
I went to see a movie, and instead I saw the future - heshiebee
https://m.signalvnoise.com/i-went-to-see-a-movie-and-instead-i-saw-the-future/
======
cs702
From the OP: "This is the future, I’m afraid. A future that plans on
everything going right so no one has to think about what happens when things
go wrong. Because computers don’t make mistakes. An automated future where no
one actually knows how things work. A future where people are so far removed
from the process that they stand around powerless, unable to take the reigns.
A future where people don’t remember how to help one another in person. A
future where corporations are so obsessed with efficiency, that it doesn’t
make sense to staff a theater with technical help because things only go wrong
sometimes. A future with a friendlier past."

This reads eerily like the world depicted by the classic film, "Brazil," by
Terry Gillian -- a world run by impersonal machines and processes beyond the
control of most human beings. The plot starts with a fly getting jammed in a
printer, creating a typographical error, which results in the incarceration
and accidental death during interrogation of an innocent man; and that's just
the beginning. People in this world are _powerless_ , unable to take the
reigns, unable to help other human beings. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_\(1985_film\))

Let's hope humanity finds a way to build a different kind of future.

~~~
scruple
This has kind of been true in some sections of society for a while now, hasn't
it? In the places where corporations have gutted and displaced the humanity
that you used to be able to find. I've certainly seen and experienced the lack
of humanity (a lack of empathy is probably the way that I'd describe it)
explained away as, "Well, that's store policy, sir." for decades. I don't see
that going anywhere in the future. I agree with the OP that we can just expect
to deal with more and more of this in our lives.

As an anecdote, just this past week, at our local Target, my wife dealt with a
similar situation around getting an exceedingly minor situation resolved. As
part of a larger online order, we needed to get some lotion for our (< 1 years
old) twins. We received the right brand and type of lotion but not the child
version of the product that we ordered. My wife realized the error at the car,
before driving home, thankfully, and so she went back inside to get it
resolved. "I can't do that. The system requires 24 hours to pass from such and
such arbitrary moment in your transaction." or whatever. My wife had to stand
her ground, arguing with the employee about the issue, about how she needs it
_today_, because one of our girls has eczema, it's being exacerbated by the
dry winter weather, and we ran out of the same lotion this morning. That she
doesn't have time to run through the store to find it, wait in line to buy it,
and then for one of us to have to come back tomorrow still to process a return
for an incorrect item through no fault of our own.

She did get it resolved, but it took corralling a small set of managers and
then the store manager to do an override of some sort. Over 20 minutes of my
wife's time on a work day, after work hours, and when we have these very young
twins at home. We were trying to save time and instead it cost us. Because of
"the system.", etc...

------
nlh
I think this view could be abstracted as "tech is helping automate customer
service into oblivion."

I had a very similar experience this past week:

I wanted a new dryer for the apartment. The goal was to have the installation
process be as hands-off as possible, so I googled, ordered online from Home
Depot, and signed up for their "free installation" service. Click click click
done.

Every part of the process stunk. The delivery company rescheduled (they didn't
care - no connection to Home Depot itself), the guys who showed up came up
with some excuse as to why they couldn't actually do the installation, and not
only did they not care when I told them to cancel the delivery, they seemed
happy that they didn't have to do the work ("no problem! we're outta here!").

Home Depot customer service didn't care when I asked for a refund. Nobody
cared they lost a sale over something trivial and solvable. Nobody wanted to
solve the issue (it would be more work to do that), nobody had a stake in the
game, everyone got paid regardless. No humanity, just automatons dutifully
processing the commands given to them.

In the end? Ordered from the local appliance shop that's been in business for
100+ years. Single phone call. They cared. Perfect process, no Internet (or,
frankly, any tech other than an email confirmation) required.

~~~
gamblor956
That doesn't describe my experience with Home Depot at all. After I complained
about their contacted installer, the manager of the store called to apologize
and they had a new installer stop by at my convenience to redo the
installation for free.

