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My local coffee place has humans who operate an espresso machine, while Starbucks has baristas who push a button, and there are vending machines that produces e

My local coffee place has humans who operate an espresso machine, while Starbucks has baristas who push a button, and there are vending machines that produces espresso without having an operator. None of this excites a moral panic. Kitchen labor-saving devices have been being invented for hundreds of thousands of years. What's new? Think about wheat. Wheat used to be ground in stone mills operated by oxen or wind or water, which is much more labor-intensive than today's mills. Before that, the grinding process was even more labor-intensive.

ekianjo 9y ago
> What's new? Nothing new indeed, but when something creates fear you can be sure there's always going to be someone that is going to take advantage of it to enact laws, collect taxes and the like.
Growlzler 9y ago
Grinding wheat left byproducts of the stone burrs in the wheat product. This ground the enamel off peoples teeth leaving them nearly toothless by their mid-thirties. It wasn't till recently that "milling" became the norm in flour production. The wheat berry is not crushed in the milling process but is first burst and torn successively into every finer pieces. Some people have never tasted freshly milled flour made into bread. Total pity that...,
- dannyw 9y ago
  Could you cite a source for grinding wheat leaving sufficient stone burr particles resulting in enamel damage? I could not find a source via Google.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Dental health and disease in ancient Egypt http://www.nature.com/bdj/journal/v206/n8/full/sj.bdj.2009.309.html http://www.nature.com/bdj/journal/v206/n8/full/sj.bdj.2009.3... I got there by googling [wheat enamel damage -gluten stone], there's lots more than just this one article
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      Getting the vast majority of your food from a single starchy source is also not great for dental (or general) health, even without the sand chewing part.
statictype 9y ago
What's different is that the button was being pushed by a human. That human gets paid a salary and earns a living. And that human could presumably choose not to push the button if the expresso machine tries to become sentient (in theory).
- greglindahl 9y ago
  The vending machine still has many humans involved: building it involved humans, maintaining it involves humans. The difference is that the button is pushed by the customer. That's the same amount of human labor, actually, it's just that the customer isn't paying someone else for the button press.
  - petre 9y ago
    I believe the vending machine has greater work overhead and uses more materials than an actual human. Thnik about it: precut veggies stored in refrigerated (probably plastic) containers. Somebody has to supply and prepare the veggies. Some other human has to resupply the machine when it runs out of veggies. Some other human has to fix the vending machine when it stops working. Some other humans have to design the machine and assemble it, at least in part. With an actual human you'd only have to supply the raw veggies and the human worker would do all the preparation (using food processors), serving and processing payments. One could automate some tasks like payment processing or have two humans operate the salad bar: one that prepares and serves the salads and one that processes payments. This would avoid cooks switching between working with (dirty) cash and preparing salads.
    - lemmings19 9y ago
      I disagree and think the machine has less overhead. Yes there is a large cost upfront to develop and manufacture it. But once the machine has been designed and tested, it will never have to be designed again. Design is a one time cost. Once manufacturing is underway, the process is typically made as efficient as possible and made to scale. The work that went into design and testing can now be scaled to thousands or millions of units which is a great return on investment. Each unit has a one time cost for materials used for parts, with some long term maintenence costs. Operation requires only an electric energy draw. If that energy is from a clean source such as solar, this unit isn't having much of any further negative impact. Operation could last years or decades depending on design and whether or not the product is superceded, at which time its parts can be recycled. Even then, the time spent on design will be used to create the next version. Supplying the machines with goods is already a task handled when goods are delivered to the location and stocked, so there isn't going to be much or any overhead added there. Plus, we can automate that too (self-driving vehicles for transportation, robots for the last leg of delivery and stocking). Human workers do not scale in the same way that machines do, and aren't typically as efficient at this type of task. Finding suitable human workers is difficult and can take considerable time and resources every time one is hired. Human workers are expensive, and this is an ongoing neverending cost. This cost will not scale down as you hire more workers or work them for a longer time (unlike machines). Human reliability is hit and miss. Also, you cannot work them 24/7. There is lots of downtime and you would require at least 3 or 4 humans to replace 1 machine if the task requires 24/7 uptime. The enegry that humans consume and their waste is typically not effecient. Three meals a day, often including animal products which are costly in terms of resources and environmental impact. Then there's waste treatment for them. And the energy costs to deliver the food from a farm to their location, and even farm growing and harvesting. None of this is as effecient or "green" as a renewable energy draw such as solar, wind, or hydroelectric delivered over a power line. On many levels, humans are a poor replacement for machines in predictable tasks such as making a coffee or a sandwich for a chain restaurant. Humans are good for social work, and making coffee is not social. In terms of someone needing a job, even if that job is meaningless and unnecessary, basic income should be provided instead. But that's a whole other conversation and we aren't there yet. Point is: Machines are efficient. Social impact is a different conversation.
