The job I had since I was 14 would have completely automated by AI if I was born today.

I got my first job when I was 14 years old at a tanning salon, operating equipment owned by a family friend. The job generally consisted of signing in customers, setting the clocks on the tanning beds, and giving people privacy to change in the rooms. Sounds simple enough, right? At the time, I was paid minimum wage, and my boss got a decent profit from me operating the tanning beds. Later he got a small personal computer that was basically just a chip and board connected to a small screen, that would automatically turn on and off the lights/tanning equipment based on a time of day or user input. Back then it was basically just a fancy remote control, but these days you could literally just hook up a few random boards and sensors to a single raspberry pi, and you would have most of the functionality of a modern tanning bed.<br><br>It's been years since the tanning salon closed down, but I always think about how a modern system could be implemented. A small room with tanning beds, small sensor on the floor that detects pressure when someone walks in that turns on the lights and fans, or a small pressure plate that switches the bed on when someone steps on it. Then they don't have to even touch anything in the room, you just step on the sensor, get in the bed and it starts, then exit, and the bed turns off and the lights turn off. You could even add speakers that automatically play a song you like, or a voice assistant that lets you control the experience. The only thing a person would still have to do would be to pay and take their phone, and even that could be solved if people used apple pay or paid at a self checkout.<br><br>I was born in 1995. I feel bad for kids these days, they have completely missed the boat of getting a simple minimum wage job to learn how to interact with other people.