Appliance delivery and installation companies absolutely depend on their
connections to big box stores to stay alive.

~~~
haydn3
It would be much easier for people to disregard the customer and not complete
sales in a big company like that though. It's not only more likely, it _ONLY_
happens with them. A small business would never have a company that delivers
be that disappointing and lazy, especially after complaints to their customer
service. Or even lack any sort of concern they lost a sale... Disappointing!

------
hisnameismanuel
My opinion is exactly the reverse. This is not the future. This is a story
about a company whose time is highly limited.

I have a company - not a start-up, just a regular ol business- - that will do
just under 7 figures of revenue in this, our very first year. 100%
bootstrapped from savings.

In an industry which normally requires a high level of trust (think $4000+
upfront spend), we've signed up dozens of customers with ZERO reviews or prior
reputation.

How?

We treat other people like humans - we talk to them like they're adults, treat
them like they're adults, and have created a very special product that meets
their needs as human beings.

Everything is designed from the ground up to be HUMAN FIRST, systems, policies
and software be damned.

As long as human beings are the ones spending the money, companies like _mine_
will own the future.

~~~
newnewpdro
Companies like yours get acquired and inevitably are corrupted in the process.

~~~
mschuster91
Companies like GP's get acquired _only if GP sells their share_. If GP
refuses, competition only has the alternative of either lowering their prices
so far down and cross-financing this with more profitable other stuff that OP
goes out of business or to provide actual human support.

In both cases the consumers win.

------
goldcd
What did you expect?

This isn't the future - this is how it's been for decade(s) and it's just you
only notice it when it "goes wrong" (for whatever reason)

When your cinema ran film, there needed to be somebody who could "deal with
film"... I believe there used to be a profession called "A Projectionist"

Pretty much from the moment films were digitally distributed, the multiplex
became a giant automated jukebox - only staff there are to sell you food and
to clean up the mess you left from your food.

First time I hit this (easily over a decade ago) was when somebody had left
the polarizing filter on the projector lens and we were trying to watch a 2D
film. Eventually we got somebody to "take the filter off" and we could
actually see the film properly - but then restarting the film descended into a
cluster-fuck of trying to convince the DRM system that they weren't trying to
show a bootleg showing and how even if they did restart, it was going to
through the centrally-planned multiplex schedule into chaos.

------
trimbo
This has been true since platter systems took over in the 80s and 90s.

Back in that era, I saw so many movies that had completely broken projection
and the staff had no idea what to do. Like now, it was so automated that all
they knew was how to click the button to start the movie. Today's cinema
systems are so much more reliable in comparison.

So maybe it's best to just acknowledge that there's a lost art here: film
projection. The best looking 35mm film projection I ever saw in a regular
theater was "The Man Who Wasn't There" at the Catlow. That theater had a
projectionist who had worked there since WWII[1].

But, thanks to technology like digital projectors with autofocus, almost every
movie I see today has better projection than that standout experience. It
looks beautiful even weeks after release, since there's no physical film that
gets scratched, starts to weave, etc.

[1] - [https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-
xpm-2003-08-31-030831...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-
xpm-2003-08-31-0308310194-story.html)

~~~
pdemporg
That was the way I was taught to think about print vs digital in the bio box
--- print degrades gracefully, slowly, while digital fails catastrophically,
abruptly.

I'm sure this is true of a wider scope of things than just cinema projection.

------
Magi604
At first this article seemed like some sort of new "interactive movie" thing,
but I was mildly disappointed in the end to read that it was actually just
about a technical problem at the movie theater. (don't get me wrong, it's a
good article)

>"This is the future, I’m afraid. A future that plans on everything going
right so no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong. Because
computers don’t make mistakes . . . A future where corporations are so
obsessed with efficiency, that it doesn’t make sense to staff a theater with
technical help because things only go wrong sometimes. A future with a
friendlier past."

