The problem is that any job is going to be targeted for automation in high income countries because the cost of the worker is going to be far higher than the equipment.
Yeah, but it is going to be an adjustment for society to decide what to do when a large segment of the population will never be economically or otherwise productive.
“Technology was a strike issue and one of the very last issues to be resolved,” said Ted Pappageorge, the Culinary Workers Union’s secretary-treasurer who led the teams that negotiated new five-year contracts, narrowly averting a historic strike at more than a dozen hotel-casinos on the Strip.”
The thing is, once robots are good enough to replace the workers, the hotels won’t care about the strike. So now 5 years from now, if the robots are good enough than the jobs are gone.
I think the only time I’ve ever seen/heard of robots in jobs like this that I can accept would be how in one cafe in Tokyo where disabled people pilot robot staff. If anything, that’s the best solution for robotic staff doing customer service jobs if it ever comes down to all humans are replaced by robots.
My grandma used to go to people’s houses in the morning and brew pour-over coffee for them and put it in an old school Thermos. Mr. Coffee killed her job and she killed herself the following year.
I can imagine an engineer looking at a push-button bean to cup machine and thinking “how can I make this slightly less efficient and a lot more complicated”.
I work in the casino industry (IT) and my organization has already purchased and deployed a bevy of products to replace people. We’ve been trying nearly everything we can since 2020 as calls for higher wages have gotten louder and the company has no interest in meeting that demand. We have machines that read incoming orders and make cocktails, machines making some of the food or at least helping, machines that deliver food to tables, automated floor cleaners, towel/supply delivering machines at the hotels, hybrid tables that are more of a zoom call than a table game, card printing machines, etc. We’ve cut hundreds of jobs at each location in the past few years.
The automation tools shown at CES and other conferences get bought, get tested, and get improved upon. Dont read these stories and articles and think it isn’t really happening, I’ve deployed a lot of it already and have projects in motion for more later this year as capital projects start up.
A lot of these jobs were extremely simple and not worth a human mind to use on anyway but… under our current system people need jobs. I’d like to see an introduction of better social support systems as we replace these jobs en masse.
Ideally yes, along with programs to teach people to take care of the machines that replace them. Currently my IT team is tasked with taking care of all these job replacers but without any addition to the IT team to make up for the extra work. Its unsustainable
I’ve seen it as well in my IT department, which is ironic since the whole argument for automation and jobs from capitalists is that “the economy will shift and there will be more jobs in repair and maintenance of robotics!” Etc.
Yeah, unless you’re unwilling to actually expand those jobs at all, in which case we will just end up with a bunch of malfunctioning systems piled on top of technical debt.
I work in government and we have systems that are planning on going live that will automate entire departments away coming in 2024-2025. It’s not perfect but it is being iterated like you said. It’s all about reducing headcount over the long run.
The key is to set up that support system, not to try and stall the march of technology. If we did that we’d still have milk men and dozens of farm hands per square acre.
I recently reread “Beyond this Horizon” by Heinlein, after reading “Progress and Poverty” by Henry George. I had no idea at the time how much RAH was pulling from Georgian political economy while simultaneously writing about a future where 95%+ is fully automated and has only high level human oversight. That’s the kind of forward thinking we desperately needed during the early 1900’s, and are now in a state of emergency over. He refers to our current model as “Pseudo-capitalism” and illustrates in the first conversation of the novel how automated capitalism and collectivism are functionally only “culturally relevant” since the automated capitalist model of the novel includes a UBI and most of the basic needs of society are met for free. He then explains that even purely socialist societies still require some system of finance externally and therefore a requirement of internal financial tracking and accounting. Thus both societies are fundamentally the same in practice despite their ideological differences.
He’s most famous for ideas like “TANSTAAFL” but he also ideated much more progressive societies that people don’t talk much about if they’ve even heard of them.
I really wanna hear what the proposal is for removing "unqualified" jobs en masse without implementing universal basic income.
The low pay and bad conditions of "unqualified" jobs often gets excused because they, allegedly, are "stepping stones", a means of sustaining oneself while working towards more specialized careers.
If you destroy a significant amount of those positions, where does that leave those people? Are we so drunk on cyberpunk-esque lust of AI evolution that we are fine eliminating the means of entry to society for so many?
If it’s anything like Maggie’s legacy in the UK. It just leads to generations of poverty and society degradation that even now don’t look like they will be reversed. Like it’s mad that life was better when people crawled in a hole to mine coal by hand.
But hey it least it was an excuse for a party when she died.
The low pay and bad conditions of “unqualified” jobs often gets excused because they, allegedly, are “stepping stones”, a means of sustaining oneself while working towards more specialized careers.
If you destroy a significant amount of those positions, where does that leave those people?
This is happening not just in “unqualified” jobs. A good chunk of junior level professional positions are evaporating too. High functionality automation has taken a bite out of lots of IT jobs. I look at my own path in rising in IT and see it largely doesn’t exist anymore.
I don’t have any answers as far as what the end game of this looks like or what could or should be brought to bear to change course. I’m thinking there will be small pockets of seasoned IT professionals that are kept on to maintain system/processes until those age out and are replaced. This could take decades at the normal pace of giant corporations and government.
