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The tech necessary to replace front line service workers is not there. If it was we'd all be buying one to use as a domestic servant/slave. The robots in the ar

The tech necessary to replace front line service workers is not there. If it was we'd all be buying one to use as a domestic servant/slave. The robots in the article are more assembly line types, what happens when someone spills a coffee in some place 'unexpected', customer wants a custom frappadappalappachino instead of the regular drink, or something needs to be moved out of reach some customer needs help in a million other unexpected ways. The tech will get there eventually I'm sure but not by 2019. They will need to hire more locals, and probably increase their wages because they (rightfully so) won't accept such nonsense wages like £8 an hour in London.

lallysingh 10y ago
You can replace 5 out of 6, probably. Leave 1 as a customer service agent, and they handle all the special cases.
- 01000001 10y ago
  See Kellogg's Stretford cereal factory in the BBC Documentary Inside the Factory (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07mddvr http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07mddvr), four people plus a fleet of roughly 30-50 robotic fork lift trucks manage all the product egress. Personally, I welcome this, but it has to go hand in hand with some sort of universal income. We need to give everyone the chance to pick the job they /want/ to do, rather than the job they feel, economically, they have to do. Researcher with masters degree on 21k/year? You could easily get double that from a programming job with a few years of experience if you have the aptitude. I'd much rather receive a universal income, while working on things that I feel make a difference, rather than what I have to do to feed my family.
  - bobbyi_settv 10y ago
    > The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. - Warren Bennis
- RileyKyeden 10y ago
  This is how one local grocery store does self checkout. One attendant for about 10 machines, only a few people working the classic checkouts.
mr_luc 10y ago
I agree that things won't change enough in service jobs to matter by 2019. But as to this: > The tech necessary to replace front line service workers is not there. If it was we'd all be buying one ... what happens when ... some customer needs help in unexpected ways History does tell us that sometimes the market will throw away jobs that are becoming inconvenient to society, even if that means doing without the services that class of worker provides, or receiving worse and less convenient services. Consider household servants. They used to be seen as necessary for middle and upper-class households, because professional households required staggering amounts of manual labor just to keep everyone fed and clothed. Those jobs vanished, right around the time that clothes and dish-washing machines were invented. But it's interesting to look at why. Clothes and dish-washing machines are, frankly, not as great as servants (my feeling 'icky' about having someone else wash my clothes aside). You have to do the work yourself, and accept more cognitive load. But they win on cost -- the costs of employing a servant went up, and eventually worse service was worth it for a simpler and cheaper self-serve solution. Could something similar happen in service work? Well, look at the Amazon store, and compare it to a current grocery store. Now imagine a Starbucks with touchscreen-and-voice enabled ordering, no visible employees (maybe one employee, nominally a store manager, working the fleet of coffee machines behind the screens, and doing some light sweeping in the restaurant, etc) and a communal co-working space that more or less preserves the current experience, just minus the baristas.
- badgers 10y ago
  > Now imagine a Starbucks with touchscreen-and-voice enabled ordering, no visible employees (maybe one employee, nominally a store manager, working the fleet of coffee machines behind the screens, and doing some light sweeping in the restaurant, etc) and a communal co-working space that more or less preserves the current experience, just minus the baristas. We are already almost there. We have coffee vending machines. We have touch screen soda dispensers. Starbucks could wire in their mobile app to give customers a "redbox" coffee experience if they wanted to. I think it's part of their brand that a barista hand crafts your beverage rather than a machine do it, but who knows what their future direction will be.
  - 10y ago
Chaebixi 10y ago
> customer wants a custom frappadappalappachino instead of the regular drink Actually, I think that's something that would be relatively easily to automate. I've seen computerized ordering kiosks in European fast food restaurants. If you already have the robot, all you'd need to do is add a custom-item builder to the ordering interface. If the customer has a loyalty card or account, they could built it offline and save the item to their account for later retrieval. Assembling a liquid product seems like it'd be much easier to automate than cooking or general cleaning tasks. Overall, though, your point still stands.
- frobozz 10y ago
  Agreed. In fact, modern self-service soft drinks dispensers make it even more appealing and simple for the customer to get exactly what they want. Faced with a waiter or a person behind a counter, there's no way I'd order glass of a lime-and-raspberry half-sugar half-diet cola, for a number of reasons: I'm not going to bother looking through a menu to see what's available; it's not explicitly on the menu, and I don't know how the system behind the counter works, or how much extra might be charged for such an odd order; I don't want to be "That Guy". If I want something half-way between a macchiato and a cappuccino, but with the coffee poured on top of the milk, then I'd rather do that by pressing buttons on a machine, than ask a server who relays it to a coffee wallah who then looks quizzically at the instructions and asks the server for clarification who then passes the question on to me...
  - Neliquat 10y ago
    Be that guy. Get what you want. Often, you just have to ask. Your fear of being that guy is holding you back. You only really become that guy when you are an ass when you cannot be accomidated, or knowingly interfere with their work. This is just my dumb opinion, and I dont mind risking looking like that guy to share it.
SimonPStevens 10y ago
The tech doesn't have to replace the workers entirely, just improve their efficiency to the point that less humans are needed. Take supermarkets. What used to be 10 checkout assistants serving 30 customers per hour each for a total throughput of 300 customers per hour, can now become 20 self checkout machines serving 15 customers per hour each, with 2 retrained checkout assistants to oversee 10 machines each and handle the edge cases. Same overall throughput. Each individual customers experience gets slightly worse (perhaps, although maybe the longer checkout time is offset by shorter queues?), but throughput stays the same, and staffing is reduced significantly. I'm seeing this right now in every large supermarket, and even a lot of smaller corner shop type ones. There's a whole range of service jobs that are vulnerable to this kind of 80% efficiency improvement that will drastically reduce the levels of staff needed. Restaurant wait staff can be 80% replaced by self ordering via app or tablet. Bar staff, coffee shop staff (you can already preorder Starbucks and pay via the app, the human just makes the drinks), fast food staff (ever seen an express lane), all the same, a machine could make each staff member able to handle many times more customers but automating only the most repetitive parts leaving the human to just handle the edge cases. They aren't talking about replacing all workers, just some of them. "The $35,000 robot can boost the number of items picked by a worker by 200 percent to 500 percent, Welty said, and six employees can handle work normally done by 20 to 25."
- ghaff 10y ago
  The use of self-service in supermarkets is pretty patchy though. Once you get beyond barcoded items, it's a PITA. And it's not even a great experience for a cartful of barcoded items. Around where I live, other than a Walmart Superstore, there's not a single grocery store that uses self-service. One chain even put it in and then took it out. Personally, I'd probably go out of my way to avoid a chain with self-service given the option. Oddly, it's the big box home improvement stores that are the biggest self-service retail users around where I live. Even though many items you buy there are at equally bad for self-service as grocery stores.
  - SimonPStevens 10y ago
    > The use of self-service in supermarkets is pretty patchy though. That's kinda my point. The user experience is actually worse for many users. And it certainly doesn't handle all edge cases. It handles one specific case (of a customer with just a small number of small barcoded items) kind of acceptably, but slower than a human would. But it's still being used, and replacing staff by reducing the overall number of staff required despite not handling all situations very well at all. And this is the same mistake people make all the time when thinking about job automation. They say things like "I'm OK, my job could never be automated because a robot couldn't handle all the complex tasks I do like handling a customer complaint" but what they forget is that customer complaints is only 2% of their job. 80% is repetitive tasks that can be automated. So yeah, OK, one robot won't replace one person. But 10 robots and 1 person can replace 5 people. So now you have to reapply for your new job of robot supervisor/edge case handler, alongside your 4 other colleagues. And only one of you is going to get that job.

