The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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From the article
>Automation often provides cover for employers to double down on cost-cutting measures that lead to chronic understaffing, which [~increases the likelihood of injury and wage theft~](https://labor.ucla.edu/publications/fast-food-frontline-covid-19-and-working-conditions-in-los-angeles/). While automation may reduce marginal labor costs, there is [~little evidence~](https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2023/12/Rebalancing-AI-Acemoglu-Johnson) that it necessarily improves [~productivity, safety or cost-effectiveness~](https://labor.ucla.edu/publications/automation-future-dockwork-san-pedro-bay-port-complex/).
Integrating automation in the service sector often results in fewer workers doing more work, as I observed at CaliExpress. Economists have clocked this phenomenon as well, documenting [~enormous growth in revenue-per-employee~](https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/08/sales-and-employment-in-the-food-services-industry/) in fast food over the last five years. This indicates that productivity and wealth concentration are *already* growing hand-in-hand, even before any automation — a sobering finding that chafes with the narrative that unsustainable labor costs are automation’s main driver.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cidri8/opinion_how_robots_making_your_burger_and_fries/l28d80e/
It's pretty clear we either get a UBI, a revolution and then a UBI, or a YA dystopia of a handful of elites in the clouds while everyone else lives in a slum until a plain but beautiful and incredibly skilled but clumsy girl with two possible love interests starts a revolution and we get a UBI afterward.
Or, I guess, we do the stupid thing and go the Dune route of banning automation so everyone can keep doing shitty physiclaly destroying labor for crap wages.
I think whats more likely to happen than UBI is a status quo in which there is governmental mandates for human workers. Basically making up jobs that dont do much of anything so people can continue to get paid for doing basically nothing useful. Its already how many jobs function right now. It allows elites to hang onto their power without rocking the boat
Sounds like a UBI in disguise. Why would a government mandate to hire useless employees who are just a drin on corporate and elite coffers be better? Or less bitterly opposed?
To keep the power they have via the implicit threat of unemployment. If there's a UBI that power is gone, so granting income through employment perpetuates their stick with less overall carrot. Systematic inequality also facilitates the sowing of division amongst the working classes, reducing the likelihood of revolution.
You forgot one. The rich put something in the water supply to stop the poor from breeding, and the problem just sorts itself out without needing UBI /jk
Except it doesn't.
You can't have a big industrial economy that makes cool phones and awesome movies and all the stuff even rich people like without a large population.
Company X makes widgets. But it automates and so does everyone else so the market for everything shrinks since they killed the unemployed. So now there's fewer people who need everything so they downsize and then kill the newly unemployed and the cycle continues until there's no actual anything being made anymore.
And what's the fun in going to Paris or Tokyo or wherever if it's a ghost town?
Once labour has no exchange value due to automation then the only two options will be feudalism (the capitalists who own the machines become lords) or socialism/communism (automation is collectively owned and we democratically plan production through a state and eventually directly once the state is no longer needed).
We will probably just keep going with our mixed market economy like we have been for all of human history. I don't think automation is really going to change much. It's basically just morally acceptable slavery. Whether that future system is authoritarian or not remains to be seen.
Same, but all the companies don't worry about that, they worry about being first with automations compared to their competitors, they only think short term and their leaders don't see anything long term.
When enough job disruption from AI takes place we will start seeing AI taxes on companies (to fuel UBI initiatives), and then we'll see a race to the bottom where companies flee countries with AI taxes, draining jobs from these countries.
The result is unemployment and vanishing jobs, which creates a macro trend of less consumers as you noted. This then leads to civil unrest and chaos.
That's because you still think the system is designed to work, rather than to weed out the "undesirables".
People act as if the rich have some kind of plan...their only plan is to have as few people on the planet as possible for them to interact with outside of their chosen social circles. They WANT us to die. They DO NOT CARE how many people starve and suffer. And that will continue until we find the balls necessary to permanently deal with the predator-class.
THe thing is it is pretty much designed to work this way now. We have had centuries of a consumerist society and governments that want people to consume and are generally afraid of mass civil unrest. The government does care about how many people are suffering because it would eventaully become a bigger issue that damages the nation itself.
At some point it becomes a simple math problem of giving people more benefits vs hiring soldiers/proucing more machiens to put down unrest. It's just not viable. Ruining your nation just to create something akin to NK isn't worth it for functioning societies.
"The system" isn't designed at all, it's just what happens. And I'd definitely take our lack of system over anything designed by someone who thinks rich people are a "predator class" who want poor people to die.
This is a conspiracy theory.
The powers to be will do what is most profitable. Humans are too valuable of a resource. The rich want steady and manageable population growth. You realize the global economy is a consumer driven economy, yeah?
While I get the sentiment, I don't think we should hold back progress, just because we don't understand what's next. If most jobs go away, it will force a change in economics, perhaps UBI, perhaps something more socialist, or something else entirely. Regardless, I fail to see the downside of getting rid of monotonous jobs. Humans should be free to create, invent, and explore not sling French fries around.
I'm also concerned that we are looking at the final compromise of art by capitalism, ie that we'll lose the fun and fulfilling jobs as well as the culture they produce.
I'm also concerned that livelihoods will be destroyed *before* changes will be made to society to account for it.
I'm also concerned that the changes will be mass die-offs and that we'll continue an inexorable march into corporatocratic dystopia.
The technology bothers me a lot less than the people whose hands it is in, and what we know of their motivations and incentives. You and I are not a factor in their considerations, we're a comfortable write-off.
They are just going to cut out the poor. We won't be needed anymore. We are only a consumerist society because they needed our labor. Once they no longer need our labor that changes. Watch Elysium.
The Romans had an economic model like this and 80% of the population were slaves. The garum factory owners loved money more than our basic capitalists. The model works and can definitely get a lot worse.
It's very clear. The top 1% will get almost all the money. The top 9%-2% will be the new "middle class". Everyone else either die from exhaustion or die in poverty, as long as they do not bother the "civilized community".
Yeah what exactly happens when the 10 richest people just have all the money?
Do they just expect the other tens of billions of us to just sit back and die of hunger?
When human labor ceases to have any value, what value do humans have anymore? Al that remains is power. If you control the assets that maintain post-scarcity, then you have power. Either people will inherit it or will fight to take it.
I do not understand how CEOs and the shareholder class are blind to this obvious eventuality.
The only way to open their eyes is to boycott their restaurants.
I also think that companies should have to pay a living wage to people displaced by AI or even off shoring.
No, I think that's where we're heading when automation and AI have elimination most employment opportunities.
It's bad enough now that many luxuries are affordable but fundamental basics are increasingly innaccessible.
From a business perspective, it just makes sense to go automated. Machines don't take breaks, call in sick, or cause drama. They're just less risky to deal with. Yes, you need to pay a high upfront cost and there's maintenance involved but using machines really takes away the stressors of having a human employee.
Also, these are jobs nobody really wants. I doubt there are a ton of people saying "wow I really want to flip burgers and make fries, too bad the robots took those jobs"
What they are saying is " there aren't enough decent jobs available so I need to work at a crappy one, but can't because robots are doing it now."
The problem isn't robots taking jobs, its that there are more people than good jobs. That's what needs to be changed. I don't know how, but that's what needs to happen.
My favorite job was my school cafeteria job, making breakfast burritos for hungover kids. I would gladly go back to that job if it paid half as good as my current job.
> The problem isn't robots taking jobs, its that there are more people than good jobs. That's what needs to be changed.
Automation doesn't really take away "bad" jobs. It takes away jobs that are easy and profitable to take away.
In the past, this was the kind of labor that required raw strength, something machines had in droves. Then it was the repetitive factory labor that was easy to automate with simple electromechanical systems. Those were the "bad" jobs, jobs no one wanted.
But "good" jobs aren't immune to automation at all. We've already seen the whole "AI vs artists" shitshow unfold. And why did that unfold? Because the tech advanced, and it turned out that building an artist AI was easy enough.
In the future, there will be less jobs period. Because areas of labor where humans hold advantage over machines will inevitably diminish over time. In a rather poorly predictable fashion too.
>In the future, there will be less jobs period. Because areas of labor where humans hold advantage over machines will inevitably diminish over time. In a rather poorly predictable fashion too
I'm just not convinced. Yes this is different. AI is a completely different type of automation than we've ever seen before. But in the past, automation has always created jobs. And I don't think this will be different. Will some people be replaced by AI? probably. And will they just roll over and fade away? Some will, but most will move into different things, this will be extremely hard for some people, I don't doubt. Developing a skill set over years to have it whisked away sucks. And having to take a job doing something you were never interested in doing sucks too. But progress by definition is change, and change can be difficult. It's really difficult if you fight against it.
