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This Was the Year the Robot Takeover of Service Jobs Began (gizmodo.com)
merbs writes: Out of the three major sectors of the economy -- agriculture, manufacturing, and service -- two are already largely automated. Farm labor, which about half the American workforce used to do, now comprises around 2 percent of American jobs. And we all know the rust belt song and dance, beat out to outsourcing and mechanization. Which is largely why some 80 percent of all American jobs are service jobs. And this year, quietly but in the open, the robots and their investors came for them, too.
There's a case to be made that 2018 is the year automation took its biggest lunge forward toward our largest pool of human labor: Amazon opened five cashier-less stores; three in Seattle, one in Chicago, and one in San Francisco. Self-ordering kiosks invaded fast food and franchise restaurants in a big way. Smaller robot-centric outfits like the long-awaited auto-burger joint Creator opened, too, and so did a number of others.
In Las Vegas, our service job mecca, hotels' and casinos' widespread plans for automation in everything from bartending to waitstaff to hotel work led one of the city's most powerful hospitality unions to the brink of a 50,000-person strike last summer before a successful negotiation was reached... Combined, they act as a set of markers on a trendline we can no longer ignore. We face the prospect of major upheaval in the last dependable pool of jobs we've got.
There's a case to be made that 2018 is the year automation took its biggest lunge forward toward our largest pool of human labor: Amazon opened five cashier-less stores; three in Seattle, one in Chicago, and one in San Francisco. Self-ordering kiosks invaded fast food and franchise restaurants in a big way. Smaller robot-centric outfits like the long-awaited auto-burger joint Creator opened, too, and so did a number of others.
In Las Vegas, our service job mecca, hotels' and casinos' widespread plans for automation in everything from bartending to waitstaff to hotel work led one of the city's most powerful hospitality unions to the brink of a 50,000-person strike last summer before a successful negotiation was reached... Combined, they act as a set of markers on a trendline we can no longer ignore. We face the prospect of major upheaval in the last dependable pool of jobs we've got.
If wishes were horses then beggars might ride
Also Google is stepping into the automated call center business
<SARCASM>Yep, getting replaced by a robot is in no way related to artificially driving up the price of your labor.</SARCASM>
Reality says your actual minimum wage is zero.
So I guess it's not the end of the world. Plus, I can always go back to dancing in the clubs like I did to get myself through college.
Increase minimum wage and allow floods of immigrants from Third World countries in. That will...ahhh...never mind.
Obvious.
$15 an hour.
If you can find the last job left.
"...with your order in about five minutes."
I was flipping burgers in San Francisco and this Creator company came in and everyone went there and there are no burger flipping jobs left. So then I became a Chess grandmaster and the AI took that job, so I became a Go grandmaster and then the AI took those jobs too. I finally settled on being a taxi driver, so I am OK now.
We can continue to provide government subsidies, charge high import tariff on farm products to make sure the farm industry can replace workers with robots, while blaming China for the lost jobs.
What happens when labor has no value? Or, when all that matters is capital? .. to say nothing of provide for their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness?
How will people earn respect
Please reply with your ideas, ideally without trolling. I would especially like to hear anything beyond the extremes of Death Universal Basic Income. Neither of these allow for self-respect.
I saw him dancing in a club last week. He wasn't on stage though, so I am not sure what he was doing.
Not really... but weren't you ridiculous "conservative" idiots clamoring and crying about "picking winners and losers" just a couple years back? $5 billion to employ a couple thousand (underpaid..) construction workers is about as smart as paying Soy and Pork producers to sit on their unsellable wares because you wanted to pick a publicity fight with China (and then cave anyway).
You really need to get back to your "invisible hand" bullshit arguments, those were much more entertaining.
First the came for the farm jobs and I did not complain because I was not a farmer.
Then they came for the manufacturing jobs and I did not complain because I was not an assembler.
Then they came for the service jobs and I starved.
God, the Russian spambot troll is back. Ivan you need a REAL job, have you considered felating Vladimir Putin? Donald Trump says you get over the salty taste right away, it's actually delicious.
"We face the prospect of major upheaval in the last dependable pool of jobs we've got."
dramatic much?
It didn't just start. I remember calling in to the movie theater, getting a person on the phone, and having a conversation about which movies were playing. Poor woman probably wanted to kill herself, and she was replaced by a tape machine - and eventually by "MoviePhone". This was just one part of an overall move to voicemail/menu systems to replace human interaction. I remember the first self-checkout line at the grocery store, and prior to that the first barcode scanner. Prior to that the stock boys had to use a price gun to put a price on every goddamn item (I know because I was a stock boy and I had to do that). Airplanes had a flight engineer. Postal workers manually sorted mail. Companies had "secretary pools" to manually copy documents (OK, that was before my time, along with washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and dishwashers). Service jobs have been replaced by machinery since we invented machinery. Maybe it has accelerated or reached some kind of inflection point, but it certainly didn't "begin" this year.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Repent your sins and turn to Fear, for the kingdom of Skynet is near!