lallysingh 10y ago

You can replace 5 out of 6, probably. Leave 1 as a customer service agent, and they handle all the special cases.

01000001 10y ago
See Kellogg's Stretford cereal factory in the BBC Documentary Inside the Factory (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07mddvr http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07mddvr), four people plus a fleet of roughly 30-50 robotic fork lift trucks manage all the product egress. Personally, I welcome this, but it has to go hand in hand with some sort of universal income. We need to give everyone the chance to pick the job they /want/ to do, rather than the job they feel, economically, they have to do. Researcher with masters degree on 21k/year? You could easily get double that from a programming job with a few years of experience if you have the aptitude. I'd much rather receive a universal income, while working on things that I feel make a difference, rather than what I have to do to feed my family.
- bobbyi_settv 10y ago
  > The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. - Warren Bennis
RileyKyeden 10y ago
This is how one local grocery store does self checkout. One attendant for about 10 machines, only a few people working the classic checkouts.

mr_luc 10y ago

I agree that things won't change enough in service jobs to matter by 2019. But as to this: > The tech necessary to replace front line service workers is not there. If it was we'd all be buying one ... what happens when ... some customer needs help in unexpected ways History does tell us that sometimes the market will throw away jobs that are becoming inconvenient to society, even if that means doing without the services that class of worker provides, or receiving worse and less convenient services. Consider household servants. They used to be seen as necessary for middle and upper-class households, because professional households required staggering amounts of manual labor just to keep everyone fed and clothed. Those jobs vanished, right around the time that clothes and dish-washing machines were invented. But it's interesting to look at why. Clothes and dish-washing machines are, frankly, not as great as servants (my feeling 'icky' about having someone else wash my clothes aside). You have to do the work yourself, and accept more cognitive load. But they win on cost -- the costs of employing a servant went up, and eventually worse service was worth it for a simpler and cheaper self-serve solution. Could something similar happen in service work? Well, look at the Amazon store, and compare it to a current grocery store. Now imagine a Starbucks with touchscreen-and-voice enabled ordering, no visible employees (maybe one employee, nominally a store manager, working the fleet of coffee machines behind the screens, and doing some light sweeping in the restaurant, etc) and a communal co-working space that more or less preserves the current experience, just minus the baristas.