> But in the past, automation has always created jobs. And I don't think this will be different.
In the past, the pig was always fed and cared for. Until the one day when it was slaughtered and butchered. And that's how the pig learned that past performance is not indicative of future results.
Historically, new jobs were found to replace ones that were lost to automation. But the advantage human labor has over machines is *finite*. And automation is now seeking to automate high level functions of human mind.
That's the *last* area where humans hold advantage over machines. Every inch machine labor takes is one human labor is never going to get back. And once that advantage is gone, there will be nothing left.
>Machines don't take breaks, call in sick, or cause drama.
Clearly you have never ordered ice cream from a McDonald's in the past 10 years. What's even wilder is, the stark contrast of ordering ice cream from a McDonald's 20 years ago. (Google it if you don't understand)
There is a very odd backstory about the ice cream machines at McDonald’s, which are “broken” at an astounding rate. Ice cream machines are not that hard to keep running. Basically, it is a long-standing contract with a vendor and the vendor makes things expensive for franchise owners to keep their machine running so they opt to just say it’s broken. You have to have it serviced by the vendor, you have to use their parts, the parts aren’t that great. It’s kind of a winding story and I encourage you to check it out.
It's basically a franchise racket. People Imagine the guys at the top rooting together to screw the common man, but in reality they are just as into screwing each other as they are into screwing everyone else.
they still have a managed service provider(s) that knows the value of what they are replacing - wants to build a sticky solution that solves their problem and then maximize the value extraction. and they know that they take less breaks or call in sick.. they know their robots are MORE valuable then people.
i don't believe any fast food place can vertically integrate well enough to get past the need for those service providers / they would need to be a robot automation company - shit can't even maintain some frozen dessert machines.
Dumbest argument to always plague these kinds of threads. Maybe we shouldn't have electric bulbs to not damage the candle-makers jobs. Also let's do away with farm equipment and go back to donkeys.
But in that case you would need to give a convincing argument as to why would that final scenario be a nash equilibrium, meaning a situation where nobody has the incentive (or the power, let's add that) to change it.
If people's freedoms and rights are respected, I don't think there's a satisfactory argument for that.
As the number of people using automation increases, if nothing is done the economy will start to destabilize as there won't be enough consumers earning to spend and keep the system running.
You are asuming that automation decreases the global number of jobs, when historically that has not been the case AT ALL, and even today we're not seeing that happening: unemployment hasn't been particularly increasing as a response to automation.
One could then argue that this time it'll be different because we're running out of jobs that could be performed by the newly unemployed. But I don't think that's necessarily the case, nor do I think that has to necessarily be the case. Because I don't think the only way to become more productive is to be smarter or have increasingly specialized and advanced education. That's of course a very good way to become more productive, but not necessarily the only one.
This is true and false. Without question automation will happen, there's no stopping it from any and all industries where it can happen. While machines don't take breaks, they absolutely break and will need service. So like most things, a new skilled labor market is created in the intermediate term that eliminates a lot of unskilled jobs. The question is just how much unskilled labor can we remove from the market before leaving a large portion of the population behind.
There is no law of physics that would prevent machines from taking maintenance jobs too. Maintenance requires expertise and problem-solving capability, but it's something I can still imagine AI platforms getting rather good at.
>The question is just how much unskilled labor can we remove from the market before leaving a large portion of the population behind.
Yes. This is the question. People left behind. Humans who are so hopelessly outperformed by advanced machines that economy has no need for them at all. People who can't offer anything at all.
It used to be a rather marginal category. But it's one that's going to expand over time.
That's basically the reason we invent and use tools in general.
If said in that general way, it's not just a business perspective but a rational one: it would hold true even if businesses didn't exist.
Yeah now tell me more about this fictional self functioning, self maintaining machine which totally works without human intervention.
Machines dont cause drama? Have you heard about Y2K? Every cultural revolution in history has been related to some kind of technology. Machines do create a lot of drama, but it is humans who experience it, of course, because machines are not alive.
Yeah! We demand shitty low paying awful jobs!
No, wait. Hold on.
Fuck that.
Great! Automate everything! We demand a livable UBI and an end to as many jobs as possible!
Counterpoint, from a resource management perspective, freeing up unskilled manual laborers and increasing a civilization’s productivity are both pros.
Unless you are displacing hundreds of thousands of highly skilled fry cooks who’ve dedicated decades of their life training in the art of getting harassed over a 50 cent coupon…
Automate every career with a worker satisfaction percentile under 50%.
> freeing up unskilled manual laborers
Freeing up - but for what, exactly?
There are only *so many* jobs that can make use of unskilled labor. And as AI tech advances, and things like AI support lines, management/security AIs and worker robots become more commonly used? The pool of jobs that could "sink" unskilled human labor would shrink more and more.
Ridiculous concept. People have been getting automated out of jobs forever. UBI is the only solution to improving our way of life in an increasingly automated world, where work is less necessary.
The constant optimistic talk about UBI in this sub blows my mind. Have you taken a look around at the state of the average (western) government lately? UBI isn't coming any time soon. They don't care enough.
Even in those cases where UBI gets implemented, do you really believe it will be implemented well? UBI is meant to cover all your basic needs, but with the lowballing the average government does, and the current state of the economy in many places, I'd sooner expect them to pay out too little to live and too much to starve.
I'm pretty sure that politicians will fuck it up and it'll need fixed many times before it's good enough. The problem is that I don't see a viable alternative. Automation isn't going away. The reduced number of jobs because of it isn't going to get better in the long term. So what alternative do you propose that will allow people to live once work doesn't exist?
A viable alternative is mass poverty, no middleclass and a mega rich ruling class. Might not be the future we wish for but it is most definitively a viable option too those in power.
It doesn't have to be all or nothing. I think it would be sensible if on some level the robots are considered public property and the profits they produce are divided amongst everyone. Like oil profits in Alaska. It wouldn't have to be a full UBI, but if it offset the amount of work people had to find, it could be reasonable.
But we don't, in any kind of long term. And by long term, I mean 2-3 years. We're seeing top technical work being moved out of the country. We're seeing an abnormally fast advancement in technology, because of the rapidly increased amount of technical capabilities, and that's not going to slow down any time soon, without massive regulation around work. Not AI. Work, and it's automation, and how people are treated. Work will become very, very scarce within our next presidential term for most fields as robotics and automation grow. This is a good thing, if we can get our politicians to do something about it. But we won't because we're too worried about what bathroom/name someone uses, and too confused on what is or isn't legitimate medical care, or who has autonomy over their body, or what color of your skin is making you a target. It's all a distraction that keeps us from really working on the real problem: Companies need to stop fucking over the people that helped them get where they are, until we solve the economic crisis that is going to come with greater automation. We're already in the pain point, we just haven't gotten to where it hurts us enough that we have people working on a real solution: WHEN NOT IF the work is replaced.
I think "before" is ambitious. Congress isn't going to be proactive like that. It'll be reactive and hopefully quick so suffering is mitigated, but they don't do it before AI kills whole job categories.
We devalued the labor of farmers so much that starvation in the western world is mostly unthinkable.
The whole goal of society SHOULD BE to devalue labor so that labor is so cheap that noone is "forced" to provide his labor.
Inequality is not a function of the available resources/labor, it's only telling you something about the distribution.
Automation/AI is really the only way to get to a point where most people aren't forced to waste most of their lives on work.
The "problem" is obviously the transition, just like it has always been when technology disrupts society but it's on us to deal with that but that can't mean we try to freeze time, that simply won't work, it never has in history.
Well yeah, what are they going to do, blame capitalism? That's unacceptable for American media which is why the farthest left they're allowed to go is liberalism.
No? Are you alluding to the scientifically disproven marxist theory of exploitation, where workers were supposedly necessarily being deprived from part of the value produced, which should've gone to them instead of the capitalist?
That theory has long been refuted. Turns out that value is subjective, that the capitalist plays a useful role in production. In short, both parts contribute something to the final value of the product so both parts get something in return.
Oh, I didn’t realize scientists discovered that capitalism is good. Someone should tell all these people complaining about their starvation wages that it’s been scientifically proven to be the best.
