Can you explain what this "robot" does that radically differs from what a human does when making a hamburger? Because I watched the appallingly shitty video they have for it, and I don't see anything that wouldn't also be done by a human. Slightly different tools, but that's it. It grinds the meat, slices a fresh bun in half, toasts it, seasons the meat, cooks it, slices tomatoes, shreds lettuce and cheese, applies sauces, and then stacks it all up.
What do humans do that makes their hamburger superior and "quality"?
Well, sure, but that doesn't mean you can't make cheap chuck taste fantastic either. I tend to go with the cheap stuff rather than waste a good steak, and still consistently make better burgers than I can find most places around where I live.
My personal favorite is to do a fine dice on mushrooms and jalepenos and add them, a bit of roasted cumin, and salt and pepper into the meat. When you cook the patty, the mushrooms and jalepenos steam into the meat, adding a ton of moisture. The taste/texture doesn't really change much, the mushrooms enhance the umami from the meat, and the extra bit of smoky/earthiness from the cumin pushes it over the top.
I consistently get "that's one of the best burgers I've ever had" from people who try them, and that's without using expensive cuts of meat. I could probably make even better burgers if I did, but why bother? I'd rather eat those cuts as steaks.
And ironically, a lot of the customer base for the fast food industry are minimum wage folks, who won't have money to spend there anymore if automation takes their jobs. When your employees are your customers, you really need to think twice before getting rid of them.
Did you see the size of this thing? To make one burger at a time? It's a factory assembly line, not a robot chef.
Yes, there is now a "robot" which can make a burger. But it's nothing near a robotic kitchen. You're going to need decent AI to program an all-purpose robot chef. And we're far, far from that. FFS, current robot technology has issues simply holding things. I'd be surprised if there is a robot on the market right now that can pick up things as varied as peas, eggs, sticks of butter, liquids, flour, and whole chickens. And if there is one, my guess is that it would be cheaper just to hire a human chef than to buy one, without even considering the kitchen engineering it would need nor the AI.
While we will probably eventually get there, we're decades away from it right now. Self-driving is a far easier task for a robot than cooking, and we're several years from being able to do that yet.
Twitter hasn't changed our democracy, but it certainly can give that appearance to those who can't do critical thinking. It used to be that you only got a couple of opinions from the people that the TV or newspapers decided to interview, and that was usually a soundbite at most, created by a politician's staffer and relayed via the journalist to you. Now you can not only see what every politician's staffer is saying, but you can interact with their staffer which allows you to think that you could even shape their opinions.
Thanks to Twitter I think I have far more influence over politics than I ever have had before.
Because that's the problem with Twitter, isn't it? You have no idea who is writing those tweets, even if they are posting from a verified account.
Previous phone? Ran out all the time. Current phone? Never. And I've never lost one or broken one.
I honestly don't understand how people lose/break their phones all the time. Put a case on it, and keep it in your front pocket or purse/bag so you don't sit on it. It's really not that difficult. With water resistant phones becoming more common, even dropping one in the toilet isn't a death sentence anymore.
With wireless charging now and far better power management, I don't run out of power. I just toss my phone on the charging puck/cradle at work and at home, and if I had a newer car, I could do it there as well. When I'm away from power for a long period of time, I can go into my power settings and crank them down once I get under 50% to give me hours more battery life. Current estimate for battery life is 7hrs at 60% battery. Cranking the power saving to max and it estimates about 17hrs.
With my last phone, I would not have been willing to use it as a key. With this one, I definitely would. I think that as phone technology continues to mature, this will become far more feasible.
does every state have to create a treaty with every other state in order to start expecting a tax?
If that's the case, we're probably going to have to send a representative from every state to meet together and work out the details. I wonder how that sort of system would work?
Yeah! Super easy! Only 42,000 zip codes to keep track of! And setting an update schedule and mechanism and determining who is responsible for the update. And if you're relying on someone in each zipcode to make sure that their's is accurate, you'll need some method of authenticating people who can make that change. And then there's collecting address/payee info about where to send the tax for each one. And dispute resolution. And you'll probably need to keep track of what you sell as well, because some zip codes will be allocating the tax from one type of item (soda taxes, e.g.) differently than others.
And that needs to be implemented correctly by every online business with a presence in the US.