When it comes to IT, it's important to keep things in perspective, there's a limit on how much it can be impacted. It may be able to give you the foundations of that Python code you need, but it sure as hell won't be able to make sense of the fucking mess that your organization has made out of the venvs (I won't either, but sssshhhhhh). I think most if not all of IT specialties have that kind of situation.
If there's anything my time in IT has taught me, is that any solution or paradigm change that gets introduced doesn't really outpace the difficulties and challenges that are constantly emerging, and more often than not they create their own positions without completely eliminating the ones they are trying to streamline/replace. You introduce Ansible to automate and streamline the configuration of your storage systems, you think the people that were doing the deployment and config until now are now obsolete... Joke's on you, you now need both the Ansible dev as well as the guys that were already in charge of deployment and configuration, because inevitably something goes wrong periodically, something needs to be adapted to the particularities of the environment, or any other number of other things.
In the short term, yeah, maybe some entry positions might be affected under the direction of directives with lack of foresight, but I hope that, in the end, it won't end up being as severe as we expect, or at least that there will be an eventual course correction.
You’re making a fundamentally bad assumption: that this is in any way “good faith”.
The billionaires and giant corporations can make more money by employing less people. That’s it.
It’s limitless greed. They don’t care about living wages or “stepping stones” or funding the country or how many people get thrown out onto the street. It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but it’s the truth and we’re all witnessing it. This is capitalism run amok: They can become even richer and nothing matters more than that.
We don’t have to let corporations rule us. If voters weren’t so fucking brainwashed we could make a system that works for everyone. I’m hoping at some point it will be too obvious for anytime not to notice that a system where give swathes of the population are just left to starve isn’t something we can tolerate.
The solution is - instead of rejecting technology, which isn't going anywhere and will only progress and can't be stopped, because under capitalism it will lead to workers starving - we reject capitalism.
It's literally the only way that would actually prevent people from suffering (and significantly help the planet, too).
Thank you for including those links. I especially liked this part of the conclusion:
So the transformation from capitalism to socialism requires political action by the working class, in order that it can establish structures necessary for the transition to socialism. Just as the merchant class during feudalism could discern its long-range interests in the full realization of factory production, the working class must discern its interest in the full emancipatory implications of automated industry. And just as the merchant class became a revolutionary bourgeoisie, the working class must become a revolutionary class that acts politically to establish a new type of society on a foundation of automated industry.
If anyone is curious, it’s a short read and a good overview.
The problem is that humans are really bad at caring for unproductive people. If you use wealth generated by natural resources as a proxy for wealth generated by robot labor, humans have a bad record of distributing the material wealth.
Some of that turn is physical plant. Kitchens, especially, are built to serve human forms, where tech solutions to food prep would rather be stand-alone boxes. It’s a far harder problem to make a robot that uses a restaurant’s existing grills, ovens, and deep fryers than it is to make a box that turns out perfect french fries. It’s a riskier proposal for a restaurant to replace its fry station, where a human can make fries, onion rings, egg rolls, or whatever new fad hits tiktok, with a fries-and-rings-only box with less than 10 years commercial proof. Generative AI, for all its faults, is just code that runs on a computer you already have, or maybe in a cloud service with zero physical footprint. Relative to replacing your barista with a vending machine, trying ChatGPT for a quarter or two is practically zero risk.
Yup, I figured service jobs would be some of the last to go honestly. Replacing a person that works at a desk on a computer all day with a computer is just cutting out the middle man. Replacing someone that requires a lot of physical ability to move around and manipulate objects requires tech that doesn’t live in the cloud.
And considering I’ve been reading about AI taking other jobs for the last year or more, I guess they kinda are the last to go. Now we just sit back and watch it accelerate. Either get UBI or a revolution that leads to UBI. Or the cyberpunk future the oligarchs plan to leave us with as they set their power hungry sights on Mars.
We already have fully automatic coffee machines - and they make shit coffee. Adding a robotic arm will not help because it’s not about mechanical control it’s about getting the process right and consistently repeatable. And that can be done without AI if anyone wanted to invest enough money.
Most coffee places use automatic coffee machines, as long as they have good beans the coffee is good. Getting the correct weight of grounds and tamping them down is not a process difficult to automate.
You are objectively wrong about coffee. You are leaving out a whole world of variables that easily effect the coffee and are the difference between a bad coffee shop and a great one. Water quality, water temperature, grind size, grind consistency, tamp pressure, bed consistency are all huge and we haven’t even gotten to roasting the beans, dialing in an espresso machine for a certain bean, etc…
Most coffee shops use automatic machines for their drip coffee and nothing else
I’ve never been in a coffee shop without an automatic/one-touch espresso machine. The last one I tried - a place that roasts their own beans and offers a range of classes and Specialty Coffee of America certifications - I asked if they could make me a “bad” espresso, and they basically said, “Nope, you’re gonna get whatever the button gives us.”
I didn’t leave the other variables out. A human in the loop doesn’t change grind size or consistency. A human in the loop doesn’t change water quality, or temperature. A human in the loop won’t change bean quality.