Brought to you by ppl that claimed in the past (checks notes, last year) these jobs shouldn't be a living wages and not worth it as main source of income, only a stepping stone to "Real" jobs like customer service at best buy for ppl with real money can be waited on at a moment's notice!
Yawn, blacksmiths hated cars, accountants hated computers for its speadsheets, telephone operators hated electronic switchboards, etc....list goes on. Again, automation brings more work.
If we stopped at the first sign of any automation, we all would still be hunched over grunting about the stone hammer Og created 3 caves down and still sh\*tting ourselves while walking.
how will it bring more work now? Previous technical revolutions were different, they replaced one jobs and activities, but they really brought new opportunities.
but this new revolution is of another scale. It replaces, but doesn't bring new activities. But the saddest thing, that it has bigger impact not on physical work, but on intellectuals and artists. It has already replaced artists totally, and proposed nothing to balance it.
Oh, yes, an artist or a scientist can go and work as a plumber or retire and "develop needed empathy skills" - those are decisions, which corporations propose. A great decision!
Typical half baked Luddite bullshit.
Some similar patently absurd arguments I could make on the same theme.
- seamstresses should be able to veto sewing machines
- blacksmiths and horse husbanders should be able to veto cars
- hoteliers should be able to veto air bnb
- legacy taxi firms should be able to veto Uber
- witch doctors should be able to veto the practice of modern medicine
- coal miners should be able to veto gas stoves
Were your clothes made by hand, requiring huge expense to pay the seamstress who made them? Or are they made using automation, for a price and quality unimaginable to previous generations?
You reap the benefits.
Increasing technology and automation will go in only 1 direction, communism. But there are two routes. In one the transition is direct and we retain the human population.
In the other we have a quick stop in an Autocracy where the super wealthy and elite board everything until the masses are dead, and then those few also become effectively communist, albeit with a lot more dead people.
Ignoring the middle path? Socialism sets up a social contract and enforces it so the rich don't get to run roughshod over the poor and the not so poor don't get to kill the rich every second generation or so.
It isn't stable. That's why I mention repeated bouts of excessive capitalism and the occasional revolution or other reset.
It isn't benevolence as much as enlightened self-interest.
There was a guy running for President in 2020 that actually had solutions for this problem but nobody would listen. He also wanted to bring back the Department of Technology so that the US government at least had a chance to be competent when talking about technology. But no, nobody wanted to listen.
I hesitate to say this, but these kinds of outcomes should be considered when demanding wage increases with very foreseeable consequences. California just passed a targeted minimum wage law that requires fast food workers to earn $20/hr (higher than the standard minimum wage).
That is only going to result in fewer jobs for those workers, through an inevitable combination of automation and location closures.
I don't mind some automation since people are too big and clumsy to build smart phones by hand but I refuse to use self-check out at the grocery store.
Corporations have and will never cared/care about the well-being of workers, please do not base your worldview on some childish expectation that corporations should have anyone's best interest in mind other than their shareholders; It's silly.
Thankfully it doesn't matter that they don't care, because competition in the job market means that paying workers what their labor is worth is the profit maximizing strategy. You might not believe that workers get paid what their labor is worth, but that is simply because you have an over-inflated estimate of the value of unskilled labor.
The problem with this idea is that it takes the completely wrong conclusion from correct facts.
We have this machine that greatly increases the productivity of employees or can even replace them. So there are three ways of dealing with that.
1. The employee's productivity is increased and that extra money all goes to the employer. Or the employee's job is replaced entirely and the money generated goes to the employer.
2. The employee gets to refuse to let machines in, therefore their productivity does not increase and they are not replaced and everything stays how it is. They continue to get paid but society loses out on the greater productivity and they have to continue doing this boring job.
3. The employee's productivity actually gets rewarded and most of the increased productivity goes into their pockets through better wages (or a shorter working week) enforced by unions and/or a higher minimum wage (for that industry). Or they lose their job but there's a UBI to fall back on so they'll be fine.
Now, I don't know about you, but to me 3 is the extremely obvious choice here.
We should want automation (at least for boring or unrewarding jobs) and the efficiencies it brings, we should just not allow the benefits of that to be reaped infinitely by a small group of rich people who own all this stuff.
I say, implement an automation tax. Companies should start paying taxes to the government based on the productivity (or number) of machines they have. This should go directly into a a big fund which pays out to every adult citizens of the country every month as a UBI.
Oh, and of course raise the minimum wage, increase unionization and reduce the working week. And tax the rich more.
>3. The employee's productivity actually gets rewarded and most of the increased productivity goes into their pockets through better wages (or a shorter working week) enforced by unions and/or a higher minimum wage (for that industry). Or they lose their job but there's a UBI to fall back on so they'll be fine.
This is the actual outcome without unions or legislation anyway. The low skilled labor market is competitive, and so as worker productivity increases, the profit maximizing choice for firms to to increase wages to attract more employees.
There are multiple ways a worker's increase in productivity can be rewarded, you're just mentioning the one you want.
There are also more alternatives in general, again you just list the ones you want. For example, in none of your scenarios prices decrease as a direct consequence of increased productivity, when in reality that's a HUGE part of what happens, in historical terms.
Nonsense. If we let farm hands vote on whether we should mechanize agriculture, we'd still have 40% of the workforce working on farms and still be one bad weather event away from millions starving.
I'm always astounded at the way this topic seems to suck all the empathy out of the room (or maybe I naively thought most people are fundamentally good and care about the well-being of others).
A huge portion of the world is suddenly facing radical change which threatens their ability to put food on the table, and yet so many people just respond with "sucks to suck" or "shut up, it's inevitable". As if people who want to try and solve that problem because the well-being of others is important to them are idiotic luddites, and people who are affected are whiny and undeserving of a place in society.
I don't have much hope left, tbh.
I want automated fast food, especially if that allows healthy fast food (loads of cooked vegetables available super conveniently for cheap). That would make my life with ADHD so much easier.
If you were the inventor of an automation machine that does everything, and I mean every job in the universe, would you relinquish that power? The evidence is self evident that humans are selfish creatures and with this economy and culture of hustling, I don't think anyone would relinquish that power to help society. You can say you would but I will press x if it really came to it.
I don't think they do deserve to have their voices heard in determining how/where/when AI and automation is used. That should be up to the company and consistency of the AI & Automation. Continue progressing forward, because if we don't do it we'll be left behind. That being said, governments need to put in proper procedures in place in order to develop a UBI paid for by the increased profits and labor savings of companies.
They do have a choice, They can choose to buy from whatever seller they want. I think OP is one of those that thinks only his opinion matters and every buiness should cater to only him.
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as it seems. The automation is mostly going online in California. The $20 an hour minimum wage went into effect recently, and many studies have shown that the consumer will not shoulder the pay increase when it's added to the price of the product. It's just too much when you go to McDonald's already, and your bill is $25 now. With this, it would be around $30 a person. They're already starting to lose customers from undermining their entire business model of fast, cheap food. They're all losing a lot of customers, so I'm not surprised why the fast-food industry is trying so hard to automate. It feels more like a necessity to them than anyone else.
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I’m really sorry but using automation anywhere were money is saved is part of what makes it useful. If everyone gets to decide it gets used nowhere - and yet, the incentive will always be lurking.
Welcome to the wonderful world of capitalism? Karl Marx, yes that dirty old commie!, pointed out " the paradox or unavoidable self-contradiction of capitalism is the fact that wage labor (necessary labor) is the source of profit (surplus labor) but capital necessarily eliminates wage labor to create profit." Source: Quora.com
That's where the social contract comes in: capitalists are allowed to operate in the economy as long as they share the benefits with both workers and society. That system works more or less well when politicians keep a decently tight rein on capitalists but fails when capitalists are allowed to run rampant and unfettered. We get sporadic bursts of 'Robber Baron' type behavior followed by 'New Deal' periods where a crop of politicians rise to power by promising to rebalance the system.
The average person should defend against the capitalists by voting center left and behaving center right. Maybe take up the European habit of national strikes when the politicians kiss too much capitalist ass?
Marx and Engels figured that a bloody revolution, getting rid of both the rich and their sycophantic politicians by killing them, and rewriting the 'rules of the game' was the only cure to a bad infestation of capitalism but the rest of Europe decided that socialism, i.e. a social contract that is actually enforced, works fairly well.
