Dive Brief:

• It's a brave new world, and machines are doing much of what humans once did. But there is one job where humans outperform machines on a regular basis—grocery store checkout.
• A columnist for The Wall Street Journal says machines are supposed to be better than people at low-skill, repetitive jobs but it "turns out that checking out groceries requires just enough mental-processing skills to be a prohibitive challenge for computers."
• The key issue is that computers cannot process the visual data required to properly enter prices. Or, as the columnist says, machines "can't tell shiitakes from Shinola."

Dive Insight:

Given our fear of an impending world war involving cyborgs, robot planes, Skynet, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, we're thrilled to learn that there is a place where machines dare not tread—a place where we can ride out the pending apocalypse—our local supermarket, which does not have self-checkout.. And that place has food!  What more could we ask of a fallout shelter?