badgers 10y ago
> Now imagine a Starbucks with touchscreen-and-voice enabled ordering, no visible employees (maybe one employee, nominally a store manager, working the fleet of coffee machines behind the screens, and doing some light sweeping in the restaurant, etc) and a communal co-working space that more or less preserves the current experience, just minus the baristas. We are already almost there. We have coffee vending machines. We have touch screen soda dispensers. Starbucks could wire in their mobile app to give customers a "redbox" coffee experience if they wanted to. I think it's part of their brand that a barista hand crafts your beverage rather than a machine do it, but who knows what their future direction will be.
- 10y ago

Chaebixi 10y ago

> customer wants a custom frappadappalappachino instead of the regular drink Actually, I think that's something that would be relatively easily to automate. I've seen computerized ordering kiosks in European fast food restaurants. If you already have the robot, all you'd need to do is add a custom-item builder to the ordering interface. If the customer has a loyalty card or account, they could built it offline and save the item to their account for later retrieval. Assembling a liquid product seems like it'd be much easier to automate than cooking or general cleaning tasks. Overall, though, your point still stands.

frobozz 10y ago
Agreed. In fact, modern self-service soft drinks dispensers make it even more appealing and simple for the customer to get exactly what they want. Faced with a waiter or a person behind a counter, there's no way I'd order glass of a lime-and-raspberry half-sugar half-diet cola, for a number of reasons: I'm not going to bother looking through a menu to see what's available; it's not explicitly on the menu, and I don't know how the system behind the counter works, or how much extra might be charged for such an odd order; I don't want to be "That Guy". If I want something half-way between a macchiato and a cappuccino, but with the coffee poured on top of the milk, then I'd rather do that by pressing buttons on a machine, than ask a server who relays it to a coffee wallah who then looks quizzically at the instructions and asks the server for clarification who then passes the question on to me...
- Neliquat 10y ago
  Be that guy. Get what you want. Often, you just have to ask. Your fear of being that guy is holding you back. You only really become that guy when you are an ass when you cannot be accomidated, or knowingly interfere with their work. This is just my dumb opinion, and I dont mind risking looking like that guy to share it.

SimonPStevens 10y ago

The tech doesn't have to replace the workers entirely, just improve their efficiency to the point that less humans are needed. Take supermarkets. What used to be 10 checkout assistants serving 30 customers per hour each for a total throughput of 300 customers per hour, can now become 20 self checkout machines serving 15 customers per hour each, with 2 retrained checkout assistants to oversee 10 machines each and handle the edge cases. Same overall throughput. Each individual customers experience gets slightly worse (perhaps, although maybe the longer checkout time is offset by shorter queues?), but throughput stays the same, and staffing is reduced significantly. I'm seeing this right now in every large supermarket, and even a lot of smaller corner shop type ones. There's a whole range of service jobs that are vulnerable to this kind of 80% efficiency improvement that will drastically reduce the levels of staff needed. Restaurant wait staff can be 80% replaced by self ordering via app or tablet. Bar staff, coffee shop staff (you can already preorder Starbucks and pay via the app, the human just makes the drinks), fast food staff (ever seen an express lane), all the same, a machine could make each staff member able to handle many times more customers but automating only the most repetitive parts leaving the human to just handle the edge cases. They aren't talking about replacing all workers, just some of them. "The $35,000 robot can boost the number of items picked by a worker by 200 percent to 500 percent, Welty said, and six employees can handle work normally done by 20 to 25."

ghaff 10y ago
The use of self-service in supermarkets is pretty patchy though. Once you get beyond barcoded items, it's a PITA. And it's not even a great experience for a cartful of barcoded items. Around where I live, other than a Walmart Superstore, there's not a single grocery store that uses self-service. One chain even put it in and then took it out. Personally, I'd probably go out of my way to avoid a chain with self-service given the option. Oddly, it's the big box home improvement stores that are the biggest self-service retail users around where I live. Even though many items you buy there are at equally bad for self-service as grocery stores.
- SimonPStevens 10y ago
  > The use of self-service in supermarkets is pretty patchy though. That's kinda my point. The user experience is actually worse for many users. And it certainly doesn't handle all edge cases. It handles one specific case (of a customer with just a small number of small barcoded items) kind of acceptably, but slower than a human would. But it's still being used, and replacing staff by reducing the overall number of staff required despite not handling all situations very well at all. And this is the same mistake people make all the time when thinking about job automation. They say things like "I'm OK, my job could never be automated because a robot couldn't handle all the complex tasks I do like handling a customer complaint" but what they forget is that customer complaints is only 2% of their job. 80% is repetitive tasks that can be automated. So yeah, OK, one robot won't replace one person. But 10 robots and 1 person can replace 5 people. So now you have to reapply for your new job of robot supervisor/edge case handler, alongside your 4 other colleagues. And only one of you is going to get that job.