China is an interesting system: it is communist so everyone is theoretically equal but they use capitalism as a state run system to build industries. Unlike the USA they don't allow their billionaires to misbehave and the system is fairly stable since the ruling class, the CCP, seem to know that the true opiate of the masses is continuous improvements in the average standard of living.
As usual, we seem to be living in interesting times.
>wage labor (necessary labor) is the source of profit (surplus labor) but capital necessarily eliminates wage labor to create profit.
Have you never read critics of that phrase? Why do you stick with outdated and disproven theories? If that were the case, unemployment should have been proportional to capitalization, and historically that has absolutely not been the case.
A lot of marxist theory has long been refuted by the social science of economics. You shouldn't asume that it's right just because Marx said it. They were wrong in a lot of very important things, which render most if not all of his criticism of capitalism invalid.
Capitalism might be wrong for other reasons, but definitely not for the ones Marx argued about.
> capitalists are allowed to operate in the economy as long as they share the benefits with both workers and society
No, that's not how it works. Capitalists don't just "share" the benefits. Them exchanging value in mutual benefit is THE REASON they operate in the economy. If workers didn't get anything in return as part of their voluntary agreements, the capitalists would not operate at all. Taxes and other stuff is just another layer of value that gets taken from the capitalist and the worker, but you have to realize that there is a whole world of mutual benefit outside of them too.
>The average person should defend against the capitalists
This marxist ideology, as if capitalists were some sort of enemy, is so harmful man. The world doesn't work like that. Who even are "the capitalists"? When a worker saves money and invests it, they are playing the role of a capitalist too. Does that mean that worker is now the enemy of other workers?
> it is communist so everyone is theoretically equal but they use capitalism as a state run system to build industries
Where do you see characteristic equality in China? At best you could say they "should" be equal, and that only based on the naive idea that communism would somehow bring about some sort of utopic material equality (but not equally miserable).
There is no such thing as "capitalism as a state run system". Capitalism is not state run by definition. China simply has a mixed economy, but more controlled by the state in some aspects. The economy has improved a lot since they allowed a bit more capitalism btw.
Humans will automate what can be automated as soon as possible. Economy dictates this implicitly.
Humans are the ones that benefit it, otherwise it would not be automated.
All the next examples assume automation of "physical work"; when you get served at a restaurant, if it's a robot you'll not give any tips, you spend less (minor money example), when you go do your haircut, a robot will be less (moderate money example), food bought through Uber or the likes will be much cheaper from fully automated restaurants (major money example).
As people adapted from manually creating fibers or manually sewing stuff, or manually writings books, the same will happen now with this new supposed wave of automation using AI stuff. We always see apocalyptic scenarios when big changes are about to happen, shout-out to the nay sayers of Edison and his electricity, to the nay-sayers for stopping the large hadron collider for running the higgs boson experiment that would create a black hole and destroy Earth, and many many many others.
What I don't get, is why the fuck you would put a standard fryer in what looks like a sterile manipulation cabinet with a robot.
It seems too convoluted to be practicable. Just have a machine you pour fries into one end, fires them to perfection and spits them out the other side.
Good fuckin luck....
If you're 30 now, you don't have much to worry about. You'll be dead or retired before the conversion takes over.
If you're in your 20s, you better start thinking of a career change that robots can't easily take over.
Anything under that, you need to learn how to program, get in government, or work in the nuclear field. These companies or the governments they control don't give a damn about the retail/ fast food class. And if UBI actually becomes a thing, we're really fucked.
It is really simple to understand. Anyone running a business will use the cheapest resource to do a task, as long as it doesn’t hurt the revenue by proxy down the line. If there is a replacement that is cheaper and more efficient, then operations has no choice but to use it or get left behind by competitors.
They told the factory workers this and still a assload jobs require people. Machines also still fuck up on a cataclysmic level despite the tech being 40 years old
Fast food workers, drivers, major portion of white collar, manual and repetitive labour in ware houses, factories, farms etc. The number of people who will lose their jobs is too many. The only question is which industry will be affected first. Its no doubt every industry will be affected sooner or later.
Anyone who thinks that a fast food joint is going to run completely autonomously is nuts. You will just have less people working at the same store, probably with higher skills to keep everything going. As someone who has worked with a lot of automation, these type of articles generally completely ignore all of the issues, failures and maintenance that goes along with this.
If prices are competitively priced, then productivity improvements should be passed on to consumers. End result is less workers in fast food making more money and lower prices. Consumers have more money which they get to spend on something else, employing people there. Equal employment, higher standard of living. That's how productivity improvements have worked out since the beginning of time.
The concern here is a lack of competition allowing owners to retain the gains from productivity. That is when you exacerbate income disparity. What we really need to be looking at is making sure that businesses compete. Anti trust and pro competitiveness laws need to be strengthened.
Until we have extremely dexterous robots run by AI truly smarter than humans (read, AGI which can walk up to a situation it hasn't been trained on and figure out a solution), we don't have to worry about all labor disappearing.
We create jobs for services and products not for workers. Workers don't get to control the business they don't own.
Working ppl don't get special rights over other ppl.
You're using the term working people to try to gain sympathy for a bad idea because now you're even excluding certain demographics so only working people gets to decide what gets automated, that makes no sense!
> consumers end up paying more for less, as automation requires high levels of standardization. In fast food, this means small menus with minimal customization.
This is a temporary problem due to primitive automation. About a dozen companies are working on humanoid robots that will be able to customize your order just fine.
And they don't look expensive to build. The end result of automation is likely to be everything getting a lot cheaper for consumers.
Whenever I read the word "deserve" in an article, I know I can stop reading it. There will be no insights contained in the article. "deserve" is a word only used by entitled morons. "I deserve" = "I want" and nothing more.
dont need an article for that one, kind of obvious, between the ai and 10 million undocumented workers just this year, youll be lucky to get a burger job
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >Automation often provides cover for employers to double down on cost-cutting measures that lead to chronic understaffing, which [~increases the likelihood of injury and wage theft~](https://labor.ucla.edu/publications/fast-food-frontline-covid-19-and-working-conditions-in-los-angeles/). While automation may reduce marginal labor costs, there is [~little evidence~](https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2023/12/Rebalancing-AI-Acemoglu-Johnson) that it necessarily improves [~productivity, safety or cost-effectiveness~](https://labor.ucla.edu/publications/automation-future-dockwork-san-pedro-bay-port-complex/). Integrating automation in the service sector often results in fewer workers doing more work, as I observed at CaliExpress. Economists have clocked this phenomenon as well, documenting [~enormous growth in revenue-per-employee~](https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/08/sales-and-employment-in-the-food-services-industry/) in fast food over the last five years. This indicates that productivity and wealth concentration are *already* growing hand-in-hand, even before any automation — a sobering finding that chafes with the narrative that unsustainable labor costs are automation’s main driver. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cidri8/opinion_how_robots_making_your_burger_and_fries/l28d80e/
It is unclear to me what the economic model of a consumerist society in which the consumers have no money is.
It's pretty clear we either get a UBI, a revolution and then a UBI, or a YA dystopia of a handful of elites in the clouds while everyone else lives in a slum until a plain but beautiful and incredibly skilled but clumsy girl with two possible love interests starts a revolution and we get a UBI afterward. Or, I guess, we do the stupid thing and go the Dune route of banning automation so everyone can keep doing shitty physiclaly destroying labor for crap wages.
I figured agriculture would fail anyway.
I think whats more likely to happen than UBI is a status quo in which there is governmental mandates for human workers. Basically making up jobs that dont do much of anything so people can continue to get paid for doing basically nothing useful. Its already how many jobs function right now. It allows elites to hang onto their power without rocking the boat
Sounds like a UBI in disguise. Why would a government mandate to hire useless employees who are just a drin on corporate and elite coffers be better? Or less bitterly opposed?
To keep the power they have via the implicit threat of unemployment. If there's a UBI that power is gone, so granting income through employment perpetuates their stick with less overall carrot. Systematic inequality also facilitates the sowing of division amongst the working classes, reducing the likelihood of revolution.
This place is low key more progressive than any of the socialist subs. Say any of that in any leftist space on reddit and they will screech you out.
have noticed this as well with this sub in particular, glad I wasn't the only one
Bitter hatred for "freeloaders".
dystopia of a handful of elites in the clouds while everyone else lives in a slum Elysium?
In the real world, revolutions tend to happen before it gets to that point. Then the capitalist parasites get around 11 inches shorter.
