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Robots Are Already Replacing Fast-Food Workers (recode.net)
An anonymous reader quotes Recode:
Technology that replaces food service workers is already here. Sushi restaurants have been using machines to roll rice in nori for years, an otherwise monotonous and time-consuming task. The company Suzuka has robots that help assemble thousands of pieces of sushi an hour. In Mountain View, California, the startup Zume is trying to disrupt pizza with a pie-making machine. In Shanghai, there's a robot that makes ramen, and some cruise ships now mix drinks with bartending machines.
More directly to the heart of American fast-food cuisine, Momentum Machines, a restaurant concept with a robot that can supposedly flip hundreds of burgers an hour, applied for a building permit in San Francisco and started listing job openings this January, reported Eater. Then there's Eatsa, the automat restaurant where no human interaction is necessary, which has locations popping up across California.
More directly to the heart of American fast-food cuisine, Momentum Machines, a restaurant concept with a robot that can supposedly flip hundreds of burgers an hour, applied for a building permit in San Francisco and started listing job openings this January, reported Eater. Then there's Eatsa, the automat restaurant where no human interaction is necessary, which has locations popping up across California.
I can't wait for the day robots replace the Slashdot "editors". Maybe the comments can be written by robots too to get rid of ass-hats like me.
These are garbage repetitive jobs, they should be automated. Sucks about the people that did this for a living, but maybe they could get a skill set that's harder to automate.
Is there a machine that washes the dishes? That would be news.
I noticed that the local McD's has a beverage filler at the drive-through station which is an oval track holding 10 or so beverage cups, which proceed through what looks like a partially automated filling line.
But this is really a progression rather than any new thing. We don't stop to think that the washing machine, the dish washer, and the answering machine took away a good many women's jobs.
Bruce Perens.
You have simply never heard of savory pies. Pizza is one. Pies need not be sweet.
Bruce Perens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ...sad that idiocracy may eventually be viewed as a documentary.
Someone had to do it.
This kind of tech has been around since the invention of the multifunction hot beverage machine. It grinds beans, steeps coffee, blends creamer and such to the users specification. theres not much special about extending this to fast food. mcdonalds has had pilot instances of french fry machines for more than a decade now.
the trouble with these machines comes when capitalism rears its ugly head. hot beverage machines become brake-dust dispensers as the drive for profit leads to borderline rancid beans sourced from auction in a 50lb hopper. in the 21st century i cant think of a single person that would stuff 60 cents into one of these and expect a decent cup of black coffee (the arguable standard by which such a machine is judged to make other beverages.) Pretty soon ingredients like cheese are replaced with cheese topping, and other ingredients become dehydrated synonyms of their original embodiment. Automation of fast food is an excellent idea, so long as silicon valley understands that doing so further enables companies to cut costs and corners, ultimately delivering a mediocre product from an almost bankrupt franchise. McDonalds is the meat-space embodiment of this capitalism-until-death model, with kiosks to place orders and automatic fry droppers and ten pound caulk guns filled with toppings shipped four thousand miles across the country. Maybe companies will realize customers dont embrace automation if the machine is flipping garbage, but the continued existence of the 'hot beverage' machine in my companies breakroom seems to suggest companies dont give a shit what customers want in an automated form factor.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The answer: rank robots by capabilities, tax them as virtural workers, pay proceeds into Social Security system
We're moving in that direction, but we're not there, just yet. I think we'll have a rough couple of years, while the automation steps in. Eventually, it'll make things cheaper, but I would imagine that the prices of things will remain on the same gradual increase they've always been alongside inflation, for a while, at least. Eventually, the reduction of full-time employment among the general population will drive prices down. Ultimately, it'll break capitalism, assuming that Congress doesn't step in to make laws preserving it (i.e., banning excess of automation). I can't imagine that we'll be in a place where a UBI is practical for another 15 to 20 years, though. There's just too many problems to solve, first.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
Luckily all the high-school dropouts flipping burgers can just go to college and get a degree in liberal arts. Problem solved! They've lived so frugally over the years they surely must have enough money saved up to pay for that plus kids/rent while unemployed.
Oh wait, no, maybe the solution is raising minimum wage? Oh, that'll accelerate automation you say? Hmm.
Institutional unemployment is best paid for institutionally (free education) or else the problems will be paid institutionally anyway (crime, poverty, social welfare programs.) I knew someone who never went to high school because her broke parents were too poor to afford the $50/year fee; if that fee were waived, that $200 would've paid for itself many times over in reduced social welfare costs.
As an increasing number of people are shuffled into a decreasing number of jobs, it'll lead to wage depression. Higher productivity will lower costs of goods and services to offset this somewhat, but lowered job security and making more people unemployable is a more serious price paid. The only winners here are those who own the means of production. Publicly available replicators or central planning are potential solutions. Nationalized real estate + basic income could work as well.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Who will have the money to buy fast food, iPhones, cars, movie tickets, etc? This sort of thing contributes to the decline of the economy, to the betterment of the company's shareholders...
It's amazing how an idea can affect us! The push to increase the Minimum Wage causes those businesses that need a low minimum wage to innovate. And the technology sector (that is, /.'s readers) is innovating. We /.-ers may want a higher minimum wage but we are systemically creating and refining technology to displace minimum wage workers even before the minimum wage is raised. We should be ashamed of ourselves!
Actually, how funny the prideful superiority the average /.-ers display and the hypocrisy in manufacturing and distributing the actual opposite of their stated desire. How Funny! We are AssHats of the First Order!
meanwhile the rest of us want timely service, properly cooked food, correct change...can't wait for robots to have the jobs.
I can see a backlash to this approach. The capitalist class will say: We purchased these robots and they are ours. If you tax them, we'll shut down the business and go find something else to exploit. What they don't realize is if they build enough of these robotic based businesses, there will be nobody left to come.
plan B make jail / prison cost so much that UBI is cheaper. When people just start going in and out of the system just to get room and board then UBI looks like a better thing to do.
The folks with all the money realized a few decades ago: there's just too many people (as other than prostitutes and bodyguards, we don't need them anymore due to off-shoring, computerization and automation).
But rolling the cattle trucks is a bit too on the nose, so let's go with Permanent War, sugar-based industrialized food, set them at each others' throats with race and religion-based hatreds, choke-off competent and well-funded primary education, and what the hell, add in the idea that vaccines are a bad idea.
It'll only get cheaper for those getting the profits. Unless a competitor comes in using cheap technology to undercut them, it's just more money in their pocket.
No business person ever lowered prices when their cost was lowered except if a competitor requires them to / they'll make more money by more sales.