It doesn't make sense for a theater to have a high-paid techie on staff to
handle the small percentage of the time some major technical glitch happens.
Instead of the theater hiring technical staff, they can now put that money
towards a better overall movie-going experience (those times when glitches
don't happen anyways).

I guess I just don't agree with the author of the article that this is a bad
thing.

~~~
simion314
>I guess I just don't agree with the author of the article that this is a bad
thing.

The people working there can't fix the issue so for next days/weeks this bugs
can repeat. What kind of complex tech is there you can't train someone to fast
forward a movie? It could be some DRM protected computer that plays the movie
and you need special keys to do anything more then plug it out and back in.

~~~
dwild
> The people working there can't fix the issue so for next days/weeks this
> bugs can repeat.

They probably have a technician on call which can answer before the next day,
but not instantly during an issue.

The most likely issue is a part that broke, you really expect movie theaters
to stock parts for everything and always having someone able to replace them?
Your ideal movie theater would bankrupt quite fast. Instead the chain may have
a stock for many theaters (or a contract to get replacement quick) and a
technician able to go from one to another quickly (or again, a contract for
this).

> What kind of complex tech is there you can't train someone to fast forward a
> movie?

It's not clear from the article whether he did wait enough or just abandonned
once they got the movie back on.

I frequently go see movies, so I have seen many technical issues and they
always were able to fast foward. No technical issues are alike and them
figuring it out is clearly always a struggle, so it's rarely quick to fix.

~~~
simion314
>The most likely issue is a part that broke, you really expect movie theaters
to stock parts for everything and always having someone able to replace them?

>I frequently go see movies, so I have seen many technical issues

That sucks that this happens frequently.

~~~
dwild
> That sucks that this happens frequently.

Never said it happens frequently, I see in average 50 movies a year and I have
been doing this for the past 6 years. It's just the good old Murphy's law.
There's so much software engineer here, it's weird that it's not a concept
that we are aware of.

In my whole life I probably got 5 issues in a movie, they weren't able to fix
it only once, and the manager told me there was a burnt smell in the
projection room, so I guess it was the good old magic smoke that escaped.

------
skrebbel
It's nuts how similar this story is to the numerous HN comments I've read
about people running into trouble with their Google accounts.

~~~
texasbigdata
Someone replied on one of those threads that with (made up number) 2 billion
users, of which 0.5 billion probably lack basic computer literacy x $15 per
hour x 1 ticket per year... Etc etc ....it works out to be like 50% of
Google's profit or something. And they end up employing 20,000 FTEs in call
center.

Or you know....they don't.

Not really sure what the right answer is here but I don't feel it's my right
to tell google to spend $X billion a year in service.

Maybe a competitor comes up with service, and google gets beat.

~~~
Nextgrid
Support could be paid. If it ends up being Google's fault the fee is refunded,
otherwise the fee is kept. This will deal and scale no matter how many idiots
are calling as they're the ones paying the people answering the calls.

~~~
jessedhillon
Charging for support, even if it's contingent as you described, would
definitely be more of a drag on brand than having no support.

------
arkitaip
Most of us in tech have not only seen this future, we have coded and design
it. Systems with little or no human interaction so when things go terribly
wrong, there is no course of action that people can take to solve their
problems. It's probably going to get worse with mediocre AI working on huge
data sets, "don't blame our product issues on us, it was the AI that caused
it... and we have no idea what the hell is was thinking.".

------
gigama
"A future that plans on everything going right so no one has to think about
what happens when things go wrong. Because computers don’t make mistakes. An
automated future where no one actually knows how things work."

Sounds like a good plot line for a movie...