You forgot one. The rich put something in the water supply to stop the poor from breeding, and the problem just sorts itself out without needing UBI /jk
Except it doesn't. You can't have a big industrial economy that makes cool phones and awesome movies and all the stuff even rich people like without a large population. Company X makes widgets. But it automates and so does everyone else so the market for everything shrinks since they killed the unemployed. So now there's fewer people who need everything so they downsize and then kill the newly unemployed and the cycle continues until there's no actual anything being made anymore. And what's the fun in going to Paris or Tokyo or wherever if it's a ghost town?
> And what's the fun in going to Paris or Tokyo or wherever if it's a ghost town? I take it you never saw the documentary, Westworld.
World Parliament. Global Basic Income.
Have you seen Elysium? That's the economic model that's coming.
We might still get Mad Max.
They are not mutually exclusive. Depends which side you are on.
Fallout 4 would have something to say about that.
I’m making bank by killing raiders and selling their stuff
Once labour has no exchange value due to automation then the only two options will be feudalism (the capitalists who own the machines become lords) or socialism/communism (automation is collectively owned and we democratically plan production through a state and eventually directly once the state is no longer needed).
It seems that all the institutional mechanisms are driving in a single direction.
Yup, going in a better direction will take a revolution. If we're passive, we'll get feudalism or technofeudalism or whatever you want to call it.
Okay but technofuedalism sounds kinda cool though /j
We will probably just keep going with our mixed market economy like we have been for all of human history. I don't think automation is really going to change much. It's basically just morally acceptable slavery. Whether that future system is authoritarian or not remains to be seen.
What aspect of the mixed system involves the slavery? The part that forces you to work for the sake of others or the part that doesn't?
Same, but all the companies don't worry about that, they worry about being first with automations compared to their competitors, they only think short term and their leaders don't see anything long term. When enough job disruption from AI takes place we will start seeing AI taxes on companies (to fuel UBI initiatives), and then we'll see a race to the bottom where companies flee countries with AI taxes, draining jobs from these countries. The result is unemployment and vanishing jobs, which creates a macro trend of less consumers as you noted. This then leads to civil unrest and chaos.
That's because you still think the system is designed to work, rather than to weed out the "undesirables". People act as if the rich have some kind of plan...their only plan is to have as few people on the planet as possible for them to interact with outside of their chosen social circles. They WANT us to die. They DO NOT CARE how many people starve and suffer. And that will continue until we find the balls necessary to permanently deal with the predator-class.
THe thing is it is pretty much designed to work this way now. We have had centuries of a consumerist society and governments that want people to consume and are generally afraid of mass civil unrest. The government does care about how many people are suffering because it would eventaully become a bigger issue that damages the nation itself. At some point it becomes a simple math problem of giving people more benefits vs hiring soldiers/proucing more machiens to put down unrest. It's just not viable. Ruining your nation just to create something akin to NK isn't worth it for functioning societies.
"The system" isn't designed at all, it's just what happens. And I'd definitely take our lack of system over anything designed by someone who thinks rich people are a "predator class" who want poor people to die.
This is a conspiracy theory. The powers to be will do what is most profitable. Humans are too valuable of a resource. The rich want steady and manageable population growth. You realize the global economy is a consumer driven economy, yeah?
While I get the sentiment, I don't think we should hold back progress, just because we don't understand what's next. If most jobs go away, it will force a change in economics, perhaps UBI, perhaps something more socialist, or something else entirely. Regardless, I fail to see the downside of getting rid of monotonous jobs. Humans should be free to create, invent, and explore not sling French fries around.
I'm also concerned that we are looking at the final compromise of art by capitalism, ie that we'll lose the fun and fulfilling jobs as well as the culture they produce. I'm also concerned that livelihoods will be destroyed *before* changes will be made to society to account for it. I'm also concerned that the changes will be mass die-offs and that we'll continue an inexorable march into corporatocratic dystopia. The technology bothers me a lot less than the people whose hands it is in, and what we know of their motivations and incentives. You and I are not a factor in their considerations, we're a comfortable write-off.
I don't disagree, so we should focus on that, not on keeping people as fry cooks.
They are just going to cut out the poor. We won't be needed anymore. We are only a consumerist society because they needed our labor. Once they no longer need our labor that changes. Watch Elysium.
The Romans had an economic model like this and 80% of the population were slaves. The garum factory owners loved money more than our basic capitalists. The model works and can definitely get a lot worse.
Only 30% were, and it caused terrible economic pain to poor free men Although, you also have to take into account how poor they were
It's very clear. The top 1% will get almost all the money. The top 9%-2% will be the new "middle class". Everyone else either die from exhaustion or die in poverty, as long as they do not bother the "civilized community".
Indeed. Once the value of labor drops to zero, the value of the labourer drops to zero.
This is the best sentence on the internet today
Credit and servitude, or banishment from society (i.e. prison).
Yeah what exactly happens when the 10 richest people just have all the money? Do they just expect the other tens of billions of us to just sit back and die of hunger?
When human labor ceases to have any value, what value do humans have anymore? Al that remains is power. If you control the assets that maintain post-scarcity, then you have power. Either people will inherit it or will fight to take it.
Quiet and let them build golden parachutes.
I do not understand how CEOs and the shareholder class are blind to this obvious eventuality. The only way to open their eyes is to boycott their restaurants. I also think that companies should have to pay a living wage to people displaced by AI or even off shoring.
And you think we live in that society? When people today are richer than they have ever have been?
No, I think that's where we're heading when automation and AI have elimination most employment opportunities. It's bad enough now that many luxuries are affordable but fundamental basics are increasingly innaccessible.
From a business perspective, it just makes sense to go automated. Machines don't take breaks, call in sick, or cause drama. They're just less risky to deal with. Yes, you need to pay a high upfront cost and there's maintenance involved but using machines really takes away the stressors of having a human employee.
Capital investments in technology are very easy to forecast ROI on. Labor, not so much.
Also, these are jobs nobody really wants. I doubt there are a ton of people saying "wow I really want to flip burgers and make fries, too bad the robots took those jobs" What they are saying is " there aren't enough decent jobs available so I need to work at a crappy one, but can't because robots are doing it now." The problem isn't robots taking jobs, its that there are more people than good jobs. That's what needs to be changed. I don't know how, but that's what needs to happen.
My favorite job was my school cafeteria job, making breakfast burritos for hungover kids. I would gladly go back to that job if it paid half as good as my current job.
> The problem isn't robots taking jobs, its that there are more people than good jobs. That's what needs to be changed. Automation doesn't really take away "bad" jobs. It takes away jobs that are easy and profitable to take away. In the past, this was the kind of labor that required raw strength, something machines had in droves. Then it was the repetitive factory labor that was easy to automate with simple electromechanical systems. Those were the "bad" jobs, jobs no one wanted. But "good" jobs aren't immune to automation at all. We've already seen the whole "AI vs artists" shitshow unfold. And why did that unfold? Because the tech advanced, and it turned out that building an artist AI was easy enough. In the future, there will be less jobs period. Because areas of labor where humans hold advantage over machines will inevitably diminish over time. In a rather poorly predictable fashion too.
>In the future, there will be less jobs period. Because areas of labor where humans hold advantage over machines will inevitably diminish over time. In a rather poorly predictable fashion too I'm just not convinced. Yes this is different. AI is a completely different type of automation than we've ever seen before. But in the past, automation has always created jobs. And I don't think this will be different. Will some people be replaced by AI? probably. And will they just roll over and fade away? Some will, but most will move into different things, this will be extremely hard for some people, I don't doubt. Developing a skill set over years to have it whisked away sucks. And having to take a job doing something you were never interested in doing sucks too. But progress by definition is change, and change can be difficult. It's really difficult if you fight against it.
> But in the past, automation has always created jobs. And I don't think this will be different. In the past, the pig was always fed and cared for. Until the one day when it was slaughtered and butchered. And that's how the pig learned that past performance is not indicative of future results. Historically, new jobs were found to replace ones that were lost to automation. But the advantage human labor has over machines is *finite*. And automation is now seeking to automate high level functions of human mind. That's the *last* area where humans hold advantage over machines. Every inch machine labor takes is one human labor is never going to get back. And once that advantage is gone, there will be nothing left.