I've been in a few Jackinthebox restaurants that have a touchscreen order taking system, you touch what you want, insert your card, and voila!! food appears by a human in a couple of minutes... I gather with all of the b.s. about a $15 min wage, these will become MUCH more common.....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
If it has chicago[sic] in the name it probably isn't pizza.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"As such, I detest self-checkout because as a customer I should not be expected to perform employee's duties without compensation.'
Take the lead in solving that problem by always including beer or produce in your self-checkout. Then an employee will have to come over and help you anyway.
BK's "flame broiled" tag was a marketing coverup for a major robotic replacement of human labor. Dismiss the burger flippers, and replace them with a conveyor belt. And call it "flame broiled" and claim it as a "taste innovation". There have been thousands of automation tools that have been implemented over the years. It's not a new thing, and it's not a new trend.
Learn to love Alaska
the video claims " we are doing something never done before" and is 100% bullshit.
Frozen pizza companies have had automated pizza making processes in place for nearly 3 decades now. Your frozen pizza has been "made by robots" since the 1980's.
The process that place in the video uses is horribly inefficient and is more of a rube goldberg entertainment system than a proven robotic pizza making system.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Technically, if a monopoly is forced to sell at a non-optimal point on the price/response curve simply because the cheaper point would be selling at a loss, lowered costs could allow them to sell at that lower point. There would need to be a compelling reason (antitrust laws, marketing etc.) why they cannot sell at the higher point, however.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Starvation works too. If the starving get unruly fire up the drones, terminators, and robo-cops.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Hot dog is a sandwich.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You're still taking money away from earners (the owners of the robots) to give to non-earners (the people put out of work by the robots). Venezuela just took 4.8 million toys from a company to give away to poor kids. What you're proposing is basically the same thing, at least if you take the end results. What gives you the right? They robot's owners earned it. How is what you're doing anything other than theft? If the robot owners want to give away the proceeds that's their business. But you're suggesting we force them (presumable at the barrel of a gun)?
If you can't answer these questions I don't think socialism will ever get anywhere. At least, not until things have gone completely to shit for 90% of the population. Maybe 95%...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
When all work can be done by robots you'd propose a universal basic income? Get your head out of the 20th century. All that does is give the government ultimate power over everyone who needs that check.
It's the 21st century. Think universal basic robots. Everyone owns the means of production - at home. Power to the people - well, unless the power goes out.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
With manual labor less in demand, the economy will need less people; paying people to not work is pointless and unsustainable.
Hmm... If you want to discuss unsustainable actions, let's talk about fostering an underclass effectively locked into perpetual poverty. What alternatives do you propose?. Note that this sort of approach (negative income tax) has been advocated by free market proponents including Milton Friedman.
I might as well stay home with a 6 pack in my cooler. I like the interaction between patrons and staff. If it comes to that I probably won't go out for my pints on a regular basis ever again.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Unless it has chicago[sic] in the name it probably isn't pizza
FTFY. If it ain't a pie, it ain't pizza.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Then why would go to a fast food restaurant?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Did you know that, in some places in the US, McDs is starting to offer table service? Same number of employees, just doing different work. Automation can also mean more meat-interaction, as humans are freed from some kinds of labor.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No, it really doesn't have anything at all to do with a $15/hr min wage.
The efforts to automate fast food started when the minimum wage was well under half that amount. If you're going to automate a $15/hr job, then why wouldn't you automate a $6/hr job? You don't have to pay the robot, after all, and they never up and quit like Judge Reinhold in Porkys.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Indeed. Either that or a drop into deep poverty for almost everyone. It can go either way...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I think automation is the way to go, absolutely, if we can create technology to work for us, then we don't have to work, and more time to play and follow our own interests. This is a good thing for society. Humans shouldn't have to work if they don't need to, as a society on the whole.
The problem is as they stop paying workers, that areas economy decreases as they are sucking money out of it into share holders / people outside of that local community.
It's like mining etc. They're going to suck as much money out of an area until it's dead then move to somewhere else, and we need to do something to stop it.
Local business are good, international ones suck money out of your area and leave it high and dry.
Yes, they get taxed, but if you have to pay 30,000$ per work which is mostly money in that community, vs the taxes on that worker of a fraction of it, a lot of money is leaving your community that they're taking in the form of sales.
If you design a restaurant to use automated cooking/assembly, you can reduce the amount of space the kitchen takes up. You can reduce food waste/spoilage, and improve speed.
Expecting those to translate to consumer prices though is a stretch.
Look people, this sort of tech has been around for decades now.
I don't think most people know, but for some of these automated restaurant ideas and industrial food machines, you read "it has been around for years"... you'll think something like early 2000s, but it's actually more like back in the 60s or 70s. You know that conveyor belt sushi thing? It was invented in 1958. It had a huge boom, then it fell out of fashion, then it started becoming popular once again in early 2000s. But here's the deal: restaurants with regular non automated parts are still the majority and the most popular.
Wanna see something older? Try restaurants that serves food using vending machines only. One of those existed back in 1902, and it was in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A prototype restaurant is far from replacing jobs in a large scale, and if this is about robots replacing fast food workers in a smaller scale, this isn't news. China and some countries in Europe already used adapted industrial automation systems, robots and robotic arms. The fact that one restaurant is opening does not mean that it's economically feasible as a regular thing, doesn't mean that all restaurants will copy the concept, and it doesn't mean it'll work at all.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/4...
Remember this Nuremberg restaurant from 2007?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
How about this japanese restaurant from 2009?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Eatsa opened last year, but it's basically the same idea as the previously mentioned Automat that had an initial boom only to disappear years later:
https://techcrunch.com/2015/08...
Right now, these automated systems are on average extremely expensive, single purpose, hard to maintain, and mostly seen as novelty both by clients and from a marketing perspective. We're still probably over a century away from a multipurpose humanoid robot that can do everything human staff do, in an ideal condition where the price, maintenance costs and usefulness counterbalances paying minimum wage or so. By the time miraculous robots like those appear, we'll be more prepared for the switch, and it'll happen gradually. And even then, it's hard to imagine robots completely replacing fast-food and restaurant staff unless we're talking about a future where robots are replacing humans. Because there will always be people willing to pay for a restaurant that has humans preparing your food and serving it.
The base logic why things like that don't suddently happen out of nowhere is easy to understand: even if by some miraculous circunstance we managed to produce perfect robots that would work flawlessly and require no maintenance in all restaurants in a city, this would automatically put so many people out of a job that these restaurants would end up having no costumers to serve, closing down before all the investment put into it had any return. But of course, we can't magically create thousands of robots out of thin air overnight, most robots and automation systems nowadays have limited functionality that's not usually adequate for fast food kitchen environments, and culturally people are not used to and will take a long time to get used to automated restaurants.
