wasoxygen -made me think of you. I imagine that somewhere you've had a conversation and this article is a, "see, I told you so," moment.
Whenever I leave the airport in Raleigh, I pay for my parking at the attendant station instead of the automated spots. I figure each time I do this I'm helping to save a human beings job. The irony is when the attendant gets annoyed that they have to look up from the book they are reading to help me. I'm helping them.
The more things change... Not all jobs threatened by automation are joyless and menial, but joyless, menial jobs are prime targets. Nobody goes to Wendy's for the ambience and the counter staff there are not generally improving the experience for anyone. The parking lot attendant is there primarily to keep people from fucking with stuff; you aren't helping him save his job because he's mostly a security guard. If he were a valet his job would be totally secure because there's a human interaction there; if Wendy's were Ruth's Chris they'd never be talking about automation. I love Kaitan sushi. It's not because I hate waitresses, it's because I don't want to interact with them every ten minutes to get new rolls and I don't know what I'll want to eat all at once. Put it on the belt and I'm still interacting with people, but it'll be the chef, not the server. I would totally go to a conveyor belt burger joint. Or a conveyor belt chicken joint. Or a conveyor belt tapas bar. I mean, if you look at it, "food trucks" are basically restaurants with the servers removed.
I'm actually quite fond of the remodeled look. More relevantly they don't add any value. The menu is tight enough that asside from interpreting badly thought out coupons their job is almost entirely mechanical. Replacing them involves, more or less, turning around the touchscreen, streamlining the interface (now with extra pictures) and adding a ticket printer. I know this works because I use such a system on a regular basis at a convenience store, of all places. A common complaint is that people take too long to order via touch screen but even at the busiest of times four touch screens could easily keep four food prep people busy without a line. Not for the touchscreens anyway, there was a line waiting for food. Nobody goes to Wendy's for the ambience
and the counter staff there are not generally improving the experience for anyone.
Not particularly shocked. The minute it became cheaper to have a robot than a person, this was going to happen. Minimum wage hikes only sped up that inevitability.
You see peolple beig replaced, I see people gaining jobs that pay half way decently. Hell, maybe their employers will even start seeing their remaining employees as assets instead of disposable labor. The inevitable is society coming to grips with the idea that keeping people employed and supplementing their inedequate income through welfare just so we can pat ourselves on the back about not giving "free money" to slackers is kind of stupid. That can't happen soon enough.
I guess the question becomes: do we want to slow down the inevitability? maybe instead we should prepare for it. Minimum wage hikes only sped up that inevitability.
So Vonnegut's Playing Piano is getting here faster and faster. Only in the book each parking attendant booth or cash register had a ten person crews employed there just for sake of having 0% population without job ;). Actually, I do want to hear about it from you guys/gals: what do you think of Vonnegut's world and its viability in light of articles like this one? In case you did not read Playing Piano or other books in this setting, it is a world that got automated to such insane level that even engineers jobs were starting to become automated and people without skills were given a job that would cost more to automate than use people. This resulted in a crew of about 20 people called to fix one pothole or similar problems. If I recall correctly in his setting there was even a tax that boiled down to "you did not invent enough busy work to employ people" that was so high that companies went along.
Vonnegut made most of his points by extrapolating trends out to ridiculous extremes. Harrison Bergeron is the classic example. The flaw in taking such things seriously (as opposed to allegorically) is that the setup presumes people are clever enough to recognize the advantages but too stupid to see the drawbacks. You aren't supposed to study them as models of society, you're supposed to study them to examine human nature under pressure. That said, Tamim Ansari observed that the Ottoman Empire was crushed under the technological innovation of Europe not because Ottomans weren't clever, but because Ottoman society employed vast hordes of people in all sorts of positions that would have risen up and overthrown the aristocracy if they were made idle.
I get the nature of Vonnegut's works, kudos on putting it in words much better that what I was trying to come up though. Tamim Ansari is complete news to me, but after a quick googling seems like someone right up my alley. Could you recommend his works to someone who is not particularly savvy in history and politics? Or similar author(s) who do go from ground up with explanations. Thanks! :D
I will freely and gleefully recommend Destiny Disrupted. It's eminently readable, dryly humorous at times and greatly insightful. I have no idea how history is taught in your 'hood but here in These United States "the crusades" were "Europe trounces the shit out of Islam" and "the Ottoman Empire" is "that thing that somehow managed to spring up after we abandoned the Crusades." Ansary makes the point that "the crusades" were "oh, yeah, that thing that happened on the periphery while we were busy getting our asses kicked by Ghengis Khan" and "the Ottoman Empire" is "the political system that calcified and allowed Europe to slowly buy out the kingdom from the inside out."
Everyone's history books suck a big one. This is because the past is politicized and our national identities are tied up in our national heritage. I had impeccable history instruction but due to state law, two entire years are devoted to New Mexico state history. Worse, the state mandates a competency test prior to graduation, of which more than 50% of the content is tied to state history. It was fairly common for exchange students to come from Europe, either by themselves or with their theoretical physicist parents, and have their graduation in jeopardy because they didn't expect to be grilled for two hours on the parochial history of a meaningless backwater province. By way of contrast, most American history classes I've seen spend the last week on events between WWI and the Vietnam War... if they're lucky. It's not uncommon for classes running late to pretty much stop at V-J day.
I had a history teacher that assigned A People's History as supplementary reading and a history teacher who had worked on the Reagan campaign in alternating years. I think explicitly politicized history worked out better for me than implicitly politicized history does for kids who get history teachers that play it straight.
I always wonder how much a company actually saves with these machines. I used to be an attendant at self serve check out's in a grocery store and even though you get some people who know what they're doing most people are very slow. Granted fast food places probably save more since their ordering system isn't very complicated. Plus the more user friendly they make the ones at the grocery store the easier it becomes too steal so that's more lost money.
Do you know they aren't because of how much they suck at anything other than the self chechouts ? Like something as simple as pointing in the direction of the milk ? Because that's what happened in my old store when they started having the pop and chip companies stock their own stuff in order to cut down on grocery staff. It was so annoying when I would be trying to just get from one end of the store to the other to do my job, a job that wasn't even supposed to exist because the software was supposed to be able to handle everything on it's own mind you, and a customer would stop me every aisle to ask a question since there was no staff ever. I know realistically the attempts to replace staff will get better but they've so far all been such huge disappointments that ruined my days so I have no faith left.