Before Before the "Whip buggy manufacturers" comments start pouring in, I got three questions for those posting them: "When are your replacement jobs going to be available?", "Will those replacement jobs pay enough for people to live on?", and "Will the vast majority of people be given the education they need to perform those jobs?"
If the answers to those questions involve the words "In ten years", "Why would we pay that much?", "No, pay for it yourself", or just "No" then you have some thinking to do. You cannot expect to upend the vast majority's ability to provide for themselves, provide no replacement, and expect people to go along with it. They will see it for what it is: A massive power and wealth transfer from them to you, that will impoverish them and their children for generations. They will see that, and they will fight you over it.
Yes, you may counter with "But death drones, advanced military training / equipment, and wealth", but those people will be making a choice of not how to live, but how to die. Given the choice of "Go down fighting" vs. "Starve to death / die of dehydration or sickness", many will take the "Go down fighting" option for the sole glimmer of hope, the hope of living and being better off regardless as to how small those chances may be, it provides over the idea of waiting to die.
So I have one question for you "Where's those easy to get regardless of qualification service center jobs, Mr. Automation?" "Where are they?" Until you can answer that question, you have a problem, and soon to be blood, on your hands.
The Whip buggy manufacturers used to have the same issues. But everyone survived.
Some ancient philosophers argued that slavery were necessary in order for others to have the leisure and energy to be, among other things, philosophers. They had something of a point, although full-on chattel slavery seems a bit much. Similar arguments used to be made for serfdom---how could enough food be grown without people figuratively chained to the land and their boring-awful farming jobs?
I'd suggest that at least at the start, nations or large co-operatives own the machines that do the work and that make the machines to do the work; eventually when labour becomes too cheap to meter.... Of course, that would reduce the level of hierarchy in society, and some people seem to love that, and not just the ones at the top; it could eliminate poverty, and some people love having someone below them, especially if such 'deserve' it....
There are very, very few dependable pools of good jobs. Most job descriptions constantly change - emerging, growing, adapting, stagnating, expanding or being automated out of existence. Very few job descriptions stay constant for very long.
On the up side, this is a good thing. When society realizes that there is an unmet need for a particular set of skills, people rush/train to meet the need. High demand and a low supply of qualified people means good compensation. For a while at least.
On the down side, it can be quite a bit more brutal. When a field gets automated, some people manage to keep the few jobs that still exist, and some manage to move into another field by retraining or adapting their pre-existing skills to new conditions. However, it turns out that many people are 1) poor at adapting and 2) incapable of being trained for a job more than once in their lives. These people wind up with permanently reduced income. Understandably, they tend to be unhappy about it.
Low skill labor for undesirable jobs are being replaced by robots and automation. Not sure what skills these people coming up from the South have? But pretty sure they are not college educated or even attended a vocational school. I think its not the America they had hoped for, and while they may get some aid and support they did not get where they came from. Its going to be a far cry from the Utopia they obviously were promised.
"Find out more... after this message from iRobot."
unlink health care from jobs
It is a massive wealth transfer to your current boss. You will be better off without her - you are lucky you have so many friendly local tax preparation services. In most countries they throw you in the brig until you pay
True, but there was a lot of chaos an uncertainty if you wanted to stay an employed textile worker, carriage maker, carriage driver, etc.. I'm speaking about the middle and late Victorian Era during the Industrial Revolution. The Luddites might be considered backwards today, but they were real people who got displaced and had to face real consequences and in some cases they were severe for them or others (ie.. when they'd riot or tear shit up). I don't know if that has any bearing on if it's inevitable or not, but that isn't my point. I have to wonder if the ends always justify the means. I agree with you in general, but I don't know if I agree with what I perceive as the underlying logic: just because "we survived" didn't mean it didn't suck donkey balls. Ask the Donner Party, for example. Still, I'm also not saying anything should have been done radically differently. I mean, trying to hold back automobiles.... pretty dumb. I guess all I'm saying is that I have a sympathy for the Luddites and I'm starting to wonder if "automation everywhere" is going to lead to a utopia or a Chinese hell.
Robot baristas have been here for a while, right? I hope they become more common.
I hope they will have a program that will slap millennial customers who make everybody else wait while they engage in chit-chat (bro!) and take ten minutes to order when they haven't decided when they get to the front of the line, and have a zillion question about the ingredients. Also, a non-overridable function for the robot to not ask about the desire for "an alternative milk". And not throw indecipherable passive-aggressive shade.