Perhaps far into the future we'll pay more to go to restaurants with an all human staff that will only be there simply because they enjoy working with that... but here I'm entering utopia territory. If we ever reach an age where robots can do most things for use at reasonable costs, we'll either have already implemented the universal basic income, or governments will be responsible for most of the upkeep of basic population needs. I mean, you have a damn army of multipurpose robots,
No, the machines are now getting much smarter. Grinding flour takes a purely mechanical machine. The second generation could use pneumatic computers and simple electrical systems to control them.
But now computers are ubiquitous and cheap. And they can see. Not very well, but well enough to automate things that were unthinkable a few years ago. Such as picking out parts jumbled in a bin. Or flipping burgers that are not in exactly defined places.
This third generation will not take over the world. But unlike second generation machines, they can pick strawberries. And will soon be able to clean offices, and paint houses, and pack supermarket shelves, and drive trucks etc. Anything routine.
Initially the robots are only just a bit cheaper than labour, so slow introduction and minimal price changes. But over time, they get better and cheaper, until anyone that still relies on labour will not be able to compete.
And real "robots" are not humanoid, with arms and legs. They are purpose built machines, but with far more intelligence than existing machines.
But the interesting case is still many decades off. When computers can program themselves.
http://www.computersthink.com/
Point to history when this hasn't happened before.
We landed on the moon because we put a bunch of African American women sat in the back room somewhere doing calculations.
We made it through 90% of humanity needing to farm because we automated the boring unskilled part. (Even parts that were so unskilled we had mules and horses do them).
We'll be fine like we always have been.
So that's why in this past year almost every fast food place has started offering $5 meals made up of far more expensive items if bought individually?
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
We use to have carriage makers...the automobile replaced them. Use to make wax candles, we don't do that either. A lot of automobile manufacturers have replaced somewhat overpaid labor with machines. Low skill jobs being replaced by machines isn't hard to imagine. Considering the ton of youtube videos where kids working these jobs are screwing around, throwing food on the floor, taking a bath in the sinks and what not, I don't blame them. These are the same low skilled people that complain about a "living wage". If they don't want to better themselves in society, then they will be out of a job. They want to party, use/sell drugs, get tattoos, wear their pants low, have 4 or more babies by as many women, and then when they age into their 20-30's...they bitch about not being able to hold a job that might actually pay the bills! Life is hard, but it's a hell of a lot easier when you figure that out!
Someone still has to clean the machine, which has lots of moving parts to get fouled and crevices for bacteria to live in.
Sure, it doesn't use it's phone while it poops, but you wont eliminate contamination.
We landed on the moon because we put a bunch of African American women sat in the back room somewhere doing calculations.
Actually, all the necessary calculations were already being done by stored-program digital computers, courtesy of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory which built one of the first embedded computers with digital ICs. Unless your "bunch of African American women" were some stowaways in the Apollo spacecraft armed with calculators.
Ezekiel 23:20
French fries
In a factory, shape a potato into a fixed size rectangular prism, save the rest for things like hash browns
Package the blocks in a multi-level grid
At the restaurant, feed the grid into a cooling unit
Have a machine remove a row from the grid and feed it to the cutting machine
From the cutting machine, feed the row of potatoes through one at a time
Per serving of french fries, press a matching metal rectangular prism into the top of the container to force the potato block through a cutting grid made up of cutting wires. The wires are found on the base of the potato storage.
The uncooked fries land in a basket and are dropped into a cooker for a deterministic period of time.
The basked is lifted and moved over a salting area
Salt is applied from above
The basket is moved over a funnel
The fries are dropped and a container is located beneath to receive them.
The fries are moved by conveyor belt towards the customer.
The basket moves to another station to be pressure washed
The salting area is cleaned by rinsing with water
Once a day (or more often) the deep fryer is turned off and once cold enough drains the oil from the bottom via a valve. From above a wire brush lowers to clean the bottom and a hose is used to clean the rest draining through a second valve on the bottom. The oil is then refilled.
The used oil travels through pipes to be picked up by a biodiesel company collecting waste.
Empty containers for carrying potatoes are placed in a second rack where a new grid is built from empties
Access to the grids of full and empties are reachable from the building side where they can be loaded and unloaded by a robotic truck.
Burgers
Burgers are formed and packed into a tube like structure that can be stored frozen
Burger is loaded into freezer at restaurant in rows on a rotating base to make each tube accessible as needed
A mechanism moves up and down the tubes to the next available burger
The mechanism places pressure along side rails on the tube to stabilize the tube
The mechanism using pressure from the back pushes (possibly hits) the burger and forces it out of the tube into a catching mechanism
The burger is moved onto a conveyor belt and carried into a cooking area
The burger is moved onto a heated and oiled teflon pan, a second heated and oiled teflon pan is placed on top to cook from above.
Bread is stored in the freezer in a similar tube but as separate top and bottom.
Bread is moved from cold storage using a nearly identical mechanism to the burgers
The bread is defrosted by hot air as it travels over the conveyor belt
The burger once cooked is placed on the bottom piece of bread
The frying pans are flipped and moved over a pressure washer, washed and then sprayed with oil
Ketchup, mustard, etc... are placed via tubes from above onto the top bun.
A cylinder that matches the size of the burger and bun surround the burger and vegetables are slices and/or chopped from above
The cylinder moves away and is pressure washed
The top bread is places on the burger
The burger rolls onto a piece of cardboard which is folded from the sides and then put on the delivery conveyor.
I can go on for a while... I am 100% confident that it wouldn't take much time, effort, money or intelligence to build a fast food restaurant that cleans itself, cooks all the food, changes oil, etc... In addition, the restaurant can be easily designed to support automatic loading and unloading of all the materials from the delivery truck with no effort from a human. Additionally, the truck itself can be self driving. Additionally, given time, it would be possible to automate substantial parts of preparing the food for the restaurant.
What I don't understand is... why do we even have employees at fast food restaurants anymore. At $15 an hour, I would rather replace them with robots. Probably could do it within a year.
Seriously, we are going to see a large number of the low-end jobs disappear. As such, we need the illegals that have not integrated into our society to be sent off.
Basically, it is long past time that we quit outsourcing and that is what illegals do; they outsource the jobs that can not be.
So, hopefully, we get a COMPROMISE in which the families that have successfully integrated (kids in our schools for 4 or more years; still in it or have GED/better;etc), while send others home.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
meanwhile the rest of us want timely service, properly cooked food, correct change...can't wait for robots to have the jobs.
This has mostly been not true. Semi-automated restaurants have been tried many times. They tried phones at every table, so you can call your order in directly to the kitchen. Then they tried touch pads at every table. In general, these have not been popular. When they go out to eat, people want human interaction. Otherwise, they would just microwave something at home.
wrong, no one want human interaction with restaurant staff. no one goes to a restaurant as an alternative to microwaving stuff at home, they have other reason to be there.
how long before the cut the workers down to the $2.13 /hr tipped min wage.