Tamp pressure is more consistent with automated machines vs humans. It is much easier to dial in a shot for particular beans/roast, you can literally dial it in, that’s why coffee shops use automatic machines. Those machines are not the cheap ones they can cost up to $10k. Over half the coffee shops in my area use automatic machines.
Australian coffee is sublime. Made manually, it’s a profession of pride for many, and in all my travels to many countries, the coffee of Australia has never been bested.
German coffee is made through exact, automated machines, and it’s crap. It’s some of the worst coffee I’ve experienced.
Machine after machine, I’ve tried them all, and I’ve given up.
I don’t know what the human does, but whatever they do that the machine is not doing, makes av huge difference, and no manufacturer has cracked the magic formula yet.
I’ve had the opposite experience, my regular coffee shop uses an automatic machine. They have the best espresso in the area, it might help that they roast their own beans.
I can’t help but feel like your sampling might be skewed.
Vollautomaten (I. E. Fully automated coffee machines that brew espressos and cappuccinos etc) tend to make worse coffee, I agree. That’s why I don’t use the one in the office.
Having an experienced barista grind you an exactly measured dose fresh for your coffee at a good Café is quite nice, on the other hand.
But that’s nothing to do with Germany or Australia.
Experienced humans know all the variables - roast levels, grind size, water temperature, slight differences in timing depending on exact coffee in question… And more importantly they can apply them intuitively without mentally processing each variable separately.
Machines could do all that but such a machine would need good programming (expensive) and a lot of sensors (expensive).
It already happened 15-20 years ago for 90% of people.
Coffee snobs (myself included) sometimes forget that the vast majority of people just want a cup of brown that makes them feel slightly less like shit.
I went to a donut shop once (sugar isn’t my thing, especially early morning, so yes, once) on my way to work at 3:30am, and ordered a coffee “the color of a plain or egg bagel before toasting” and they actually got my milk ratio spot on.
This was a very long time ago in my early 20s, and I like the coffee flavor more now; I drink coffee in soup bowl cups, which are appx 4cups. I milk and sugar the first cup (1/4 cup whole milk, 1 heaping tbsp sugar) and top off with plain coffee every inch or so as I drink it or it cools, so whatever’s in the first flavor cup is all I use.
I know some people like black coffee, and that’s great for them, but I need to cut the bitter to get the pleasant flavor, and milk and sugar are exactly it. I can do without one or the other, but not both.
I have a pretty bad sweet tooth, so coffee is one of those things I have to drink sparingly, cuz it’s probably 500+ calories before my tongue says it’s potable.
I’ve been making my own ‘milk tea’ lately by adding flavored (usually caramel or hazelnut) coffee creamer to black tea; and since the tea is way less bitter than coffee I go through a lot less creamer, but it scratches that same itch.
I think I can unite tea and coffee snobs to fight under one banner by presenting as their common enemy lol.
I have some eggnog and horchata teas that literally require both milk and sugar to taste anything like what the label says, but if you add those things they are amazing (if you like horchata or eggnog)
I also have some other flavored teas that highly benefit from the addition of one or both.
Anyone who is a purist on tea or coffee or really anything to do with taste… is missing out. Big time.
In the long run machines are cheaper (also don’t take days off nor try to unionize), which is why many companies are looking to automate things with AI or just robots in general.
In assuming that it’s simply impossible for a machine to accurately follow the same process as a person and make quality coffee (in his own subjective judgement), @makingStuffForFun sounds much like wine snob to me.
I’ve been hearing talk of mechanised coffee makers/baristas taking over for over 20 years now. In this current AI hype environment it’s pretty easy to believe that now’s the time. And sometimes hype can make that happen if everyone believes it’s the time for it.
I’m not in the robotics space but I can imagine that more pervasive ML and/or DL techniques can bring the field forward. Whether they translates to better automatic coffee machines though? I think I’m doubtful just because of how much of the job is random fine motor control stuff. Though, to be fair, so many coffee places, even good ones, have so much variance in the quality of their product that they don’t control for because they don’t have to that I can see machines doing on average a better job in many cases … where again, with AI hype, people may just be happy to accept and embrace that. I’d certainly go try coffee from a coffee robot now.
Which of course gets to the potentially oncoming reality for a lot of people … climate change + job automation … over a 5-30 year time scale, shit’s about to get whack.
Just a local burger joint near me started installing automatic ordering interfaces/computers. At first I was confused that it’d be worth it for them as they don’t have the most amount of business. Then I realised that their demand spikes massively and is rather variable. So, instead of hiring people for shifts that are too long such that they will just stand around for most of it … they’re investing in machines so that what little staff they can afford can be stretched more during peak demand times.
I was on the outskirts of this robotics transformation.
The robotic arm stuff is the game changer. It’s such a general purpose machine. It’s very impressive but not quite perfect and the vision is very impressive but not quite perfect. When I seen it, it was very almost there but because it couldn’t do that 1% it couldn’t replace humans at all. It really feels like it just needs to be that little bit better and the world will change.
Well that was almost 5 years ago. One day, maybe it’s here, the floodgates will open.
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