(Us Baby Boomers can be a bit rude when we don't get good service. But we say what we are unhappy with so that you don't have to guess IF there is something wrong, and if so, WHAT is wrong. In other words, we were taught some basic communication skills.)
Customer service with millennials on both sides of the counter are a shit show. But neither side will say anything about it, so it never gets fixed.
" Farm labor, which about half the American workforce used to do, now comprises around 2 percent of American jobs."
And they get hundreds of billions of dollars of tax money and they still go bankrupt and commit suicide in droves because they cannot compete on the market.
It sure needs to adapt quite a bit more. If self-driving cars in big city traffic get along, I'm sure that trekkers and other machines would be able to find a field by themselves in the sticks.
Now we have apps and AI so I am sure it will be different.
How do you have a capitalistic society when human labor has no value? This video outlines the issue fairly well. There is this transition period between a totally non-needs based society, and our current state, that concerns me. That period when more that fifty percent of the population is unemployable, but we are still married to the idea that those individuals should somehow make themselves employable through self improvement. It's simply NOT a reasonable dismissal. https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU
were to automation not outsourcing. To be fair outsourcing makes it that much more painful for the few jobs left. But I think it's pretty clear that our current system of wealth distribution isn't going to hold up. As much as people hate it when people get money they didn't earn (which is funny, since rent seeking on the properties your dad willed to you is A-OK) we're either gonna have to get over all that puritanical bullshit or get comfortable with a dystopia of 1% haves and 99% have-nots.
Here's the thing folks, when 99% are the have nots you're probably not going to be one of the haves. But there's always pride. True story, buddy of mine's a basement dweller living at home in his 40s because he can't find a decent paying job (blue collar guy, couple of mental issues that means he can't hustle like you're expected to in 2018). If you ask him, he's middle class. And Taxed to the Max. I don't even know where he got the phrase, "Taxed to the Max", but he got it, and he's convinced he is, even though on the crappy wages he makes working part time he's not paying any taxes ourside of his vehicle registration on a 20 year old truck. This is what we're up against folks...
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pgmrdlm = whiny INCEL faggot, not anything to be jealous about. Listen to this whiny punkass lol. Feckless traitor bitches like pgmrdlm get hung from their faggot necks until they are dead. #Solved nazi inbred problem #Rope
LOL! Hehe. Okay. Here's hopin!
ever see those automated contruction robots that extrude concrete like a 3d printer; set one of those off self walking and you could get yourself a pretty spiffy wall pretty quick.
Everyone? No. The people who were displaced were knocked down a few rungs on the economic ladder.
And as labor becomes less and less relevent in ALL lines of work, we are headed for some serious social problems.
And how tall does the mountain of machine-made-hamburgers get before the machine realizes nobody has the money to buy them?
A very big change is right on the horizon, but I don't think anybody can even comprehend the consequences.
My solution? \
Human sized hampster wheels to generate the power for the machines. Automation AND green power.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Rent free
Which is a bit of a bugger if you're already on the bottom one.
http://peterhousehold.blogspot...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Somebody will have to maintain the robots....until the new generation of robotic robot maintainers is deployed...
4wdloop
That's all shitty clickbait 'stories' like these are: Spreaders of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. *closes the tab* *moves on to something relevant*
Take note, that old fall-back job.... If they fail to get anything else ... Flipping burgers, is going away, your kids will have no jobs and hate u when they grow up.
You have to go back to the early 1980's to get such a bad labor force participation rate though... It's been pretty much like that since 2009.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
This can't happen soon enough, and the service workers have nobody but themselves to blame. I used to try to support the local brick-and-morter economy. I'd go to the store, try and find my item on the shelf and inevitably need help eventually. Either I couldn't find an item or it was out of stock and I needed a worker to check the stock levels.
15 minutes of searching to find a worker, who would greet me like an angry bear just woken from a nap, only to give a useless response designed to get them back to goofing off as fast as possible. Usually a wild goose chase into the wrong part of the store when they'd run and hide in case I came back. Or the pretend search of the back room only to never come back.
I couldn't possibly count the number of times I'd give up and order an item from amazon from inside the brick-and-morter store I'd gone out of my way to support, to have it show up on my doorstep the next day. Service workers are useless. I remember one time I went to a live cashier in a store that had automatic check-out-lanes. She very rudely told me I could check myself out over there. I ripped into her about what an idiot she was, I was trying to help her keep her job and if everyone uses the automatic checkouts, how long are they going to pay her to stand there stari9ng off into space like a vapid cow. I called the manager over, told him what had happened and left my cartful of good and left the store. I could fill a book with anecdotes. I don't give a crap about B&M disappearing, but if anything happened to Amazon and their ilk, I'd be miserable that I have to back and deal with service trash-people again.
