Labour has called for local authorities to be given new powers to restrict the growth of the machines but was defeated in a parliamentary vote earlier this year.
The growth of self-service machines, experts and users say, is partly a result of improvements in the technology since the early days of automated teller machines, which were much slower to catch on.
They are an engine of growth, a machine for putting the rural poor onto the first rung of urban prosperity and freedom.
"The culture at Wal-Mart celebrates Sam Walton," he writes, "but it was David Glass who had a global vision that allowed Wal-Mart to grow in ways that few expected" and who "turned Wal-Mart into one of the greatest growth machines of all time".
A notable effort in this regard is the foundation of the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, a historic partnership between Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, some of the leading voices in machine learning innovations, to address some of the fears stemming from the growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Broad trends, though, can be identified and this year's Military Balance shows the continuing growth of China's military machine.
This included the now clear rise of SQL, the consolidation of cloud application vendors, the end of the war between the public and private cloud, and the growth of analytics fueled by machine data.
Briefly peaking at a half-trillion dollars before slipping over the last month, Cisco has been the exemplary Silicon Valley growth machine of the last five years: its annual earnings growth over that period has averaged almost 43percentt; revenue growth has been above 50percentt.
Meanwhile, ministers recently said that the growth of high-stakes roulette machines on the High Street is "concerning" and they do not rule out action to restrict them.
"We needed the education around some of the how-to, growth machine kind of stuff," Going said.