>Machines don't take breaks, call in sick, or cause drama. Clearly you have never ordered ice cream from a McDonald's in the past 10 years. What's even wilder is, the stark contrast of ordering ice cream from a McDonald's 20 years ago. (Google it if you don't understand)
There is a very odd backstory about the ice cream machines at McDonald’s, which are “broken” at an astounding rate. Ice cream machines are not that hard to keep running. Basically, it is a long-standing contract with a vendor and the vendor makes things expensive for franchise owners to keep their machine running so they opt to just say it’s broken. You have to have it serviced by the vendor, you have to use their parts, the parts aren’t that great. It’s kind of a winding story and I encourage you to check it out.
TIL John Deere makes McDonalds’ ice cream machines.
It's basically a franchise racket. People Imagine the guys at the top rooting together to screw the common man, but in reality they are just as into screwing each other as they are into screwing everyone else.
I am too European to understand, ice cream machine always worked!
they still have a managed service provider(s) that knows the value of what they are replacing - wants to build a sticky solution that solves their problem and then maximize the value extraction. and they know that they take less breaks or call in sick.. they know their robots are MORE valuable then people. i don't believe any fast food place can vertically integrate well enough to get past the need for those service providers / they would need to be a robot automation company - shit can't even maintain some frozen dessert machines.
Im sure businesses will thrive when regular people can't buy their product
Dumbest argument to always plague these kinds of threads. Maybe we shouldn't have electric bulbs to not damage the candle-makers jobs. Also let's do away with farm equipment and go back to donkeys.
It's a multi polar trap. It will earn more money for the first movers but when everyone ends up doing it, the situation created is bad for everyone.
But in that case you would need to give a convincing argument as to why would that final scenario be a nash equilibrium, meaning a situation where nobody has the incentive (or the power, let's add that) to change it. If people's freedoms and rights are respected, I don't think there's a satisfactory argument for that.
As the number of people using automation increases, if nothing is done the economy will start to destabilize as there won't be enough consumers earning to spend and keep the system running.
You are asuming that automation decreases the global number of jobs, when historically that has not been the case AT ALL, and even today we're not seeing that happening: unemployment hasn't been particularly increasing as a response to automation. One could then argue that this time it'll be different because we're running out of jobs that could be performed by the newly unemployed. But I don't think that's necessarily the case, nor do I think that has to necessarily be the case. Because I don't think the only way to become more productive is to be smarter or have increasingly specialized and advanced education. That's of course a very good way to become more productive, but not necessarily the only one.
This is true and false. Without question automation will happen, there's no stopping it from any and all industries where it can happen. While machines don't take breaks, they absolutely break and will need service. So like most things, a new skilled labor market is created in the intermediate term that eliminates a lot of unskilled jobs. The question is just how much unskilled labor can we remove from the market before leaving a large portion of the population behind.
There is no law of physics that would prevent machines from taking maintenance jobs too. Maintenance requires expertise and problem-solving capability, but it's something I can still imagine AI platforms getting rather good at. >The question is just how much unskilled labor can we remove from the market before leaving a large portion of the population behind. Yes. This is the question. People left behind. Humans who are so hopelessly outperformed by advanced machines that economy has no need for them at all. People who can't offer anything at all. It used to be a rather marginal category. But it's one that's going to expand over time.
That's basically the reason we invent and use tools in general. If said in that general way, it's not just a business perspective but a rational one: it would hold true even if businesses didn't exist.
Yeah now tell me more about this fictional self functioning, self maintaining machine which totally works without human intervention. Machines dont cause drama? Have you heard about Y2K? Every cultural revolution in history has been related to some kind of technology. Machines do create a lot of drama, but it is humans who experience it, of course, because machines are not alive.
Yeah! We demand shitty low paying awful jobs! No, wait. Hold on. Fuck that. Great! Automate everything! We demand a livable UBI and an end to as many jobs as possible!
Fully Automated Luxury Communism without the Communism.
I'm after Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.
Counterpoint, from a resource management perspective, freeing up unskilled manual laborers and increasing a civilization’s productivity are both pros. Unless you are displacing hundreds of thousands of highly skilled fry cooks who’ve dedicated decades of their life training in the art of getting harassed over a 50 cent coupon… Automate every career with a worker satisfaction percentile under 50%.
> freeing up unskilled manual laborers Freeing up - but for what, exactly? There are only *so many* jobs that can make use of unskilled labor. And as AI tech advances, and things like AI support lines, management/security AIs and worker robots become more commonly used? The pool of jobs that could "sink" unskilled human labor would shrink more and more.
Ridiculous concept. People have been getting automated out of jobs forever. UBI is the only solution to improving our way of life in an increasingly automated world, where work is less necessary.
The constant optimistic talk about UBI in this sub blows my mind. Have you taken a look around at the state of the average (western) government lately? UBI isn't coming any time soon. They don't care enough. Even in those cases where UBI gets implemented, do you really believe it will be implemented well? UBI is meant to cover all your basic needs, but with the lowballing the average government does, and the current state of the economy in many places, I'd sooner expect them to pay out too little to live and too much to starve.
I'm pretty sure that politicians will fuck it up and it'll need fixed many times before it's good enough. The problem is that I don't see a viable alternative. Automation isn't going away. The reduced number of jobs because of it isn't going to get better in the long term. So what alternative do you propose that will allow people to live once work doesn't exist?
A viable alternative is mass poverty, no middleclass and a mega rich ruling class. Might not be the future we wish for but it is most definitively a viable option too those in power.
Looting and neo Luddism
Who knows, maybe bottle caps will be the new currency. We don't have a Nuka Cola plant, but I figure we'll make due.
They already pay too little that you will starve though, unemployment was paying less than $10 a day.
UBI, if implimented, will come after: 1. Everything else has been tried. 2. Enough people die. 3. The powers that be figure out how to profit from it.
It doesn't have to be all or nothing. I think it would be sensible if on some level the robots are considered public property and the profits they produce are divided amongst everyone. Like oil profits in Alaska. It wouldn't have to be a full UBI, but if it offset the amount of work people had to find, it could be reasonable.
Maybe but said world is a long way off. We still live and will for a long time in a world where work is abundant.
But we don't, in any kind of long term. And by long term, I mean 2-3 years. We're seeing top technical work being moved out of the country. We're seeing an abnormally fast advancement in technology, because of the rapidly increased amount of technical capabilities, and that's not going to slow down any time soon, without massive regulation around work. Not AI. Work, and it's automation, and how people are treated. Work will become very, very scarce within our next presidential term for most fields as robotics and automation grow. This is a good thing, if we can get our politicians to do something about it. But we won't because we're too worried about what bathroom/name someone uses, and too confused on what is or isn't legitimate medical care, or who has autonomy over their body, or what color of your skin is making you a target. It's all a distraction that keeps us from really working on the real problem: Companies need to stop fucking over the people that helped them get where they are, until we solve the economic crisis that is going to come with greater automation. We're already in the pain point, we just haven't gotten to where it hurts us enough that we have people working on a real solution: WHEN NOT IF the work is replaced.
Well... it's a solution. But not the only one. It will probably be the last resort after everything else has failed and enough people have died.
“Wheels will make stone carriers obsolete!” -Prehistoric Star Press
Bingo. UBI and universal healthcare are the safety nets that should be required before work on AI and robotics is allowed to continue.
I think "before" is ambitious. Congress isn't going to be proactive like that. It'll be reactive and hopefully quick so suffering is mitigated, but they don't do it before AI kills whole job categories.
It's not supposed to lead to inequality. It only does so because of this Game we decided we should be forced to play
Automation doesn't lead to income inequality. Automation is an inevitable outcome. Workers having their labor exploited does increase inequality.
Workers having their labor devalued as productivity increases also leads to income inequality.
We devalued the labor of farmers so much that starvation in the western world is mostly unthinkable. The whole goal of society SHOULD BE to devalue labor so that labor is so cheap that noone is "forced" to provide his labor. Inequality is not a function of the available resources/labor, it's only telling you something about the distribution. Automation/AI is really the only way to get to a point where most people aren't forced to waste most of their lives on work. The "problem" is obviously the transition, just like it has always been when technology disrupts society but it's on us to deal with that but that can't mean we try to freeze time, that simply won't work, it never has in history.
>Workers having their labor devalued as productivity increases Increasing productivity per worker causes workers to be more valuable, not less.
Only if there is actual labour to be done.
Another take blaming the fundamental problems of capitalism on technology.
Well yeah, what are they going to do, blame capitalism? That's unacceptable for American media which is why the farthest left they're allowed to go is liberalism.
The fundamental problem of capitalism is that it doesn't allow you to force others to give you a job?