If you're going to automate a $15/hr job, then why wouldn't you automate a $6/hr job?
Because the return on investment is less than half as much.
If you ever decide to start a business, you should partner with someone that can do math.
But the ROI is more than zero, and increases over time.
When you figure in all the hassles of having humans working for you, automation that can do the job will be a better investment even if you could get the human to work for nothing.
And this is really the end-game of late-stage capitalism. It's always about exploitation. You don't have to fuck people over to make a profit, but it helps.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Money only has value when it circulates. If the robot owners have all the money then it's worthless.
No business person ever lowered prices when their cost was lowered except if a competitor requires them to / they'll make more money by more sales.
Which happens constantly in innumerable cases across the economy, and always has. The competitors don't require it, the customers do.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
So many of you, collectivists, say things like 'it will break capitalism', I have to guess that this nonsense comes from such a fundamental lack of proper education and understanding that it cannot be fixed with any number of comments.
Capitalism is private ownership and operation of property. Relative price levels going up or down cannot break it anymore than snow or sand can. Your comment is pure drivel, yet it is +5, .
You can't handle the truth.
One of the problems of this world is that half of all produce spoils before it's eaten. So in the cities of the future, why not have centralized, automated mega-kitchens which receive trucks of fresh raw ingredients and transform them into healthy, delicious and customized meals? Sure, they only make fast food now, but there is no reason why robots can't execute the instructions of Michelin-star chefs, and no reason why such excellent meals should cost more than fast food costs now. Together with some sort of automated delivery service, this is simply a much better way of feeding people than what we do now.
Just think of all the time we waste stocking shelves in stores, driving to them, parking, filling our carts... stocking our fridges, heating up an entire oven for the sake of a single meal, cooking, cleaning up, etc. etc. All that requires a great deal of total cognitive load for many humans, and much wasting of resources. The alternative is that a massive restaurant kitchen cooks up exactly the meal you want, with the freshest ingredients and flavoring details that you would simply not be able to accomplish in a home kitchen. Then the meal arrives through an automated delivery car network, which also picks up the dishes from the previous meal. The city could also have dining rooms with a direct pipeline to each of the city's various mega-kitchens, and these can host social or family groups who want to eat out.
A world like that is actually quite achievable with tech that's already in the prototype stage, and it's a much better world than the wasteful one we live in now.
Point to history when this hasn't happened before.
We landed on the moon because we put a bunch of African American women sat in the back room somewhere doing calculations.
We made it through 90% of humanity needing to farm because we automated the boring unskilled part. (Even parts that were so unskilled we had mules and horses do them).
We'll be fine like we always have been.
I'm certainly hoping we'll be fine. The trick parts will be regarding the idle population. As the work eliminated expands up the skill ladder, we'll face some issues for a while. The problem is that for one reason or another, many of the folks working the unskilled labor are not going to be capable of moving up. Some folks just aren't that smart, some folks are voracious underachievers. Some folks have problemacious personalities. Are there answers to those issues? Probably.
But assuming that the present day attitude toward labor costs holds, there isn't a plan for people to move up, the plan is to eliminate jobs. Unless we decide to do make-work.
So we are possibly looking at a post labor America to start, and the world later.
The most difficult barrier is going to be the diminishment of the ages old concept of having to work to survive. This is rooted so deeply on most people that few can contemplate the idea. Anyhow, very interesting times we will be living in.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
We landed on the moon because we put a bunch of African American women sat in the back room somewhere doing calculations.
Actually, all the necessary calculations were already being done by stored-program digital computers, courtesy of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory which built one of the first embedded computers with digital ICs. Unless your "bunch of African American women" were some stowaways in the Apollo spacecraft armed with calculators.
Is this a big whoosh? You are talking about the MIT designed Navigation computer, and OP is talking about Katherine Johnson, one of NACA and later NASA's "computers" - yes, they called the ladies computers. The respect for the woman was so high that John Glenn refused to fly unless she verified the numbers that NASA's first digital computer spit out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You're not taking it to the logical conclusion.
The removal of the worker from the equation removes their ability to obtain capital, and this participate in private ownership and operation of property.
By removing what could eventually be upwards of 90% of the participants in the system you will break the system.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
If it has chicago[sic] in the name it probably isn't pizza.
Chicago "Pizza" ia a whole loaf of bread with tomato sauce and cheese in it. I remember when bragging rights were how thick the layer of bread was. Yuck.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
We're moving in that direction, but we're not there, just yet. I think we'll have a rough couple of years, while the automation steps in.
Why is it the tone of these stories is always that automation is some new thing? This has already been going on for hundreds of years, sure it getting more rapid and will continue to do so, but the automation concept is as old as the first windmill.
wrong, no one want human interaction with restaurant staff.
AFAICT the only reason to go to a restaurant like "Hooters" is the interaction with the restaurant staff.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
No one has to eat at a place that makes food with robots.
Frankly, I prefer a hand-smashed burger and a baked on the spot bun.
I do business with these places because they produce a superior product.
This is nothing new... 25 years ago Burger King was already experimenting with live outsourcing of drive through window order taking: you roll up, talk to the video monitor, and the human on the other end is at a call center in Missouri, they take your order and it appears on your monitor and in your local kitchen to be made - in 1991.
Nonsense, the only thing that breaks capitalism is any form of government that destroys private property rights, as in makes it illegal from point of view of the law to own and or operate private property. Even if 1 person out of the entire population can afford productive private property and nobody else has the resources but it is not made illegal to obtain, possess and operate property, it is still capitalism. Of course that scenario is nonsense. Labour can always compete with capital if the government does not make it prohibitively expensive to do that.
Get rid of government laws, rules, income and wealth taxes, government controlling money and manipulating interest rates, redistributing income and property, under those conditions you will have a working economy. Otherwise you will have war.
You can't handle the truth.
Obligatory: http://www.marshallbrain.com/m...
Those vending machines that dispense a mildew-laden cup of poor quality coffee have been around for a LONG time. I remember encountering one of those lousy machines when waiting around to be selected for jury duty, back in the late 1980's.
The fact is, people building and deploying these machines know that the public's expectations from them are minimal. The goal is to offer something you can afford with your left-over pocket change, so they get that impulse buy.
I think any building calling itself a restaurant is going to be held to a much higher standard. So robotic automation used in one of them really does still have to work with a food product of the same quality the restaurant used with human labor, or people will stop patronizing them.
If you paid attention to speeches given by Ray Kroc about McDonalds, you'd learn that HIS business model is rather unique anyway. He's really in the real estate business, with McDonalds restaurants as the "excuse" to acquire valuable land in developing areas. They generally make more money reselling McDonalds restaurants that have been open a while than they ever make selling food while they're open.
I self-check produce all the time. Usually beer, too, without real interaction: They just look up at me, see that I'm *probably* old enough to their Dad, push the button, and go back to their Facebook game.