Yeah, I haven't worked under contract much, but I've been on probationary periods at new jobs more than a few times, and you can be damn sure that I had a very good idea of when those things were nearing an end. Calendar reminders and sticky notes. This is my paycheck, and not paying attention to critical points in it could potentially fuck my work situation up.
Who the hell would trust someone else to do that for them? (Well, this guy, apparently....)
Christians believe that they (like all humans) are sinful and in desperate need of forgiveness.
Wrong about the "all humans" part. That's pretty unique to the Abrahamic religions, in particular christianity.
Such arrogance!
I'm guessing that you were being sarcastic, but yeah, it's fucking arrogant as hell to claim that you have some connection with a divine being, and are going to get infinitely rewarded by that divine being because you understand them and therefore are superior to all those who do not. To claim without evidence that there even is such a divine being is pretty fucking arrogant, let alone tell others that you speak on its behalf.
A large amount of the UBI that goes to people living in poverty would come from eliminating things like unemployment insurance, food stamps, and Social Security, including additional money saved by having far less administrative overhead.
Not really. Have you run the numbers?
Lets assume we limit this to adults. There are about 250m adults in the US. Lets assume we pay $1,000 per month to them all. That's $3T every year.
Social Security: $1.046 trillion, Medicare: $625 billion, Medicaid: $412 billion. Cost to run Social Security: $6.5b. Medicare/caid are in the 2% range, so another $2b can be saved there. In a given year we only spend ~$40b on unemployment, and about double that on food stamps. If you add that up, you'll notice that we're still close to $1T short.
For the middle class (let's make up a number and say the middle 80%), you would raise their taxes by roughly the same amount as the UBI, so most people will be basically unaffected.
That's where the final 1/3 pretty much has to come from, but there's not enough middle class for that. Now, maybe we can pull some money out of the military, and maybe we can reform the tax code and close a lot of the loopholes, and that would help us get there. But what we're talking about is a pretty radical change to tax policy, and it's a very large amount of money.
That trillion dollars levied on half the adults in the US (125m people) would come out to about $8k each, or ~$700/month. So we'd effectively be cutting UBI for half the recipients down to $300/month.
The major flaw in this, however, is that we don't have a suitable replacement for Medicare/Medicade that's affordable for people under the poverty line. Sure, a $12k/year UBI will keep a roof over their head and some food on the table, but it won't pay for a hip replacement. So we're likely going to need to keep those, and that leaves us with another $1T that we need to come up with.
Ok, so since you're logically challenged, I'll lay it out for you:
Since we're not Marxist, the workers do not own the means of production. I agree with you that as processes are automated, production costs fall. In general, people are vastly more productive than they were a few decades ago. However, wages have not really increased in the last several decades, while the wealthy have gotten far, far wealthier.
Where did that money come from?
Where did the money saved in decreasing production costs go?
In your mind, these do not seem to be related at all. I can't fathom what you think explains these two things.
So more productive workers, stagnant wages, the wealthy getting wealthier, and far more people not working is evidence of what, if not a serious change in the labor force?
Open your eyes and look at the world. It is not what you've constructed in your head.
If you want to see the real ramification of it all, if you want to see the actual effect, it got to be introduced as a WHOLE for everyone.
You are bold! I assume you're volunteering to fund this, right? Or are you suggesting that the Canadian government should make a $50 billion gamble on this?
Make no mistake, I'm in support of UBI. But politically, I doubt most countries in the world could take that gamble. You're talking about a very significant percentage of all expenditures by a country being required to fund UBI. Here's one analysis:
But how would we pay for this? $1,000 a month for everyone would cost approximately $2.7 trillion annually, which represents around four to five times the size of the defense budget and 15 percent of the GDP.
I get that UBI doesn't work if it's not universal. But before you're going to convince anyone to take this dive, it's going to have proven at least minimally effective in trials.
Yes. Or not even created in the first place. See Tesla among other companies that started with 90% automation. A couple of decades ago they would have hired a lot more people. These days they're building alien dreadnoughts, as Musk refers to his factories. Note how many humans are in the photos of Tesla's factories. And yes, they are actively building cars in those photos.
Or is automation making some jobs obsolete while creating new ones?
Could you please explain what new jobs could possibly be created that wouldn't be automated in the first place? And if you have an example of one of these unicorns, would it employ enough people to make up for automation? And would those people be qualified or able to qualify for that job?
If this basic income pushes you up by $17,000, then it removes the incentive to find a better job until you find one that makes well in excess of $17,000.