~~~
ovi256
This is already a big theme in Brazil. When you have an air conditioning
malfunction, there's no one to fix it. An underground system of guerilla
technicians develops, outside the bounds of the law, because they're not
supposed to exist.

~~~
Anthony-G
When I read the first sentence, I thought of the country. For those not
familiar with the Terry Gilliam science fiction film from the, it’s worth
clarifying that _Brazil_ is the name of a film:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_\(1985_film\))

------
cwyers
Digital and analog movies fail in different ways, but when a movie exhibited
on film fails, normally there's not much the theater staff can do about it in
time to keep on schedule anyway. I really don't see what most of this story
has to do with "the future" \-- going to the movies 15 years ago on a gift
certificate when there's a projector problem probably has about the same
outcome.

~~~
mschuster91
The biggest issue that the author seems to have had was the lack of trust in
humans and the lack of information at that cinema.

The staff had no one who had any knowledge about the technology, the cashiers
had no power (=they were not trusted to not abuse) to issue refunds, and no
one including the manager had any idea of _telling the people what 's going
on_.

It's similar to public transport issues: passengers are way more likely to not
be frustrated when you tell them "so, someone threw themselves in front of a
train, we're sorry but there won't be any service for hours, please take these
cab vouchers", compared to leaving them in the station with "train delayed by
10min", followed by "delayed by 20min", "delayed by 60min" and so on. If I
know there won't be a train for 2 hours, I can hail a cab and get out of the
mess vs losing time in waiting for a train that's not gonna come and be
frustrated as hell.

------
wellpast
Will consumers reward businesses that correct for this?

Alamo Drafthouse has always seemed humanity-first to me from movie
programming, to community-based events, to viewing experience. Their patrons
seem to appreciate it.

~~~
profmonocle
The best part of the Alamo Drafthouse is that they don't show ads before
movies (besides trailers). Instead they do a fun, in-house series of videos
specific to the movie.

Ads at other theaters have gotten so bad that I'm willing to drive out my way
to go to Alamo instead. The last movie I saw at AMC didn't actually start
until 30 minutes after its scheduled time because of ads. (Less than half of
that was for trailers.)

------
m-i-l
If you're going all in on automation, at least try and do it well. In this
case I don't see any technical reason why you couldn't have automated
monitoring of the screenings, automated raising of alerts if there are issues,
remote debugging from some central service desk, centrally controlled
announcements to keep customers informed, etc.

And if you're not going the automation route, make personal service a
differentiator. In the UK we have the Everyman Cinemas doing this for example,
offering sofas with tables, a table service for food and drink, knowledgeable
and enthusiastic staff, etc.

~~~
hug
> I don't see any technical reason why you couldn't have automated monitoring
> of the screenings

Well, I suppose the first question is whether or not your automated monitor
contains a Mysterious Hum Detector, and whether or not the case of a
Mysterious Hum happens frequently enough to be worth rolling out the
Mysterious Hum Detector to every screen in every one of your cinemas.

Also: The Audio Has Accidentally Been Set To French detector, and the Dammit
Something Has Fallen In Front Of The Projector detector are equally hard to
implement.

Automating uncommon real-world events is significantly harder than you might
think.

~~~
zinodaur
I bet you could make a Mysterious Hum detector that worked by having a camera
and microphone installed in the theater that compared what it was seeing and
hearing to what it was supposed to be seeing and hearing.

But I agree with you that it would be relatively pointless - any resolution to
a problem like that probably needs physical intervention to resolve.

And anyways that theater was full of mysterious Hum detectors. The article was
written by one!

~~~
hug
You're right: They could implement some kind of autonomous general
intelligence to assist in resolving issues.

Probably take about 9 months to build an MVP, but about 16 years worth of
training data until it's able to handle most cases.

------
pacificenigma
Reminds me of yesterday trying to collect a hire car in central Stockholm from
a Hertz "intelligent locker":

1\. Texted PIN to get into garage didn't work. After 5 minutes just tailed
someone else through the door.

2\. Locker rejected non-Euro drivers license. Call to contact centre overcame
it.

3\. "Prefilled" customer details were all wrong and didn't match confirmation
email. So 10 minutes to retype them.