BR I do feel bad for the small business owners, but this article is about service jobs specifically, and those people can't hit the unemployment lines and welfare rolls fast enough. They deserve it. If you don't believe me, head over to reddit and read some of the subs filled with retail workers whining about actually having to do their jobs while having one giant cluster-orgy of mutual support.
or even that special. I'm not the first person to notice that the working class refuses to think of themselves as such. He's not the other, known the guy since 7th grade and he is and remains my closest friend.
But you're strawmaning to avoid the issuea, which is that:
a. Automation is going to put us all out of work and if we don't change how we distribute wealth everybody but a lucky few born into it will live like shit (think Indian reservations but on a global scale).
b. Right wing politics don't work, you know this and it makes you very uncomfortable. Stop reading Ayn Rand and hating yourself and start looking around at the deck stacked against you. You'll have an uncomfortable free years while you work out the demons put in your head by the billion dollar propaganda machines like Fox News and Rush but you'll be better for it.
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meanwhile unemployment continues to go down.
meanwhile most touchscreens at McDonalds in UK and USA test positive for feces
service jobs replaced by robots? ain't happening.
most touchscreens at McDonalds in UK and USA test positive for fecal contamination.
unemployment continues to go down
the big online guerrilla Amazon is hiring in droves, thousands of jobs to fill
oh my, automation is creating jobs, who'd have thunk. Anyone in IT or who uses computer all day... has a job that automation created.
dumb-ass chicken little lies, is what this article is
1) Since the Industrial revolution (and really with every advance in production technology), fewer people are necessary to create things that people value. The phenomenon is the "consolidation of the production of value." For example, instead of 10 farmers producing enough for a subsistence living with primitive technology, one farmer can produce a lot with advanced tech. Instead of 100 people required to run a store that generates 20 million a year in revenue, with advanced tech it now only requires 10.
2) So there's a "production pyramid": at the bottom, everyone makes everything they need. The next layer up it requires fewer people to make everything everyone needs. The next layer up even fewer.
3) Thought experiment: imagine the top of the pyramid. One man (or woman) can make everything everyone needs. He owns all the productive capital. How to distribute money then?
One thing to realize.
i. People are necessary to create demand, for both goods and services, and the money to buy those goods and services. Without any people and no demand, money is worthless, and the single value creator is only making things for his own consumption.
So: How to distribute money in the one creator system, at the top of the pyramid? How about 2 layers down? How about 50 layers down?
You honesty can't think of a solution for touchscreens at McDonalds testing positive for feces?
The solution is near field communication to a cellphone you own. No physical contact. Problem solved... ...as if that were the problem in the first place. Did you try testing the door handles at McDonalds?
Marie-Antoinette, that did not end well for your great grandmother!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I see very few people use the touchscreens, unless there is a long line. And you can easily avoid the fecal factor by ordering ahead on the app and picking it up. Plus plenty of companies offer delivery from pretty much anywhere you want through their own app: Grub Hub, Uber Eats, 256ToGo, BiteSquad, Door Dash, Eat24, etc.
because the cost is baked into my rent. You do know your landlord isn't doing that out of the goodness of his/her heart, right? Donald Trump rather famously used maintenance as an excuse to jack up rates and increase profits.
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Out of the three major sectors of the economy -- agriculture, manufacturing, and service -- two are already largely automated. Farm labor which about half the American workforce used to do, now comprises around 2 percent of American jobs. And we all know the rust belt song and dance, beat out to outsourcing and mechanization. Which is largely why some 80 percent of all American jobs are service jobs. And this year, quietly but in the open, the robots and their investors came for them, too.
Every time I have someone say we need illegals for farm jobs Americans won't do, I just link to sites that promote the robotics for farming. I never hear shit from them again.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Of course at this point in history it's important to remind people the Luddites were not opposed to automation per se; they were merely opposed to how the benefits of automation were being distributed.
about time they eliminated employees ... my ship to store experience...
wal-mart #1 - go to back, push button, wait 15-20 min for employee to show up, then find the package - total time about 30 min to get a package
wal-mart #2 - type code into tower, package comes out instantly - total time about 30 seconds
Not really... but weren't you ridiculous "conservative" idiots clamoring and crying about "picking winners and losers" just a couple years back? $5 billion to employ a couple thousand (underpaid..) construction workers is about as smart as paying Soy and Pork producers to sit on their unsellable wares because you wanted to pick a publicity fight with China (and then cave anyway).
You really need to get back to your "invisible hand" bullshit arguments, those were much more entertaining.
You may not agree with the purpose of a job - in this case, building a border wall - but it's still people laboring and being paid for that labor, not to mention suppliers being paid for construction materials actually used in the building of that wall. That's nothing at all like paying subsidies to an industry that otherwise can't support itself.