You might want to learn what UBI actually is before typing stupid shit on the internet about it. The entire point of UBI is that you get it instead of other benefits (food stamps, welfare), and you don't lose it if your income passes some threshold. That's what makes it different from unemployment or welfare. If you'd bothered to read anything at all, you could find this tidbit:
For every dollar that recipients earn above the minimum, their payout from the province will be cut by 50 cents, but no one is made worse off by working.
It's not my fault that their outlets aren't properly grounded. A power surge like that could have taken out my $2000 laptop and $1000 phone. They are lucky that all that got damaged is the cheap listening device that they (probably) got for free from Amazon.
I can't imagine anyone with an IQ over 90 could honestly think that Fox News doesn't lie. Are you intellectually disabled, or just a shill? I ask because if you do 5 seconds of searching you can find abundant evidence of Fox News lying, even if you don't watch it to see for yourself.
Normally I'd agree, but he is correct about the motivations of people collectively standing to lose billions of dollars for the various reasons he describes. Historically, businesses haven't just stood around idly as another business or industry put them out of business. They tend to use everything at their disposal to prevent that, including bribery, sabotage, espionage, lawsuits, anti-competitive bills, illegal actions, etc.
When investors have shorted your company for a billion dollars, I imagine it's really hard not to see a giant conspiracy in everything that goes wrong. Not many companies have an enemy list the size and scope of Tesla.
Jesus, Beau, stop being a fucking moron. The Washington post doesn't have a paywall. Yes, if you're stupid enough to let it store cookies indefinitely in your browser, it does pop up a nag screen.
That's not a paywall. That's a tax on technologically illiterate folks.
How the fuck did you get hired to edit for a technology site?
Slashdot Mirror
Can you explain what this "robot" does that radically differs from what a human does when making a hamburger? Because I watched the appallingly shitty video they have for it, and I don't see anything that wouldn't also be done by a human. Slightly different tools, but that's it. It grinds the meat, slices a fresh bun in half, toasts it, seasons the meat, cooks it, slices tomatoes, shreds lettuce and cheese, applies sauces, and then stacks it all up.
What do humans do that makes their hamburger superior and "quality"?
Well, sure, but that doesn't mean you can't make cheap chuck taste fantastic either. I tend to go with the cheap stuff rather than waste a good steak, and still consistently make better burgers than I can find most places around where I live.
My personal favorite is to do a fine dice on mushrooms and jalepenos and add them, a bit of roasted cumin, and salt and pepper into the meat. When you cook the patty, the mushrooms and jalepenos steam into the meat, adding a ton of moisture. The taste/texture doesn't really change much, the mushrooms enhance the umami from the meat, and the extra bit of smoky/earthiness from the cumin pushes it over the top.
I consistently get "that's one of the best burgers I've ever had" from people who try them, and that's without using expensive cuts of meat. I could probably make even better burgers if I did, but why bother? I'd rather eat those cuts as steaks.
And ironically, a lot of the customer base for the fast food industry are minimum wage folks, who won't have money to spend there anymore if automation takes their jobs. When your employees are your customers, you really need to think twice before getting rid of them.
Did you see the size of this thing? To make one burger at a time? It's a factory assembly line, not a robot chef.
Yes, there is now a "robot" which can make a burger. But it's nothing near a robotic kitchen. You're going to need decent AI to program an all-purpose robot chef. And we're far, far from that. FFS, current robot technology has issues simply holding things. I'd be surprised if there is a robot on the market right now that can pick up things as varied as peas, eggs, sticks of butter, liquids, flour, and whole chickens. And if there is one, my guess is that it would be cheaper just to hire a human chef than to buy one, without even considering the kitchen engineering it would need nor the AI.
While we will probably eventually get there, we're decades away from it right now. Self-driving is a far easier task for a robot than cooking, and we're several years from being able to do that yet.
You are aware that most of us won't see the anon trolls if you don't reply to them, right? You feeding them is a solid 75% of the problem.
Let me fix this for you:
Twitter hasn't changed our democracy, but it certainly can give that appearance to those who can't do critical thinking. It used to be that you only got a couple of opinions from the people that the TV or newspapers decided to interview, and that was usually a soundbite at most, created by a politician's staffer and relayed via the journalist to you. Now you can not only see what every politician's staffer is saying, but you can interact with their staffer which allows you to think that you could even shape their opinions.