4\. Exit boom gate wouldn't open. Garage said to call hire company. Hire
company said they cannot open it. 3-way call resulted in garage employee
begrudgingly pressing a button to remotely open it.

Not to single out Hertz, last week we returned an Avis car to the reservation
specified location at the correct time (10 pm), but a sign there stated the
key drop was "permanently closed" and to deliver it 5 km away. We had an
overnight train to catch so were forced to urgently do so and incur the return
taxi fare.

I'm unsure how far society can keep shoving incompetent automation down
peoples' throats. I understand that people generally want to save money, but I
think many want high-impact experiences (like 3 kids + 2 adults + transport
mode changes) to go smoothly enough they will happily a little pay more to
derisk it.

------
SlowRobotAhead
My Dad was extremely good at talking to people. Too good sometimes, when it
called for a short interaction it would become a longer one (still usually
benefited him).

He had a saying I never liked about low wage workers who didn't understand
what they were doing or have any power outside of their task:

 _" A system designed by geniuses, to be run by idiots"_

... Might be a little harsh, but I think he was on to something. The workers
in this article had no power to correct anything, they had no responsibly or
opportunity to learn, the turnover is probably very high and coincides with
semester starts/ends. They're allowed to be worthless when something goes
wrong, maybe the author is right and some are even encouraged to be.

How many people have seen code that is written for " _things only go wrong
sometimes_ "? Yep, but when they do!

~~~
c-smile
Another one:

"Design a [programming] language that even idiots can use it and only idiots
will use it".

------
CapitalistCartr
Twenty-First Century corporations either don't offer any public access at all
a la FAANG, or build a wall of useless people to interact with the public, to
mask the reality that they are just like FAANG.

~~~
MagnumOpus
Don't include Amazon - they have empowered customer support who solve your
problems. Which is why they have loyalty despite devolving into an eBay-like
dropshipper marketplace.

Apple, Google, Facebook - yes, don't expect help if you do business with them
and don't have a million Twitter followers to make a stink...

------
freeone3000
The problem was that there existed humans to complain to. Imagine if there
were no people at all. No ushers to track down. No staff. The box office an
automated kiosk. Nobody to actually complain to. The only option available to
submit a ticket online, where it could be properly triaged and a technical fix
dispatched according to optimal scheduling. The author would have requested a
refund from Fandango, and may or may not have received it, but we would have
saved the time of at least five people who otherwise would have worked at a
movie theatre.

~~~
cwyers
Saved it for what, though? If they didn't have jobs, they wouldn't have
incomes (yes, yes, UBI, good luck with that).

------
scarejunba
I’ll take the small chance of this any day of the week so I can get $15 movie
tickets. I know I will because I go to the Metreon AMC and the Century
Westfield way more than I go to Alamo Drafthouse.

------
prepend
I have recently started using Office 365 at work, and it seems like a similar
setup. Our in-house tech support are fine when stuff works, but if something’s
wrong they have no idea. No word from Microsoft. Maybe if there’s a major
outage, they’ll know something. A file disappears from OneDrive, there’s no
help.

Overall, it’s a net positive, I think. But I feel bad for the humans in these
non-jobs. Once roombas can clean movie theaters and show people how to set up
Word on their phone, then it’s game over.

------
davedx
The very definition of an anecdote.

The cinema in my town in Ede, the Netherlands is fantastic.

Hmm, who would have thought it that 2 businesses could operate... differently?

This has nothing to do with computers or the future...

------
dvh
Reminds me of Foundation

~~~
bencollier49
Good call. There's a point where the sheer number of different systems,
largely created by automation, make it difficult to troubleshoot and fix
devices.

This puts an interesting angle on the "right to repair" issue. No-one has a
clue how to actually repair stuff - just replace it, and dump the broken crap
into landfill.

------
stblack
I wonder how different this story would be if the “manager” wasn’t ensconced
in the office? The mechanism works something like this:

* The “manager”, mostly not giving a shit.

