Sainsbury’s reveals plans to use more robots

The robots are coming! This article highlights how Sainsbury's are contemplating job cuts, and substituting capital in favour of labour, by increasing the number of automated tills, warehouse robots and AI forecasting.

Of course, it's not a straight swap: it's clear that capital and labour are complements as well as substitutes, but it has distributional implications because it's likely to see a larger number of relatively low-skilled jobs replaced by a smaller number of high-skilled positions for those people involved in implementing, and maintaining an increasingly automated environment.

And, if you've got here, you might think about the cost implications, never mind how Sainsbury's might look to justify such an investment via investment appraisal.