Kid-proof tablet..
If you're going to automate a $15/hr job, then why wouldn't you automate a $6/hr job?
Because the return on investment is less than half as much.
If you ever decide to start a business, you should partner with someone that can do math.
I was going to comment about this in a separate subthread, but here goes. The concept that we are forcing the poor fast food company to automation by raising the minimum wage, is merely a handy excuse to pass on to the world. This is coming whether the Minimum wage is 7, 15, or 3 dollars an hour.
Getting rid of employees with their issues is a very important thing for business, especially at the bottom of the ladder. Exhibit one is that we are going forward with the automation even as the minimum wage stays the same.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
hmm robots as virtural workers, maybe they should have Health Care too?
Maybe we should just mix it with some virtuality and call it Virtual Social Security. We'll also add some robotic rights like buying rights. but what if one robot buys another robot... Should that robot has life contract or sells tax?
Free education is never really free, first of all. All you're doing is advocating that the bulk of the costs of teaching students be covered by those who are already gainfully employed. Society has already pretty much agreed to accept that burden for a basic "core" education (grade school and high school). The enrollment fees some of the public high schools are charging are literally peanuts compared to what taxpayers are on the hook for to keep them running. I honestly don't know where those fees came from, except possibly from certain districts deciding it was a way to get around a failed tax increase vote? When I was in high school, there were never any fees like that -- but today, I have friends in the Chicago area having to pay $300 or so per kid, annually, for a public school. If a kid misses out on a high school education over those enrollment fees? I find it hard to believe that's the fault of anyone but the parents for not trying a little harder to get something worked out. I mean, otherwise? Why are we even still messing around with a public school system, if it's not really for those who can't afford the fee to get in?
The "decreasing number of jobs" should be able to be largely offset by encouraging more small business growth and new business ventures. Every day, people have ideas for things they might be able to do or sell as a business. But government taxes and regulations generally create a steep wall to climb, right from the get-go. (For example, "Obamacare" has caused quite a few businesses to close their doors or stop trying to grow because they can't afford the additional healthcare expenses they're now required to pay if they exceed 50 employees.) And even if we ignore all of that? Try opening your own sole proprietorship and then deciding to hire on your first additional employee! You're suddenly met with payroll challenges, and accounting that just got so much more complicated, you probably need to hire a bookkeeper or CPA as well, to handle all of that while you try to keep your business running. The current system discourages people from employing other people.
People will be fine a few hundred years later.
There were definitely a lot of people not fine from the change.
It certainly didn't go well in France.
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More directly to the heart of American fast-food cuisine, Momentum Machines, a restaurant concept with a robot that can supposedly flip hundreds of burgers an hour, applied for a building permit in San Francisco and started listing job openings this January, reported Eater. Then there's Eatsa, the automat restaurant where no human interaction is necessary, which has locations popping up across California.
In other words, a robot that makes lower quality food and some place that hates humans.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
My wants are limitless. As automation replaces these workers we should rejoice because they can then do something else that I value. Manufacturing in Canada and the USA has doubled over the last 20 years and the number of people employed has halved. I should therefore have 4 times as much as I had in 1996.
,
I have money but no free time. I would love to have someone clean my house, rake my leaves and give me a massage. The kids in the neighbourhood aren't interested in physical work, a registered massage therapist charges $85/hr but I don't need a registered therapist and a cleaning company is going to charge me $100 to clean my house and require me to tidy the house before they come in. I would be willing to pay $15 - $20/hr for these jobs (minimum wage where I live is $11.25/hr) but I don't know how to find and vet someone to do these jobs.
up till the point they become peoples only doctor and the prison will need to pay for that.
Say a machine costs $40k and replaces one person.
In three years, it replaces $36k of wages at $6/hour, it 90k at $15/hour (50*40=2000 hours/year).
Yeah, may year for both machines are possible, but also, maybe I want the $40k machine that replaces 2 people in half the space, so I can't also have extra throughput.
If that machine comes out at year three, I've lost money buying the first version.
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Yes the fast food industry will automate rather quickly eliminating millions of jobs. Fancier joints will be slower to automate and have to hide a great deal of their automation from patrons who pay big bucks for food. And please understand that it can not be stopped. Why would we want to pay more for fast food than other nations who automate sooner will charge? This is rather like Trump claiming he would put a 35% tax on American companies that move to Mexico and want to sell their products in the US. The buyers would be the ones paying that extra 35%. And domestic factories would jack up their car prices as the buyers would have less options. The hourly wage for human workers is now not a factor. If American robots can produce better and faster than Chinese robots we will make a lot of money exporting goods. But if their robots are better than ours then we will suffer badly. The real problem is funding for our colleges and school systems. If we do not produce superior students we are lost. And right now we simply do not produce superior students. Budget cutting has likely killed America.
Except for the fact that each person may make several kids, making hundreds of additional mouths to feed within a couple of centuries where the people kept in prisons are only one mouth to feed before they die.
Burger King tried that, oh, 10 years ago? It was simply a ploy to have fast food slower. Didn't work.
If I'm going to a sit-down restaurant where I wait to get food, I sure as heck ain't choosing McDonalds.
Even if the Mercury vehicle wouldn't have worked without one additional person doing some manual checking, which is highly implausible because of how the laws of physics work, John Glenn didn't land on the Moon or even try landing on the Moon.
Ezekiel 23:20
Initially the robots are only just a bit cheaper than labour, so slow introduction and minimal price changes. But over time, they get better and cheaper, until anyone that still relies on labour will not be able to compete.
Most of the cost is software, once you have a working system the money is in volume. Right now it's going real slow but once you have say 1% self-driving cars on the road and they're starting to look at cash-positive margins you'll see a huge and quick ramp-up with entire fleets switching. Same thing with big chains with tens of thousands of outlets, either it's just a subsidized experiment/R&D/trial project or it'll be massive. It's just in the nature of working on a common system, it either works for almost nobody or almost everybody. That in between period will pass awfully quick compared to a human's career expectations.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The mistake you're making is thinking that there is a 1:1 ratio between machines and the workers they replace. No machine only replaces one worker, because we still have those pesky limits on how long we can force people to work. Machines are meant to run 24/7.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It will translate to lower consumer prices over time Versus hiring human workers for the roles.
It's a shift that is being accelerated by economic incentives in the form of higher minimum wages for human workers. The minimum wages being forced higher for human workers make it necessary to either automate or raise prices for these companies to survive, But consumers don't want to pay the higher prices, so they'd lose business and maybe become non-profitable ---- the automation will allow fast food to continue to be a business that exists, maybe.
And millions of people will be unemployed, homeless, and very desperate.
I seem to recall something like that happened in France a while ago. It didn't end well.