* Employees, under no meaningful oversight, goof-off.

* Problem occurs, nobody notices. Customers can’t find staff...

It’s all downhill, from the top-down.

~~~
Nextgrid
The problem is that the manager has no incentive to actually care. The job is
boring, low-paid, you have very limited power to do anything, and profits to
the theatre don't actually reflect on their paycheck. Given these conditions,
from their perspective it makes total sense to put in as little amount of work
as possible.

This story would be much different at a small family-owned business (or as
some call "lifestyle business"); chances are the problem wouldn't happen to
begin with, but if it did the manager would care much more because their
wallet's contents are directly proportional to customer satisfaction.

~~~
__d
The "manager" is just an hourly-rate employee with a slightly different set of
permissions and duties. They have no greater investment in the outcome than
anyone else on the staff.

But the same thing almost certainly applies to everyone at the remote
"headquarters": why should they care either? They have no incentive to care:
they're paid to show up and be there for their shift.

It's just a stage of the process that's been ongoing for decades. Companies
treat staff as resources, and finally (at least 40 years later), staff at all
levels are behaving the way they're treated.

------
edgan
This isn't tomorrow. This is today. This is what I live daily when talking to
others as a DevOps engineer. Everyone thinks everything just works, and
doesn't under why you still need SSH access to things for debugging.

------
Zedronar
Excuse me, how can people be so concerned about this while we have a major
climate crisis going on that affects 7 billion people? It blows my mind.

~~~
bradenb
Because life has to be worth living to want to fix it.

------
imgabe
No, your one bad experience probably doesn't mean that everyone's experience
will always be bad forever now.

I'm sure people have occasionally had bad experiences at the movies for as
long as there have been movies.

------
bbulkow
this has some elements of cultural difference. in America, we want to be
coddled with empty sorries and emphatic statements. the reality is seeing a
movie is a transaction, and in many other countries, they don't get as excited
about seriously apologising over and over.

how much extra money per ticket would you pay for those sorries in exceptional
circumstances? when i was growing up, i went to a 'mom and pop' theater.
people knew each other, you got to know the owner and talk to him about what
he was booking.

he was priced out. most people prefer saving a few bucks per ticket, and will
give up sorries to get it. that's capitalism for you, giving people what they
actually want, not what they ask for it think they want. capitalism follows
the money.

------
Causality1
I've never had an experience remotely like this. It makes me wonder where the
author is from that their standards of customer service are so low.

------
einpoklum
> I went to see a movie, and instead I saw the future

When I read this title I was sure the author had gone to see Idiocracy.

------
boyadjian
This is not specially the future. This is the low cost. When you pay a minimal
price for a service, you have a minimal service.

------
koheripbal
Movie theaters are run by teenagers and young adults. It is no surprise that
they cannot handle hiccups.

------
zamfi
> This is the future, I’m afraid. A future that plans on everything going
> right so no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong.

Many organizations have one of two perspectives on customer service:

A) It's an opportunity to ensure customer happiness and repeat customers.

B) It's a cost to be externalized to the customer as much as possible.

The organizations in group A are often like the local appliance shop nih
mentions in another comment: small, with an interest in repeat business, and
relying on word-of-mouth as the primary customer acquisition channel. They may
be in a competitive marketplace nominally (i.e., there are big chains around)
and so they know they can't compete on price, so they compete on convenience,
attitude, help-when-things-go-wrong, advice, etc. Customers are often not so
price-sensitive that they'll always go with the cheapest option. This used to
be many businesses, but technology grants advantages to those in group B --

The organizations in group B compete on price, or exist in a local environment
in which they don't really to compete for customers. Movie theaters, insurance
companies, FAANGs, etc. -- they know that most customers are not _really_
there by choice (at least anymore, perhaps they used to be) -- they're there
because that's where their friends (F), the best stuff (A, A), their favorite
movies (N), or the quickest results (G) are. They're there because their
employer has a contract (insurance companies), they're there because it's the
only theater in town, they're there because it's the strictly cheapest flight
from SFO to YYZ.

For group B organizations, a dollar spent on customer service is a dollar
lost; when things go wrong, it's up to the customer to resolve it, and the
customer incurs basically the entire cost of this "fixing" it, even if the
organization nominally issues a refund. The OP here was not reimbursed for any
of the costs incurred by the theater's screw-up. When insurers deny claims
spuriously and force their customers to do the leg work to show they're in the
right, and the insurer doesn't reimburse the customer for the cost of time,
energy, missed work, etc -- and would almost certainly laugh at an invoice for
work the insurer _should have_ done, but didn't.

After all, what's the customer going to do about it? They probably can't or
don't want to switch to another vendor. If there even is an industry
regulator, it's almost certainly not going to be worth it for an individual
customer to even file a grievance.

> no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong

I think it's less that "no one has to think about what happens" when things go
wrong, it's that the _cost_ of things going wrong has simply been passed along
to the customer.

One way to think about the extra cost of customer service for a company is as
a mandated "insurance" plan for the customer when something goes wrong. The
cost is spread across all customers, but the benefit only accrues to those who
have something go wrong, or who want smiles -- except of course it also
accrues to the customers who value the knowledge that _if_ something goes
wrong, there's an insurance policy for it.

Few people pay for insurance when they don't have to, so perhaps it's no
surprise we see a trend towards group B.

------
j88439h84
typo: reins not reigns

------
notatoad
So the author had a poor customer service experience, and blames it on "the
future".

This is the sort of rant I expect from my grandpa, not the blog of a tech
company.

