Let us summarize the things we can do today without talking to a human: we can take a cab ride, shop, order food, and pay our bills. A day might soon come when we need not interact with anyone we don’t want to talk with.

This train of thought has been prompted by Amazon’s announcement on December 5 that it is opening a grocery store with no cashiers and no checkout lines. The store, which will open in early 2017 in Seattle, will enable customers to pick up what they want and walk out without having to bother about paying. The payment will be taken care of by an app called Amazon Go, which is incidentally the name of the store as well.

Customers will need to register with Amazon Go, which will carry out the transaction based on the stored payment information. The store will use sensors, computer vision, and deep learning to track customers as they move about the store, and automatically register which items they pick up.

The advantage of such stores without cashiers is that there will be no long lines for checking out. However, the livelihood of millions of cashiers who work at U.S. stores will be at stake.