~X~
But the ROI is more than zero, and increases over time.
That is not necessarily true, unless you assume your cost of capital is zero, your investment will last forever, and require no maintenance. But if you assume that, then there is never a bad investment.
In the real world, any investment has to have returns sufficient to cover interest, depreciation, and on-going expenses such as maintenance and repairs. And even then, it needs to be better than alternative investments.
This also works if you purchase a gift card. It needs to be authorized by an employee.
But if you don't want to use the self-checkout at the supermarket, that's fine by me. I get through the checkout 4 times faster than you because there is one line feeding 4 registers. If you're looking for the shortest line, be sure to divide the self-checkout line length by the number of kiosks.
And if we're all the "robot owners"?
With basic necessities removed from the economy, There will still be plenty of work. What percentage of the current economy is basic necessities, do you think? Heck, a third of us will likely be involved in providing hands-on medical and elder care at the peak of the Boomers dying off. Most of what I spend money on is for mild luxury - stuff beyond basic necessities. And I don't care for status symbols - most people do. Anything a robot can make can't be a status symbol - that entire section of the economy will remain untouched.
Plenty of use for money.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In many countries, McDs is a reasonable low-end sit-down restaurant, like the crap-on-the-walls restaurants in the US. I doubt they'll overcome their reputation to become that here, though Wendy's is trying - trying at least to move up to Five Guys and In-and-Out status.
When I was young these were good places to eat, before the food cost optimization went crazy. Who knows, they could be again.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
> Because the return on investment is less than half as much.
But it's not really. You're not factoring in training costs, turnover, staff shortages during sickness, etc. Factor all of that in and the robot ROI looks better and better regardless of meatbag wage. The $15/hr minimum wage talk was brought up by the CEOs of fast food places as a red herring to try and shift blame for when the robots and automation changes come. Instead of them just looking like money grubbers, they can now blame the minimum wage workers for daring to want a living wage for the changes. And the public eats it up, figuratively speaking.
Actually we're closer to this reality than you think. Sure, there's no forced castration, but the other comments about social mobility are pretty accurate. The American dream is a myth. Those that have the capital: keep the capital.
Perhaps... But automation has been "replacing" workers for centuries. Marc Brunel mechanised pulley block making in the early 19th century, and water and wind power replaced manual labour for grinding grain at least 2 millennia ago. In the 19th century, increased mechanisation increased production rate so much that the need for workers increased dramatically.
Increased automation led many to speculate that we would have a shorter working week and spend more time on leisure.
Things are different now, so perhaps you're right. I want you to be right! But I'm a little sceptical just because previous productivity improvements haven't achieved this.
If the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amorÃ. Dean has spoken.
Right then, what rhymes with eye? Pie, pizza pie.
But Mr Martin, a pizza and a pie are two different things.
Fuck off, you're fired.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
But those items are actually getting cheaper production wise and individually the prices are quite inflated.
Large fast food chains also have significant influence in the food production industry and manipulate prices so that you get a better "deal" by eating at the fast food places. In addition, fresh real food vs processed flash frozen stored product. You go to the grocery store and purchase fresh hamburger. It's not the same product that is being sold in a fast food place.
Far more expensive? Like what? That coke you got with your meal that's 3$ on it's own? For the 1 cent cola?
Prices in fast food are going up in Canada at least. You could buy a burger for 1.35-1.50, it's now up to 2.00$. They'll keep pushing, get some resistance, back off, once people get used to it, up it again.
Not so much the need for universal basic income. But the need to change education with more math, science, art as well more liberal arts studies.
The jobs of the future may not need college degrees but they will need to take advantage of the humans ability to improvise think on their feet and be creative. The education system has been fighting creativity for generation and now it is producing useless workers. As the current education system was made for the budding industrial economy where people were able to read and comprehend tasks they need to do and have enough math skill to not get cheated.
Today we need smarter people and let the robots do the drugs work.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Cheaper doesn't mean shit if you don't have any money. It's no more useful than giving income tax cuts to people who have no income.
The brutal truth of it is that if you want people to buy your products, you're going to have to ensure that they have money to buy them with, If you're not going to hire them and pay them, then you're going to have for provide them with money some other way or simply stop using the exchange of money (or equivalents) for product.
It's like the old-time Dark Satanic Mills. One factory belching pollution is a local nuisance, but when you have thousands of factories, it's a menace. So also with one employer laying people off versus EVERY employer laying people off.
We're not all going to be the robot owners. Robots are capital, and the trend of the last 30 years has been to push more and more of the capital upwards and away from the 99%.
Yes, robots will get cheaper, too, but cheap isn't free and if we continue laying off people faster than they can amass capital to buy their own robots, then the magic isn't going to happen.
Nor are a lot of us suited for the limited set of jobs that are expected to remain - and I should note that Japan has expended considerable effort on robotic care for the elderly (thanks to a shrinking lower-age population), that IBM's Watson is considered a first-class medical expert in its own right, and that robot surgery has been out of the realm of Science Fiction and part of everyday reality for some years now. So that wasn't the ideal example of where the newly-unemployed can retrain for a new source of capital.
Historically, new occupations have been spawned when older occupations died, but we're simply not seeing anything new open up on a major scale this time. What? You think that Robot Repair is going to be a growing field? We ALREADY have technology sufficient for a simple robot to roll up to a more complex one, unbolt a failed component and attach a new one, then roll over to the dumpster with the old one. Nobody's going to be tinkering with fine-grained repairs any more than they repair the electronics on a digital watch or TV. It's simply more cost-effective to get a new unit from the factory and scrap the old one.
The computer was extremely progressive! Digital IC logic, real-time priority-driven RTOS, complete digital autopilot...
Ezekiel 23:20
No one has to eat at a place that makes food with robots.
Frankly, I prefer a hand-smashed burger and a baked on the spot bun.
I do business with these places because they produce a superior product.
That's nice, but the only fast-food place that I know of around here that claims to bake buns on the spot (or at least on-premises) is Subway, and I've always thought that Subway buns are horrible. Besides which, they may be baked locally, but the bulk of production is done elsewhere.
I'd rather have a sub made on the supermarket buns at Firehouse.
Even the ethnic restaurants don't generally produce their own bread - there are a handful of Arabic bakeries in town and they supply the fast-food trade, and tortillas are probably coming in from out of state.
As with software, Fast, Quality and Inexpensive are mostly exclusive options. These days, however, we're not given enough lunchtime to avoid Fast, and we're conditioned to expect The Low Price Always in 21st Century USA, so guess where that leaves Quality?
One thing microprocessor technology was done is vastly simplified mechanical construction. Stuff that used to involve racks of gears and cams got replaced by simple servo-motor mechanism. Stuff that can be sealed permanently because it doesn't have many wear parts and when it goes, you just replace the whole sealed module. Because mass manufacture is cheap, but diagnostics and repair are not.
