...AND CHEAPER...:

The retail sector made massive strides in productivity during the 1990s, mainly thanks to the use of the new information and communication technologies in logistics. Perhaps automation has further to go in terms of delivering products to the supermarkets. But what would higher productivity look like in terms of actually getting groceries into customers' shopping bags?

The answer might well lie with Amazon's experimental store, Amazon Go. Customers put what they want in their bags and walk through a turnstile. A proliferation of cameras -- and an algorithm -- watch them, add up their bills and charge it to them. There is no checkout process at all.

This is spot on. In many retail industries, higher productivity means faster service. There are many routine services where getting more for less requires less time to be spent performing them. This applies to parts of many sectors of the economy. There are past examples -- think of the impact of the washing machine on doing the laundry or the ATM on taking money out of the bank -- but now we are seeing much more automation in new areas such as legal search, scrutiny of medical tests and buying train tickets online. There is surely much further to go as artificial intelligence advances.

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