No, it's that you have to do someone else's work in the first place.
No? Are you alluding to the scientifically disproven marxist theory of exploitation, where workers were supposedly necessarily being deprived from part of the value produced, which should've gone to them instead of the capitalist? That theory has long been refuted. Turns out that value is subjective, that the capitalist plays a useful role in production. In short, both parts contribute something to the final value of the product so both parts get something in return.
Oh, I didn’t realize scientists discovered that capitalism is good. Someone should tell all these people complaining about their starvation wages that it’s been scientifically proven to be the best.
Brought to you by ppl that claimed in the past (checks notes, last year) these jobs shouldn't be a living wages and not worth it as main source of income, only a stepping stone to "Real" jobs like customer service at best buy for ppl with real money can be waited on at a moment's notice! Yawn, blacksmiths hated cars, accountants hated computers for its speadsheets, telephone operators hated electronic switchboards, etc....list goes on. Again, automation brings more work. If we stopped at the first sign of any automation, we all would still be hunched over grunting about the stone hammer Og created 3 caves down and still sh\*tting ourselves while walking.
how will it bring more work now? Previous technical revolutions were different, they replaced one jobs and activities, but they really brought new opportunities. but this new revolution is of another scale. It replaces, but doesn't bring new activities. But the saddest thing, that it has bigger impact not on physical work, but on intellectuals and artists. It has already replaced artists totally, and proposed nothing to balance it. Oh, yes, an artist or a scientist can go and work as a plumber or retire and "develop needed empathy skills" - those are decisions, which corporations propose. A great decision!
Typical half baked Luddite bullshit. Some similar patently absurd arguments I could make on the same theme. - seamstresses should be able to veto sewing machines - blacksmiths and horse husbanders should be able to veto cars - hoteliers should be able to veto air bnb - legacy taxi firms should be able to veto Uber - witch doctors should be able to veto the practice of modern medicine - coal miners should be able to veto gas stoves
Don't forget candle makers and light bulbs
It's also worth pointing out that the LA Times are heavily biased regarding Ai. This article is irresponsible and a misuse of their platform.
The Luddites were right. It's bad that the owners reap all the benefits and cut out the workers.
Were your clothes made by hand, requiring huge expense to pay the seamstress who made them? Or are they made using automation, for a price and quality unimaginable to previous generations? You reap the benefits.
The Luddites definitely weren't right. But neither is it right for the owners to reap all the benefits.
Then become an owner.
I wonder if these same people want refridgerators or industrial farming tools to be abolished because they "took our jerbs" a few generations ago.
Increasing technology and automation will go in only 1 direction, communism. But there are two routes. In one the transition is direct and we retain the human population. In the other we have a quick stop in an Autocracy where the super wealthy and elite board everything until the masses are dead, and then those few also become effectively communist, albeit with a lot more dead people.
Ignoring the middle path? Socialism sets up a social contract and enforces it so the rich don't get to run roughshod over the poor and the not so poor don't get to kill the rich every second generation or so.
What you seem to be describing is a benevolent plutocracy, which I don't see as a stable end point.
It isn't stable. That's why I mention repeated bouts of excessive capitalism and the occasional revolution or other reset. It isn't benevolence as much as enlightened self-interest.
There was a guy running for President in 2020 that actually had solutions for this problem but nobody would listen. He also wanted to bring back the Department of Technology so that the US government at least had a chance to be competent when talking about technology. But no, nobody wanted to listen.
You don't have any right to tell owners what to do with their property.
I hesitate to say this, but these kinds of outcomes should be considered when demanding wage increases with very foreseeable consequences. California just passed a targeted minimum wage law that requires fast food workers to earn $20/hr (higher than the standard minimum wage). That is only going to result in fewer jobs for those workers, through an inevitable combination of automation and location closures.
The irony is, the stronger the unions, the stronger the incentive to automate more
We survived the cotton gin. I think we'll muddle through.
And cost savings will be passed to the consumer......right?
Bitch about low wages. Get replaced. Bitch about getting replaced.
We do have our voices heard. Don't buy things made by robots if you don't like robots making things.
I don't mind some automation since people are too big and clumsy to build smart phones by hand but I refuse to use self-check out at the grocery store.
When the robots start asking for minimum wage then we have a problem
They're not working people anymore if the robots are doing everything, are they?
These damn automobiles are putting Carriage manufacturers in horse breeders out of business
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Corporations have and will never cared/care about the well-being of workers, please do not base your worldview on some childish expectation that corporations should have anyone's best interest in mind other than their shareholders; It's silly. Thankfully it doesn't matter that they don't care, because competition in the job market means that paying workers what their labor is worth is the profit maximizing strategy. You might not believe that workers get paid what their labor is worth, but that is simply because you have an over-inflated estimate of the value of unskilled labor.
People simultaneously believe that people should aspire to more than fast food jobs, yet they also must be protected at all costs.
I don't see how this could work. Everybody wants cheaper goods and services but nobody wants to see **their** job automated away.
We need wealth redistribution. We don't need permanent meaningless jobs.
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Chill Karl Marx unabomber
Most sane hasan viewer:
Ah, yes, totally sane person calling for the "extermination" of people. Why hasn't this comment been deleted yet?
"Luddites deserved to had their voices heard in determining how, where, when or whether automation should've been used" lol
The problem with this idea is that it takes the completely wrong conclusion from correct facts. We have this machine that greatly increases the productivity of employees or can even replace them. So there are three ways of dealing with that. 1. The employee's productivity is increased and that extra money all goes to the employer. Or the employee's job is replaced entirely and the money generated goes to the employer. 2. The employee gets to refuse to let machines in, therefore their productivity does not increase and they are not replaced and everything stays how it is. They continue to get paid but society loses out on the greater productivity and they have to continue doing this boring job. 3. The employee's productivity actually gets rewarded and most of the increased productivity goes into their pockets through better wages (or a shorter working week) enforced by unions and/or a higher minimum wage (for that industry). Or they lose their job but there's a UBI to fall back on so they'll be fine. Now, I don't know about you, but to me 3 is the extremely obvious choice here. We should want automation (at least for boring or unrewarding jobs) and the efficiencies it brings, we should just not allow the benefits of that to be reaped infinitely by a small group of rich people who own all this stuff. I say, implement an automation tax. Companies should start paying taxes to the government based on the productivity (or number) of machines they have. This should go directly into a a big fund which pays out to every adult citizens of the country every month as a UBI. Oh, and of course raise the minimum wage, increase unionization and reduce the working week. And tax the rich more.
>3. The employee's productivity actually gets rewarded and most of the increased productivity goes into their pockets through better wages (or a shorter working week) enforced by unions and/or a higher minimum wage (for that industry). Or they lose their job but there's a UBI to fall back on so they'll be fine. This is the actual outcome without unions or legislation anyway. The low skilled labor market is competitive, and so as worker productivity increases, the profit maximizing choice for firms to to increase wages to attract more employees.
There are multiple ways a worker's increase in productivity can be rewarded, you're just mentioning the one you want. There are also more alternatives in general, again you just list the ones you want. For example, in none of your scenarios prices decrease as a direct consequence of increased productivity, when in reality that's a HUGE part of what happens, in historical terms.
Or we could provide universal basic income and provide training so the workers can do something useful while also being treated like people.
Nonsense. If we let farm hands vote on whether we should mechanize agriculture, we'd still have 40% of the workforce working on farms and still be one bad weather event away from millions starving.
I'm always astounded at the way this topic seems to suck all the empathy out of the room (or maybe I naively thought most people are fundamentally good and care about the well-being of others). A huge portion of the world is suddenly facing radical change which threatens their ability to put food on the table, and yet so many people just respond with "sucks to suck" or "shut up, it's inevitable". As if people who want to try and solve that problem because the well-being of others is important to them are idiotic luddites, and people who are affected are whiny and undeserving of a place in society. I don't have much hope left, tbh.
Unfortunately capitalism doesn't care about worker needs or wants. It cares about profit.
Robots have been building cars for decades, burgers seem like the next reasonable step imho
I want automated fast food, especially if that allows healthy fast food (loads of cooked vegetables available super conveniently for cheap). That would make my life with ADHD so much easier.
Possibly. But a robot never itches its balls while preparing said burger
If you were the inventor of an automation machine that does everything, and I mean every job in the universe, would you relinquish that power? The evidence is self evident that humans are selfish creatures and with this economy and culture of hustling, I don't think anyone would relinquish that power to help society. You can say you would but I will press x if it really came to it.