Arguably food-preparation equipment can be designed to require minimal cleaning effort by automated cleaning robots and undoubtedly do a better job that most restaurants do by hand.
So don't hold out hope on that account.
I'm just waiting for the day when self-driving trucks arrive at the back doors of Wal-Mart and pre-packed display pallets are off-loaded, moved into place and unwrapped by robots, no human intervention required. They'll probably even send sweeper robots through the store to collect any merchandise or small children that are found on the floor because the bean-counters computed that it's cheaper to sweep up and incinerate rather than pay for the more complicated robots that would re-fold items and replace them on shelves. Much less pay humans for that.
Remember shoppers - it's ALWAYS the Low Price at Wal-Mart!
Of course everyone knows free education isn't free... but it's cheaper than a user pays system as well as being more effective.
Free refers to up front costs. It refers to the fact that if you dont have $5000 right now you don't get an education. Perhaps if you had taken English in a decent school system you'd understand colloquial usages.
The thing is, paying for public education is an investment in your future as you're relying on the next generation of workers to support all the infrastructure retired people will no longer be paying for.
Then again, you never think of those things and expect the world will magically take care of you.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
That's fine, except you can up the price to $120k and have it replace three people them, and theatch still works out.
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We had pizza vending machines back in 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/business/worldbusiness/14vend.html?_r=0). It fit in standalone box. I hardly see getting the innards outside of the box into less constrained environment as innovative and distruptive...
Now you're making a different, but related, mistake. You assume that the price of a robot is based on how many people it replaces.
It's possible that a $20,000 machine replaces 10 people. The point is that there is no floor for wages above which workers' jobs are safe. Machines get cheaper and easier to maintain. People's lives don't get cheaper and easier to maintain. It's a one-way street and humans can't compete.
You can either accept a greatly expanded welfare state or fire up the ovens. There really isn't any other choice.
You are welcome on my lawn.
>We'll be fine like we always have been.
Just like the dinosaurs were fine for 100 million years, until they wern't.
What? You want more?
There is a great short story I read about 10 years ago: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm/ that deals with this exact topic. The similarities are scary.
They don't go there for an emotional conversation with the serving staff, but they do go there to be served (by a human)."Automated" restaurants will have have front of house staff still, but they will be able to cut the cooks and chefs by 50% or more.
It will be like a lot of factories in developed countries are already. A skeleton staff making sure the machines are running and hitting reboot when something goes wrong. The box of cereal you buy creates more jobs at the retail end than production, and the customer has no idea there are now only 10 jobs back in the factory.
Wannabe nerd.
Even if the Mercury vehicle wouldn't have worked without one additional person doing some manual checking, which is highly implausible because of how the laws of physics work, John Glenn didn't land on the Moon or even try landing on the Moon.
I'm not certain what your argument is. I merely pointed out that you and the other guy are both correct, but not talking about the same thing.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
fast food
The answer probably lies within the question...
The Target near me has had self checkout for a little while now, and they have a big stack of Target gift cards sitting right there. When you buy something that has a free gift card promotion, the computer tells you to grab a gift card and scan it, after which it's loaded with the correct amount.
I'm not making that point at all, of course a robot can replace more than one person.
My point is minimum wage will adjust what price is profitable.
Of course a robot can replace more than one person, and sometimes in less space too, that was my point.
There are robots that aren't worth it to replace $6/hour, but are for $15.
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... I thought they already were robots.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Ah, but my premise is "instead of universal basic income, let's have universal basic robots". I expect small-scale manufacturing to follow the arc of laser printers in any case.
Nor are a lot of us suited for the limited set of jobs that are expected to remain
Very few people farm or manufacture (though there are over a million skilled manufacturing jobs that can't be filled right now, for lack of skilled applicants). But there's always new work to be done - work that needs to be done a little bit differently each time, from handyman work to beauty salons. Plus all the yet-to-be-invented jobs customizing what the robots spit out for social status. Not software dev jobs, but jobs requiring a bit of creativity.
Unskilled jobs will vanish, but almost everyone can be good at something, given the chance.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
How does one operate private property? Am I holding it wrong?
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Hardly worth my time replying to you, except it's pretty disturbing how the OP here was modded +5 Interesting for that stereotypical Bernie Sanderesque drivel.
Paying for your own education is an investment in your future. Paying for other people's educations is an unknown.... How do you know how if those people will make any effort to learn anything useful, vs. just costing you a big chunk of tax money to act as a state-sponsored babysitter? And yes, despite that - our country decided it's willing to fork over the money to at least TRY to get the majority of people up to certain minimum levels of knowledge. But that's not good enough for a bunch of people today. Now, you hear these excuses about jobs being "too difficult to find", so they need a "free" college education as the new minimum.
News flash... The more people we churn out with 4 year degrees, the less a 4 year degree will be worth to an employer. Giving people taxpayer-funded higher education isn't going to do anything to improve the job situation if the businesses aren't here in the first place to hire all of them! That's where things sit today. Our biggest employers are WalMart and fast food giants.
You could hire girls in miniskirt and halter top to walk around the automated restaurant, bending over and such, without serving food...and hooter's customer-types would be just as happy.
3.5 million performing unnecessary task in the USA. there is no point to having unnecessary jobs, the USA could start making things again and outlaw "competing" with places that have no human safety considerations, as long as we support sweat shops and child labor and having no regard for human life of course we'll be hurt at home with unemployment
OK, we can agree on that.
But can we also agree that automation inevitably leads to a situation where it's more profitable than even a $1/hr wage?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Ultimately, it'll break capitalism, assuming that Congress doesn't step in to make laws preserving it (i.e., banning excess of automation).
Or, something unforeseen will cause new jobs to open up. A hundred years ago most jobs were agricultural and they have mostly be abandoned and manufacturing jobs took their place and when manufacturing started to go away, other jobs opened up in other fields. the future always seems to be able to throw a wrench into what people think will happen.
The sentence I responded to started with "We landed on the moon because...". There's a number of answers I could come up with for this but some preliminary calculations (only problems of modest size were possible to solve using masses of humans with calculators) many years before the deed are definitely not on the top of my list of ideas for those answers. Either some hard problems having been solved, like F-1's design or AGC's design and programming, or large-scale project management techniques, or the overall politics of the whole thing are much more likely to be the relevant answers from my POV.
Ezekiel 23:20
The sentence I responded to started with "We landed on the moon because...". There's a number of answers I could come up with for this but some preliminary calculations (only problems of modest size were possible to solve using masses of humans with calculators) many years before the deed are definitely not on the top of my list of ideas for those answers.