Thanks to Twitter I think I have far more influence over politics than I ever have had before.
Because that's the problem with Twitter, isn't it? You have no idea who is writing those tweets, even if they are posting from a verified account.
You can find some in depth analysis on things by a few people.
No, you can't. Because 140 characters (or whatever they've now raised it to.) is not in-depth. It's the exact opposite.
In-depth requires paragraphs or pages, which is the antithesis of Twitter.
Previous phone? Ran out all the time. Current phone? Never. And I've never lost one or broken one.
I honestly don't understand how people lose/break their phones all the time. Put a case on it, and keep it in your front pocket or purse/bag so you don't sit on it. It's really not that difficult. With water resistant phones becoming more common, even dropping one in the toilet isn't a death sentence anymore.
With wireless charging now and far better power management, I don't run out of power. I just toss my phone on the charging puck/cradle at work and at home, and if I had a newer car, I could do it there as well. When I'm away from power for a long period of time, I can go into my power settings and crank them down once I get under 50% to give me hours more battery life. Current estimate for battery life is 7hrs at 60% battery. Cranking the power saving to max and it estimates about 17hrs.
With my last phone, I would not have been willing to use it as a key. With this one, I definitely would. I think that as phone technology continues to mature, this will become far more feasible.
That won't start the car, I'm fairly certain.
Well, in some areas, maybe they shouldn't do that? Plan better. Don't slap on an expensive, half-assed, privacy invading patch after the fact.
Man, I wish we had some mechanism for the states to work this out together instead of doing this way. Seems rather complicated, doesn't it?
does every state have to create a treaty with every other state in order to start expecting a tax?
If that's the case, we're probably going to have to send a representative from every state to meet together and work out the details. I wonder how that sort of system would work?
Yeah! Super easy! Only 42,000 zip codes to keep track of! And setting an update schedule and mechanism and determining who is responsible for the update. And if you're relying on someone in each zipcode to make sure that their's is accurate, you'll need some method of authenticating people who can make that change. And then there's collecting address/payee info about where to send the tax for each one. And dispute resolution. And you'll probably need to keep track of what you sell as well, because some zip codes will be allocating the tax from one type of item (soda taxes, e.g.) differently than others.
And that needs to be implemented correctly by every online business with a presence in the US.
Yeah, I haven't worked under contract much, but I've been on probationary periods at new jobs more than a few times, and you can be damn sure that I had a very good idea of when those things were nearing an end. Calendar reminders and sticky notes. This is my paycheck, and not paying attention to critical points in it could potentially fuck my work situation up.
Who the hell would trust someone else to do that for them? (Well, this guy, apparently....)
Christians believe that they (like all humans) are sinful and in desperate need of forgiveness.
Wrong about the "all humans" part. That's pretty unique to the Abrahamic religions, in particular christianity.
Such arrogance!
I'm guessing that you were being sarcastic, but yeah, it's fucking arrogant as hell to claim that you have some connection with a divine being, and are going to get infinitely rewarded by that divine being because you understand them and therefore are superior to all those who do not. To claim without evidence that there even is such a divine being is pretty fucking arrogant, let alone tell others that you speak on its behalf.
A large amount of the UBI that goes to people living in poverty would come from eliminating things like unemployment insurance, food stamps, and Social Security, including additional money saved by having far less administrative overhead.
Not really. Have you run the numbers?
Lets assume we limit this to adults. There are about 250m adults in the US. Lets assume we pay $1,000 per month to them all. That's $3T every year.
Social Security: $1.046 trillion, Medicare: $625 billion, Medicaid: $412 billion. Cost to run Social Security: $6.5b. Medicare/caid are in the 2% range, so another $2b can be saved there. In a given year we only spend ~$40b on unemployment, and about double that on food stamps. If you add that up, you'll notice that we're still close to $1T short.
For the middle class (let's make up a number and say the middle 80%), you would raise their taxes by roughly the same amount as the UBI, so most people will be basically unaffected.
That's where the final 1/3 pretty much has to come from, but there's not enough middle class for that. Now, maybe we can pull some money out of the military, and maybe we can reform the tax code and close a lot of the loopholes, and that would help us get there. But what we're talking about is a pretty radical change to tax policy, and it's a very large amount of money.
That trillion dollars levied on half the adults in the US (125m people) would come out to about $8k each, or ~$700/month. So we'd effectively be cutting UBI for half the recipients down to $300/month.