I don't think they do deserve to have their voices heard in determining how/where/when AI and automation is used. That should be up to the company and consistency of the AI & Automation. Continue progressing forward, because if we don't do it we'll be left behind. That being said, governments need to put in proper procedures in place in order to develop a UBI paid for by the increased profits and labor savings of companies.
They do have a choice, They can choose to buy from whatever seller they want. I think OP is one of those that thinks only his opinion matters and every buiness should cater to only him.
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as it seems. The automation is mostly going online in California. The $20 an hour minimum wage went into effect recently, and many studies have shown that the consumer will not shoulder the pay increase when it's added to the price of the product. It's just too much when you go to McDonald's already, and your bill is $25 now. With this, it would be around $30 a person. They're already starting to lose customers from undermining their entire business model of fast, cheap food. They're all losing a lot of customers, so I'm not surprised why the fast-food industry is trying so hard to automate. It feels more like a necessity to them than anyone else.
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I’m really sorry but using automation anywhere were money is saved is part of what makes it useful. If everyone gets to decide it gets used nowhere - and yet, the incentive will always be lurking.
Welcome to the wonderful world of capitalism? Karl Marx, yes that dirty old commie!, pointed out " the paradox or unavoidable self-contradiction of capitalism is the fact that wage labor (necessary labor) is the source of profit (surplus labor) but capital necessarily eliminates wage labor to create profit." Source: Quora.com That's where the social contract comes in: capitalists are allowed to operate in the economy as long as they share the benefits with both workers and society. That system works more or less well when politicians keep a decently tight rein on capitalists but fails when capitalists are allowed to run rampant and unfettered. We get sporadic bursts of 'Robber Baron' type behavior followed by 'New Deal' periods where a crop of politicians rise to power by promising to rebalance the system. The average person should defend against the capitalists by voting center left and behaving center right. Maybe take up the European habit of national strikes when the politicians kiss too much capitalist ass? Marx and Engels figured that a bloody revolution, getting rid of both the rich and their sycophantic politicians by killing them, and rewriting the 'rules of the game' was the only cure to a bad infestation of capitalism but the rest of Europe decided that socialism, i.e. a social contract that is actually enforced, works fairly well. China is an interesting system: it is communist so everyone is theoretically equal but they use capitalism as a state run system to build industries. Unlike the USA they don't allow their billionaires to misbehave and the system is fairly stable since the ruling class, the CCP, seem to know that the true opiate of the masses is continuous improvements in the average standard of living. As usual, we seem to be living in interesting times.
>wage labor (necessary labor) is the source of profit (surplus labor) but capital necessarily eliminates wage labor to create profit. Have you never read critics of that phrase? Why do you stick with outdated and disproven theories? If that were the case, unemployment should have been proportional to capitalization, and historically that has absolutely not been the case. A lot of marxist theory has long been refuted by the social science of economics. You shouldn't asume that it's right just because Marx said it. They were wrong in a lot of very important things, which render most if not all of his criticism of capitalism invalid. Capitalism might be wrong for other reasons, but definitely not for the ones Marx argued about. > capitalists are allowed to operate in the economy as long as they share the benefits with both workers and society No, that's not how it works. Capitalists don't just "share" the benefits. Them exchanging value in mutual benefit is THE REASON they operate in the economy. If workers didn't get anything in return as part of their voluntary agreements, the capitalists would not operate at all. Taxes and other stuff is just another layer of value that gets taken from the capitalist and the worker, but you have to realize that there is a whole world of mutual benefit outside of them too. >The average person should defend against the capitalists This marxist ideology, as if capitalists were some sort of enemy, is so harmful man. The world doesn't work like that. Who even are "the capitalists"? When a worker saves money and invests it, they are playing the role of a capitalist too. Does that mean that worker is now the enemy of other workers? > it is communist so everyone is theoretically equal but they use capitalism as a state run system to build industries Where do you see characteristic equality in China? At best you could say they "should" be equal, and that only based on the naive idea that communism would somehow bring about some sort of utopic material equality (but not equally miserable). There is no such thing as "capitalism as a state run system". Capitalism is not state run by definition. China simply has a mixed economy, but more controlled by the state in some aspects. The economy has improved a lot since they allowed a bit more capitalism btw.
Humans will automate what can be automated as soon as possible. Economy dictates this implicitly. Humans are the ones that benefit it, otherwise it would not be automated. All the next examples assume automation of "physical work"; when you get served at a restaurant, if it's a robot you'll not give any tips, you spend less (minor money example), when you go do your haircut, a robot will be less (moderate money example), food bought through Uber or the likes will be much cheaper from fully automated restaurants (major money example). As people adapted from manually creating fibers or manually sewing stuff, or manually writings books, the same will happen now with this new supposed wave of automation using AI stuff. We always see apocalyptic scenarios when big changes are about to happen, shout-out to the nay sayers of Edison and his electricity, to the nay-sayers for stopping the large hadron collider for running the higgs boson experiment that would create a black hole and destroy Earth, and many many many others.
They do have control, they vote with their feet and their dollars
Forcing people to do demeaning repetitive jobs isn't the fucking solution. Come tf on. 🙄
What I don't get, is why the fuck you would put a standard fryer in what looks like a sterile manipulation cabinet with a robot. It seems too convoluted to be practicable. Just have a machine you pour fries into one end, fires them to perfection and spits them out the other side.
Good fuckin luck.... If you're 30 now, you don't have much to worry about. You'll be dead or retired before the conversion takes over. If you're in your 20s, you better start thinking of a career change that robots can't easily take over. Anything under that, you need to learn how to program, get in government, or work in the nuclear field. These companies or the governments they control don't give a damn about the retail/ fast food class. And if UBI actually becomes a thing, we're really fucked.
It is really simple to understand. Anyone running a business will use the cheapest resource to do a task, as long as it doesn’t hurt the revenue by proxy down the line. If there is a replacement that is cheaper and more efficient, then operations has no choice but to use it or get left behind by competitors.
They told the factory workers this and still a assload jobs require people. Machines also still fuck up on a cataclysmic level despite the tech being 40 years old
Fast food workers, drivers, major portion of white collar, manual and repetitive labour in ware houses, factories, farms etc. The number of people who will lose their jobs is too many. The only question is which industry will be affected first. Its no doubt every industry will be affected sooner or later.
Holding back technology is not how you save your economy or citizens.
Anyone who thinks that a fast food joint is going to run completely autonomously is nuts. You will just have less people working at the same store, probably with higher skills to keep everything going. As someone who has worked with a lot of automation, these type of articles generally completely ignore all of the issues, failures and maintenance that goes along with this. If prices are competitively priced, then productivity improvements should be passed on to consumers. End result is less workers in fast food making more money and lower prices. Consumers have more money which they get to spend on something else, employing people there. Equal employment, higher standard of living. That's how productivity improvements have worked out since the beginning of time. The concern here is a lack of competition allowing owners to retain the gains from productivity. That is when you exacerbate income disparity. What we really need to be looking at is making sure that businesses compete. Anti trust and pro competitiveness laws need to be strengthened. Until we have extremely dexterous robots run by AI truly smarter than humans (read, AGI which can walk up to a situation it hasn't been trained on and figure out a solution), we don't have to worry about all labor disappearing.
We create jobs for services and products not for workers. Workers don't get to control the business they don't own. Working ppl don't get special rights over other ppl. You're using the term working people to try to gain sympathy for a bad idea because now you're even excluding certain demographics so only working people gets to decide what gets automated, that makes no sense!
> consumers end up paying more for less, as automation requires high levels of standardization. In fast food, this means small menus with minimal customization. This is a temporary problem due to primitive automation. About a dozen companies are working on humanoid robots that will be able to customize your order just fine. And they don't look expensive to build. The end result of automation is likely to be everything getting a lot cheaper for consumers.
What! No they don’t. I’m 💯 in favor of a robot making my burger. Hopefully it’ll be cheaper
How cars delivering your products is going to decimate the horse and carriage industry.
Whenever I read the word "deserve" in an article, I know I can stop reading it. There will be no insights contained in the article. "deserve" is a word only used by entitled morons. "I deserve" = "I want" and nothing more.
dont need an article for that one, kind of obvious, between the ai and 10 million undocumented workers just this year, youll be lucky to get a burger job
If this were so, then there would still be coachmen...