No more human faces at the check out counter.

In the early days of autumn, my friend and helper made a trip to my local Rome supermarket to pick up some necessary provisions. By American or British standards it’s a small store, perhaps only ten stubby aisles, but it stocks dinner-table necessities. She found it closed for renovation, so she ambled to the even smaller supermarket just down the narrow street. That too was closed for renovations. Only at the third store, several blocks away, was she able to shop. She returned perplexed.

I, for once, was not. I knew that what were billed as renovations weren’t quite that. I knew because I’d sensed a transformation coming and now it was finally in motion.

The two closed stores were in effect removing their traditional checkout stations, for decades handled by clerks behind registers, and replacing them with barcode-only stations where shoppers could scan their goods themselves and be done with it. This system is already in use throughout the world, but Italy, as always uneasy about job reductions, had tarried. Unions, long a powerful force in Italy, could no longer stand in the way of simple convenience. More to the point, the country’s unions long ago lost their clout, neutered before the world of apps and artificial intelligence emerged.

So be it. No one deters progress.

This system is already in use throughout the world, but Italy, as always uneasy about job reductions, had tarried.

Yet there is a sadness about this overhaul. In one fell swoop it eliminates the tradition of long lines at supermarkets as well as the human interaction among customers and, more important, the back-and-forth between customer and checkout clerk.

When I shopped regularly, before I lost my vision, I had bonds of superficial friendship with several of the clerks in my own store and others. Men and women alike would ask about my health or chat about American politics ― all were once fascinated by Donald Trump ― while scanning my goods by hand. Knowing I was hindered, they’d pause to bag my purchases and, at times, chase after me when something fell from a bag. It was decent, charming, and by now quaint, or so I guess. That era is over, sir.

These literally de- or unhumanizing changes, de and un, in that they subtract from a previous reality of constant human contact in the commercial sphere, reflect some of the worries expressed by the likes of Aldous Huxley and others, starting in the decades before, but culminating in the late 1950s, as offices grew larger, cubicles more present, and chitchat more improbable, if not deterred by office policies insisting on work only at work. To fraternize could lessen the output of goods and services.

Huxley feared, though he did not live to see, the gradual but very real encroachment of extensive alienation, a worry made more tangible by the advent first of computers and later phones that could in effect stand in for human presence by allowing a myriad of functions to be conducted virtually. The swift advance of artificial intelligence has only further detached humans from discourse with other humans by providing surrogate voices carefully programmed to address and solve day-to-day dilemmas. AI’s sophistication will only grow over time, just as the number of emojis will balloon to eventually cover every nook of human emotion, rendering words, if not obsolete, then at least less vital.

Again, there is nothing at all abnormal in the desire of the species to prize both brevity and convenience. Nor is there a prerogative that elevates speech and writing above symbols, graphics, and videos.

Still, the supermarket “loss” is emblematic of a discomfiting change, at least among for the generation from the mid-twentieth-century. From my highly modest standpoint, something is lost in the extermination of checkout clerks. That modicum of relief created as the result of a brief chat, relief from sadness, passing depression, or from the drudgery of an otherwise straight and narrow day was a “task” the clerks came to naturally, since humans live in a society and a society is based on these small daily collisions, or was.

Church might be an exception, although there’s no telling when AI will take over sermons and homilies from the pastor or priest who is too busy texting.

It is these small collisions that are being gradually removed from the social and cultural wheels of the aggregate. We have fewer of our fellow beings to speak to. The concerns of the fifties, that machines would replace aspects of our traditional life, is now occurring, and no one can yet guess the consequences. Even boarding a plane, an act once filtered through agents, is handled by phone screen or kiosk. A wonderful, time-saving advance if it didn’t also minimize the chance to simply look in a woman’s eyes or at a man’s generous smile. In a way, planned and unplanned interactions are akin to society’s messy sweat glands. We are animals after all. In this scenario, apps are roll-on deodorants for another age.

I exaggerate, I know, but only to make obvious points. We are gaining, yes, but also losing, though nothing in what’s happening in my supermarkets would suggest the latter. Not yet. Not in an era in which dating apps have supplanted any chance of meeting partners “live,” since there are fewer and fewer occasions in which congregation is required. Church might be an exception, although there’s no telling when AI will take over sermons and homilies from the pastor or priest who is too busy texting.

Brave new world, Huxley once wrote ironically.

These days, those few who remember him are loathe to smile.