We landed on the moon because of many reasons. Most of which kinda sorta had to mesh together to make the whole thing work. Some were more exciting than others, but all were important. I see no reason to make too many ranking distinctions.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I don't want to sound cruel, but "new jobs will appear" isn't one of the basic laws of the Universe. Or, as they say on Wall Street, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results".
Given capable enough automation, virtually any job can be automated, even hair styling (and I'll bet you'll find at least one automated styler project already if you do a web search, although obviously not yet a practical one). Even migrant stoop labor has been threatened as farm robots have been developed that can detect ripe/unripe produce and harvest items that were formerly too awkward or fragile for automation.
You might think that even an automated hair styler at least needs someone to design new styles, but remember that "full service" is rarely an option these days. We're already accustomed to being unpaid gas pumpers (outside of a few states anyway), shoe shiners, grocery checkout people, and other things that used to be done for us by other people.
It is true that manufacturing jobs are going begging, but a lot of that is because people stopped going into manufacturing once the bulk of the jobs went offshore. When they come back,they're highly automated, and likely to become moreso, so many of us consider manufacturing as yet another occupation whose long-term security is doubtful.
Handyman? We like in a world where literally "Ending is better than Mending" and have been increasingly so for decades now. It costs more to repair than to replace.
I too believe that everyone can be good at something, but the question is whether that something will earn a living. Even as it is, hair stylists tend to run the bottom of the wage scale.
I hope for the best, but we have no assurance we'll get it, so it's prudent to consider the worst and what we might do to avoid it.
new jobs will appear" isn't one of the basic laws of the Universe
All we have to go on in any kind of reasoning about the universe is what we can observe. Every time in the past it seemed like all the jobs would vanish, and for the most pert they did, to be replaced by new jobs. It's happened over and over since the 1600s, and we understand why it happens - the old stuff gets cheap and people want more, different stuff. It may not be general relativity, but it's pretty solid.
iven capable enough automation, virtually any job can be automated, even hair styling
Sure, but people, for the most part, want some human interaction. That's not likely to change in the area of beauty salons and spas. The advice is half the experience.
And that's IMO the core of the new jobs - if everything is cheap and easy to get, what will make you look trendy, fashionable, etc.? A group to belong to, followed by social status, are next on Maslow's hierarchy of needs one the basics are trivial to provide for, and jobs in those areas will only grow. This is quite fundamental to human nature, as best we can study it.
Handyman? We like in a world where literally "Ending is better than Mending" and have been increasingly so for decades now. It costs more to repair than to replace.
Who mounts the new flat-screen on the wall? Who replaces that failing ceiling fan? Most the 20-somthings I know can't even change a tire these days; don't even own basic tools. And the Boomers, who were quite handy, are getting to the point where they need help.
I hope for the best, but we have no assurance we'll get it, so it's prudent to consider the worst and what we might do to avoid it.
Starting with yourself and your family, I hope. Abstract political discussions are easy, but you can directly affect those close to you.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Absolutely,
Also, I think Min Wage should be higher. Jobs SHOULD be automated to increase the productivity of the remaining jobs, and their should be more disposable money at the bottom to allow for investment in poorer areas.
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All we have to go on in any kind of reasoning about the universe is what we can observe. Every time in the past it seemed like all the jobs would vanish, and for the most pert they did, to be replaced by new jobs. It's happened over and over since the 1600s, and we understand why it happens - the old stuff gets cheap and people want more, different stuff. It may not be general relativity, but it's pretty solid.
I could just as easily say that because the last 99 times I flipped a coin it came up heads that I can expect the 100th time to also come up heads. That's not a law. A law is provable. All that's provable here is a pattern, and patterns often break. There's something missing this time. Always before when jobs were destroyed, the replacement jobs were already known. Automate a loom? Need loom mechanics and operators. Replace human computers with electronic computers? Need operator, programmer, service engineer.
What new jobs are being created right now? You keep suggesting existing professions and low-paying ones at that. The 20-something Geek Squad person who hangs your flat-screen TV isn't a general-purpose handyman. It's someone who's been given a minimal amount of training to do a set job and is paid accordingly. It's not even expected to be a "real" job with life-long growth. One reason why few own or use basic tools is that so many jobs these days now employ special equipment. Even replacing a car battery often requires equipment rarely found in the home garage.
In short, employment growth hasn't been what we've been seeing over the last 20 years, it's been slow shrinkage, both in positions available and in remuneration.
I also expected to see more people willing to pay for personal service, but I lost faith in that. The increasingly-poor segment of the populace can't afford to and the wealthier ones shop at Wal-Mart and use self-checkout even though they don't need to do either one. We presently don't value the human touch as much as we need to in order to put masses of people to work - quite the contrary. Nobody keeps servants any more - even the well-off generally make do with nothing more than an occasional visit from the Maid Brigade.
I present a pessimistic scenario, I agree, but history is full of events where people blithely assumed that tomorrow would work out the same way yesterday did, and paid a heavy price for it.
I could just as easily say that because the last 99 times I flipped a coin it came up heads that I can expect the 100th time to also come up heads
You damn well should expect it to come up heads. The odds are overwhelming that it's not a fair coin. Feynman may have used that exact example when discussing how experiment trumps hypothesis.
That's not a law. A law is provable.
A law is a theory that can be expressed tersely. Theories don't grow up to become laws. Nothing is science is "provable" in the sense of mathematics: science isn't in the business of proof. It's in the business of predictive models, based on observation. The fundamental assumptions of science, which can be summarized as "induction works" simply cannot be proven - which turns out not to matter very much.
Always before when jobs were destroyed, the replacement jobs were already known.
Not true at all. No one saw that the automation of shoes and furniture (and the gradual automation of agriculture) would lead to a vast industry manufacturing cars. When the stuff that dominates your budget becomes instead cheap, people start buying stuff en mass that only rich people had before, or that no one could afford before.
That's the pattern you're not seeing.
What new jobs are being created right now? You keep suggesting existing professions and low-paying ones at that.
Existing jobs expanding are what it's possible to suggest - anyone who can predict the wholly new markets stands to become quite wealthy and successful. (How many saw Facebook coming? Expanding free time was obvious, but the actual product?) But we can talk about goods and mostly services that only the rich are willing to pay for today that most people will be able to afford as everything else get cheap. And that's the key: automation makes existing stuff cheap.
BTW, there's no reason to think new skilled blue-collar work will pay any worse than being a plumber - and if you think a plumber is cheap, you've never needed one in a hurry.
the wealthier ones shop at Wal-Mart
Say what now?
Nobody keeps servants any more
Not true at all - we call those people the upper class. They aren't very visible in America, but they're here. Maid services have enabled the middle class to avoid cleaning their own toilets, without needing a live-in maid, and will only become more common as automation makes other stuff cheaper. But that's at the bottom as far as skill needed, my point is that "services that professionals can afford to hire" will move up the skill ladder, creating many more such jobs.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.