~~~
op00to
The future point the author makes is that all skill has been taken out of most
jobs, and almost all power to boot. In the future, no one will be able to
handle exceptions not caught by the software.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
Right. Systems are only getting more complex. What happens when a wildly
complex AI decides that you should not be sold a ticket to this movie or
train, and there are no attendants around because why would there be? They
haven't been needed for years, "the system does not make mistakes". What if
it's an AI that has lethal measures to protect an area (etc etc)?

~~~
arkitaip
This is already a thing in China and their social credit system. Lose enough
points and you can be prevented from buying a train ticket or booking a flight
[0]. You can probably imagine that rectifying errors in this system is...
troublesome.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/china-
bans-23m...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/china-
bans-23m-discredited-citizens-from-buying-travel-tickets-social-credit-system)

------
rhacker
When all of you damn people eventually move to a small town, please drive
slow, turn down your damn car audio system. And finally, don't make life about
money. The race doesn't need to exist. Cook at home, and don't beg New
Seasons, Natural Grocers or Whole Foods to move to your new home.

Everything that happened at that movie theatre and almost everything around
you in life is due to population scale.

~~~
rglullis
I can relate and would completely agree with you if I haven't lived in Europe.
But it is not just a matter of population scale, it is also a matter of urban
design and the scale of the communities.

Take Berlin for example, a city of ~4 million people, and you can still find
on every neighborhood smaller businesses, shops, bars and cafés where the
owner actually knows most of the patrons for years, etc. You can find the big-
box movie theater, but these are the absolute exceptions.

In a way, in the resulting story from OP the consumers are to blame just as
much as the managers/business people: people want maximum convenience, minimum
price and minimum person-to-person interaction? It should be no surprise that
this is what they are getting.

------
alexashka
This is what being completely out of touch and rich looks like when you didn't
grow up rich.

Now imagine what thoughts go through the heads of second and third generation
rich kids.

Now imagine that politicians are mostly those rich kids.

That's the present, and the future. Jason, you're part of the problem you're
complaining about and you don't even know it. So it goes.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
>Jason, you're part of the problem you're complaining about and you don't even
know it. So it goes.

I'm sorry, I don't understand. Do you think you can clarify this a little bit
for me?

