Are you frightened of the rising machines? I try not to be. Machines are the future and being horrified by the future is so terribly ageing. Banging on about the misery of automated switchboards, the insecurity of online banking or the impersonality of email puts 20 years on you immediately, like racism or natural light. I try to avoid such things.

So, for me, it’s all “Good news, my local post office has shut down!”, “Ooh, you need a ‘registered account’ to buy cinema tickets, I couldn’t be happier!” and “Hurray! A leaked NHS England report says 111 calls will soon be diverted to a ‘diagnosis app’ instead of a person!”

But there’s a development I’m having trouble with. I was reminded of it when I read about the new Amazon Go store in Seattle. This seems to be a supermarket with no tills or till operators (although there are employees to “help customers”). There’s no checkout system at all, in fact, simply sensors that detect what you’ve put in your bag and automatically charge the credit card that’s associated with the Amazon Go app on the smartphone you swiped at the door.

Well, doesn’t that sound brilliant! No, listen, it’s good because I don’t want any privacy! I want all my purchases and movements to be tracked, scanned and inextricably attached to my phone, address and official monitored self!

That sounds sarcastic. It was sarcastic. I can do better than that. I really do believe that after the age of about 30 you should check any instincts to fear or dislike: chew them around a bit, make sure you’re happy with the flavour.

That doesn’t mean you’re wrong; only an idiot is happy with everything all the time. But I’m trying to beware negativity as an auto-response.

So, there are pluses to the concept of a supermarket with no people. People are awful. No, that’s cheating. But humanity can be infuriating if you’re standing in a queue, drumming your fingers when the cashier can’t find the price or runs out of bags, tutting and sighing when the person ahead of you skitters off mid-tally to find yoghurt or tries to pay with the annual takings from the penny arcade. If there’s no checkout, there’s no checkout rage! Only the deep, cold, lonely fear of being lost among automatons, which is a lot easier on the blood pressure.

I’m quite fond of those mechanised cashiers (or “self-service tills”) that we have here, in the medium-tech UK where we’re phasing out people but haven’t yet phased out physical payment. Naturally, my first instinct was fear, alienation, disapproval and dislike. But then they started shrieking: “Unexpected item in the bagging area!”

That won me over. It was never anything unexpected. It was usually a tin of peaches. “Unexpected” would be a llama or a manuscript copy of Mozart’s Requiem. I was charmed by the excitement of the young, impressionable machines.

Machines don’t judge you. They don’t give you a withering stare when you’re buying three bottles of wine, a microwave lasagne and a Sandra Bullock DVD.

This must be good news for those who are trying to find love in the supermarket. Do people still do that? When I was single, magazines were forever advising you to “keep that basket sexy!” in case of handsome passing shoppers. Many’s the night I came home with a dozen ribbed Mates, a punnet of lychees and a pot of Elmlea, still no boyfriend and nothing I could feasibly cook for dinner.

I worked out that I would recognise my soulmate if his basket contained a box of Guylian chocolates, a bunch of freesias, a pair of black cashmere socks, a slim volume of poetry and a jar of tropical fish food. Unfortunately, he’d be gay.

Anyway, if lonely hearts still wander round supermarkets, it will be a blessing to get rid of eye-rolling cashiers and suspicious security personnel.

There’s no point being wistful for “human interaction” at the till in Sainsbury’s. Nobody ever passed the time of day to much effect in a spot-lit, 12-aisle hangar with 30 people waiting behind them to buy bog roll. If you find the automated till too impersonal, you can simply do what I do and pretend there’s an unpaid child labourer crouching inside.

Look, I’m doing my best… We have to try to believe that increased mechanisation is broadly good, because loads of people throughout history have believed themselves to be living at the exact moment it went too far and it’s simply too unlikely that that moment is now.

Douglas Adams had our instincts right when he wrote: “Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.”

So I am trying to fight phase 3. And where is the development I struggle with? It’s the remaining people in the shop. It’s the Amazon Go store staff who are only there to help its first users figure out the door-phone-swipe business. It’s the employees of my local Budgens who come over, all smiley and helpful, when the machine is baffled by a lettuce or a shopper is baffled by the machine. In some outlets, you can actually ring a bell for them.

In essence, those people’s jobs are to teach you how to make them redundant. You’re ringing a bell for minimum-wage staff to hurry over and help themselves into unemployment. That seems a cruelty too far.