moral compasses and people's behaviors that I

spoke about in another episode . I really think that the less we interact with people , the worse we get in , and I think that all these self-checkouts , etc . I've kind of honed in on that one You're removing these low-paid-skill jobs that students and stuff have always had in the past .

You always think of students getting cashier jobs , coffee shop you know coffee shop jobs . You know mcdonald's fast food restaurant jobs . It's removing them away and it's reducing people's interaction . I know people before that . You know if you've got anxiety , you don't want to speak to people .

They're a good thing , but in general , the more you avoid something , the worse that thing becomes . And I think that covid , um , and we're going to relate to covid so many times aren't we through our lives ? We were , you know , they're affected generations of that , I think in 2020 .

When covid hit , everyone was like yearning for kindness and exploration and human contact . Uh , it also made us too comfortable to not see people um very much , though , and that kind of hurts as well .

But kind of people were like I'm gonna do this for myself , I'm gonna do this for myself , I'm gonna spend money on myself , and if I meet a friend along the way , then that's kind of good . When I don't see my friends half as much , um , and that's partly my fault , I'm not gonna blame my , blame my pals for that , um , but I don't .

I don't see my friends half as much , and that's partly my fault . I'm not going to blame my pals for that , but I don't have kids A lot of them do , so there's a lot of responsibility on them to make the time for me , and it's probably easier for me to make time for them . But organising stuff is so hard now .

Just being an adult is just harder , isn't it Like one of the days when you're a kid and you just fly around someone's house on a bike , but not from a right tangent here , but you know what I mean .

I think that Covid did kind of push us all in a direction where we know we crave human interaction , but we also have kind of come out with that of you know it's okay to be alone , and then people's mental illnesses are kind of more heightened now .

So if , if you know you've got anxiety or or you know adhd or autism stuff , it's okay to kind of go and segregate yourself , I can't help but think that that maybe is a bad thing , um , yeah , I just don't know where we're going to be .

Are we going to be like the Matrix , where , you know , humans will start handing over jobs to robots and we'll just oversee them ? How do we generate money from that ? Surely the employment level would go through the roof and we can't sustain that . I don't , I don't know . It's a weird one , isn't it ?

And I know climate change is like a massive thing and maybe that'll kill us before this becomes an issue . Uh , but I think that the increased , the increased automation things and the increasing pressure for companies to save money and automate things , which isn't always a bad thing , don't be wrong .

I'm not not completely against stuff , but it's uh , someone's on my front door . Someone's on my front door . I think that might be my call to leave this podcast where it is . Um , as you can hear my dog probably going mental in the background , but yeah , I just don't know where we're going as a society and as a nation and as a world .

Where are we going with this , I don't know . Anyway , I'm going to leave that there because I'm really nosy and I want to know who's at the door as well . So , right , take care of yourselves and yeah , let me know what you think in the comments and chat and send me a message . You can do that if you look in the description of the episode .

You can send me a text message and , yeah , I will speak to you all soon . Take care of yourselves . You've been listening to Infinite Drattle . Thanks for listening . If you liked this episode , go back and listen to some others and please continue to listen . Your support is much appreciated .

Please like , share , comment and subscribe and I'll speak to you all again soon . Take care , like , share , comment and subscribe and I'll speak to you all again soon . Take care .