Mrs and I go back and forth about self-checkout, because she thinks it's good for people to "have jobs" and I'm more of the Socratic opinion. You'll recall that Socrates is quoted "not life, but good life, is chiefly to be desired". That served as a launch point in his dialogues about what a "good" life consists of.

Socrates was very comfortable with the idea of euthanasia - choosing a peaceful exit when life became more misery than joy. Not the same kind of "self-checkout" ... but I digress ...

So "not jobs, but good jobs, are chiefly to be desired". And jobs for the sake of jobs are a waste of humanity - we've long passed the tipping point where mankind overproduces everything we need for everytone to live a comfortable life with far less than the standard 40-hour workweek, and it's only the archaic demands of the capitalist class (to be allowed to skim, leverage, hoard and waste the fruits of labor) that keep unnecessary jobs like "checkout clerk" going.

So what does that have to do with automation? Automation, in its simplest essence, is "encapsulating procedure" - offloading anything that doesn't require human intervention, to unintelligent processes.