Right, that’s exactly what he said. For a few years, a car could either have airbags or automatic seatbelts. So a lot of cars chose the cheap seatbelt option, and omitted airbags. Then airbags became mandatory, and suddenly then didn’t want to do the auto seat belts.

I don’t trust them with produce, but pretty much everything else it’s highly convenient for me. I’m certainly happy for the apps to tell me which aisle a food is in, but then I have to hunt anyway. It’s certainly not faster for me to walk around versus just picking up the ready to go ordered stuff.

We have lost most of the stores where a clerk will collect your items for you

Actually, pretty much the opposite, they are making a comeback in the form of curbside ordering. Walking through a grocery store or walmart nowadays there’s a large number of staff picking items from the shelf.

It’s been crazy to see people going nuts about having to scan their own items at the same time the bigger pain in the ass of picking the items is now being offered at no additional charge.

Also, trust myself better.

I have some soft bread, I at least know I won’t put something heavy on it.

I have some items that are fragile, I can keep track of them packing and keep them separate.

I won’t end up single-bagging a bunch of stuff that could be bagged together (e.g. if they scanned some window cleaner, they bag it separate, not knowing that some dishwasher detergent is coming that it could be packed with).

Got some product with a markdown barcode? I can be sure the discounted barcode gets scanned not the full price one.

To the extent possible, I can also just skip bagging most of the time. If I have some very small things sure I might use a bag, but mostly I just scan and put in cart.

Yeah, that robotics stuff is happening still (e.g. little robot mowers using machine vision for easier guidance).

But you are right that the prospect of advanced robotics gets a fraction of the attention that chatbots get. Trillions of bets on datacenter bound LLMs that can generate images, videos, and text but a relative pittance for advancements that would translate to physical labor…

I get that there’s value, but the value proposition seems way out of whack.