The major flaw in this, however, is that we don't have a suitable replacement for Medicare/Medicade that's affordable for people under the poverty line. Sure, a $12k/year UBI will keep a roof over their head and some food on the table, but it won't pay for a hip replacement. So we're likely going to need to keep those, and that leaves us with another $1T that we need to come up with.
Ok, so since you're logically challenged, I'll lay it out for you:
Since we're not Marxist, the workers do not own the means of production. I agree with you that as processes are automated, production costs fall. In general, people are vastly more productive than they were a few decades ago. However, wages have not really increased in the last several decades, while the wealthy have gotten far, far wealthier.
Where did that money come from?
Where did the money saved in decreasing production costs go?
In your mind, these do not seem to be related at all. I can't fathom what you think explains these two things.
In the last 10 years, 15 million additional people have left the labor force.
So more productive workers, stagnant wages, the wealthy getting wealthier, and far more people not working is evidence of what, if not a serious change in the labor force?
Open your eyes and look at the world. It is not what you've constructed in your head.
If you want to see the real ramification of it all, if you want to see the actual effect, it got to be introduced as a WHOLE for everyone.
You are bold! I assume you're volunteering to fund this, right? Or are you suggesting that the Canadian government should make a $50 billion gamble on this?
Make no mistake, I'm in support of UBI. But politically, I doubt most countries in the world could take that gamble. You're talking about a very significant percentage of all expenditures by a country being required to fund UBI. Here's one analysis:
But how would we pay for this? $1,000 a month for everyone would cost approximately $2.7 trillion annually, which represents around four to five times the size of the defense budget and 15 percent of the GDP.
I get that UBI doesn't work if it's not universal. But before you're going to convince anyone to take this dive, it's going to have proven at least minimally effective in trials.
Are jobs really being lost to automation?
Yes. Or not even created in the first place. See Tesla among other companies that started with 90% automation. A couple of decades ago they would have hired a lot more people. These days they're building alien dreadnoughts, as Musk refers to his factories. Note how many humans are in the photos of Tesla's factories. And yes, they are actively building cars in those photos.
Or is automation making some jobs obsolete while creating new ones?
Could you please explain what new jobs could possibly be created that wouldn't be automated in the first place? And if you have an example of one of these unicorns, would it employ enough people to make up for automation? And would those people be qualified or able to qualify for that job?
There is no evidence that "this time is different".
What do you call this then?
As processes are automated, production costs fall, freeing up money to invest or spend on other things...
Oh, trickle down economics. Yes, that works super well, as evidenced by what I linked to.
How did you create a world in your head that is so different than the actual world?
If this basic income pushes you up by $17,000, then it removes the incentive to find a better job until you find one that makes well in excess of $17,000.
You might want to learn what UBI actually is before typing stupid shit on the internet about it. The entire point of UBI is that you get it instead of other benefits (food stamps, welfare), and you don't lose it if your income passes some threshold. That's what makes it different from unemployment or welfare. If you'd bothered to read anything at all, you could find this tidbit:
For every dollar that recipients earn above the minimum, their payout from the province will be cut by 50 cents, but no one is made worse off by working.
It's not my fault that their outlets aren't properly grounded. A power surge like that could have taken out my $2000 laptop and $1000 phone. They are lucky that all that got damaged is the cheap listening device that they (probably) got for free from Amazon.
I can't imagine anyone with an IQ over 90 could honestly think that Fox News doesn't lie. Are you intellectually disabled, or just a shill? I ask because if you do 5 seconds of searching you can find abundant evidence of Fox News lying, even if you don't watch it to see for yourself.
Normally I'd agree, but he is correct about the motivations of people collectively standing to lose billions of dollars for the various reasons he describes. Historically, businesses haven't just stood around idly as another business or industry put them out of business. They tend to use everything at their disposal to prevent that, including bribery, sabotage, espionage, lawsuits, anti-competitive bills, illegal actions, etc.
When investors have shorted your company for a billion dollars, I imagine it's really hard not to see a giant conspiracy in everything that goes wrong. Not many companies have an enemy list the size and scope of Tesla.
Jesus, Beau, stop being a fucking moron. The Washington post doesn't have a paywall. Yes, if you're stupid enough to let it store cookies indefinitely in your browser, it does pop up a nag screen.
That's not a paywall. That's a tax on technologically illiterate folks.
How the fuck did you get hired to edit for a technology site?