Amazon has launched a real-world shop that allows customers to walk in, take what they want and walk out. No checkouts, no queues. As they explain in the FAQ about Amazon Go:

Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. Our Just Walk Out technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you’re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we’ll charge your Amazon account and send you a receipt.

This new model of shopping not only challenges established retailers, but it raises serious questions about the future of work and the changing nature of the economy more generally. Furthermore, it suggests the role of government will need to change, involving itself less with regulating business and more with redistributing wealth.

At this stage the store is only available to Amazon employees, though public versions are due to be opened in the US early in 2017. An Australian version is likely some time after that. Indeed, Amazon is currently gearing up to launch a number of its services in Australia, including AmazonFresh, its grocery delivery service.

All of these are likely to shake up the various cartels (Coles/Woolworths, David Jones/Myer) that dominate certain retail sectors in Australia, but it is Amazon Go that is likely to be the real disruptor.

The ramifications for employment seem obvious. In the US, around five million people are employed in retail, while Australia has 1.3 million and Britain 2.8 million. Stores like Amazon Go could therefore mean many job losses. Retailers could realise savings of something in the order of 15% of running costs, an amount that is likely to make the technology very attractive. And really, it is just the next logical development from the automated checkouts already in use in most supermarkets, or the self-serve kiosks McDonald’s is already rolling out.

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Of course, Amazon Go may create work too, most likely value-add services involving things like handling returns or gift-wrapping, but that is hardly likely to make up for other job losses. It will also need people involved in stock ordering and logistics, though again, not many. Amazon is already well advanced in using robotics to do these things, with years of experience developing such technologies in its “fulfilment centres” (the creepy name they use for their warehouses).

So by any measure, it’s hard to see how an operation like Amazon Go doesn’t ultimately mean fewer jobs.

Is it all bad? Of course not. I mean, no queues or checkouts? From a shopper’s point of view, what’s not to love?

Amazon Go addresses another rising problem too. There has been concern for a while that cities and other retail centres will hollow out as people increasingly shop online, but imagine shopping if all the big stores were like Amazon Go. With no checkout queues, it’s easy to picture a vibrant city or suburban centre where people come to buy the stuff they want, are less stressed about it and are therefore willing to linger in public spaces listening to buskers or drinking coffee. Who knows what other services they might avail themselves of?

But there is a more important point to make.

Amazon Go, along with businesses like Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, and even Google and Facebook, are part of a fundamental restructuring of the economy and the work that goes with it. It is not simply that the technology is causing jobs to be lost. It is that it is changing the relationship between businesses and employees, governments and citizens.

We are moving from a globalised world of manufacturing giants to a networked one of technology giants.

In the former, the role of government was to coordinate and create markets, local and international, and to define the rules under which we all operated. Firms themselves tended to do just one thing – make cars, for instance – and so benefited from a permanent, full-time workforce. This provided security and prosperity to a substantial middle class.

In the networked world of technology companies, firms are no longer stand-alone silos that do a single thing. They tend to be project-based, pulling together casual workforces to achieve particular outcomes. Their employees are almost by definition contingent (and often not technically employees).

The role of government in this sort of economy is more to facilitate innovation and education, but that won’t be enough.

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Left to itself, this sort of economy is also a recipe for massive inequality and insecurity. Platforms like Uber or Amazon Go, because they need so few workers, tend to funnel the wealth they generate to owners and investors rather than distribute it broadly via wages.

The role of government therefore becomes one of equalisation, of finding ways to see that the wealth generated in the new economy doesn’t simply flow to a tiny number of people at the top of the new corporations. The most efficient way for governments to do this is by the mechanism of a universal basic income, a guaranteed wage for everyone, that not only provides a financial floor below which no one can fall, but allows us to redefine the sort of work we do and find meaningful.

That is to say, by breaking the link between survival and work, UBI allows us all to not only benefit from the technology, but to reinvent what we even mean by the concept of work.

Aside from climate change, this reinvention of work is the most wicked problem facing humanity, and we can see the unease it causes reflected in the politics surrounding Brexit, and of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Pauline Hanson. What all these politicians have in common is they promise to “bring back the jobs” because they understand how important a decent job is to most people.

But developments like Amazon Go are a sharp reminder of how hollow such promises are. Our societies are being transformed right before our eyes. Automation is increasingly displacing human workers and so the politicians we need are not those playing on our insecurities by conjuring an image of the past, but those who can offer us a realistic vision of what comes next.

