Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.