christopheml 9y ago
What's new? Well, if we keep replacing low-skill jobs by high-skills ones, we may have a little problem: are humans going to keep up with the training? Is the workforce going to adapt fast enough? When job replacement happens over several generations, it's a pretty easy problem to solve. When it gets faster, turns out some human abilities are not scaling very well.
- robert_foss 9y ago
  A solution is providing the option of mid-life education. Of course this comes more easily to places with free education.
  - gm-conspiracy 9y ago
    and available careers, not just jobs.
  - ErrantX 9y ago
    What about if there are a group of people who cannot do mid-to-high skilled jobs (whilst potentially controversial, I think this is accurate)? If we replace all of those jobs what do they do? I have always thought there is a far-future dystopian story in that somewhere; society has evolved IT and automation to the extent that only the top 25% of individuals actually "work" and everyone else has leisure. The 25% decide they want a leisurely life also, causing the collapse of society...
    - robert_foss 9y ago
      Even if there is such a group of people, unable to learn a new trade, surely they're not the majority. So there is lots of room for improving the situation. There are lots of stories of American coal miners going into tech when the mining jobs dried up. But their process of getting there is through charitable organizations, not a proper educational program.
      - megaman22 9y ago
dalbasal 9y ago
I think most of that has excited moral (I would call it political) panic at one point or another. But, there isn't anything special about these salad machines, I agree. The underlying narrative is a fear of automating lots of other things. The new wave of automation is still uncertain, we don't know how to identify nevermind personify the symbols and culprits of it. Automated kitchen robots are a nice stand-in for automation generally. Like the robots in the jetsons.
coldtea 9y ago
>labor-saving devices have been being invented for hundreds of thousands of years. What's new? An extremely larger population that any other period in time (more than double what was merely 100 years ago), combined with the most extreme productivity improvements and new technologies like AI and robotics that can make most of them redundant in a few large fell swoops. Plus, the fact that for most of humanity's existence, the masses mattered mostly if they were useful to some end, not for their intristic value as human beings.
- eru 9y ago
  Mattered to whom? People always matter at least to themselves.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >Mattered to whom? To those that run society and determine policy. >People always matter at least to themselves. Which is neither here nor there as to whether anyone will lend them a helping hand or let them perish e.g. in slums and poverty. Though even at that one would be surprised. People left without a job/role in society often don't matter even to themselves -- low self esteem, turning to drugs, alcohol, etc.
    - smelterdemon 9y ago
      >People left without a job/role in society often don't matter even to themselves -- low self esteem, turning to drugs, alcohol, etc. I see this argument all the time here, but no one accounts for the fact that we live in a society in which people's worth is largely determined by their ability to secure financial stability. Who's to say that people without jobs, allowed to live without societal derision in a (best case) post work future would be inevitably reduced in spirit?
      - coldtea 9y ago
        I covered that in the first part of my comment: the masses are rarely nurtured when they are not useful. So, it's more likely that they'll be left to rot, than that they'll be provided for and allowed to be included is a "post work future".
jbreckmckye 9y ago
> None of this excites a moral panic. It has done, in the past, and these concerns have not been without merit. The Ur-Case is that of the Luddites. When weaving machines came onto the fore in 19th century Britain, groups of saboteurs fearing for their jobs wrecked the machines with rocks and hammers. The Crown response was swift and unflinching. Machine-breaking was made a capital offence and the Luddites were put down with the violence typical of 19th century law enforcement. Nowadays we look on and shake our heads. In the long run the Luddites' fears were unfounded. Mechanisation improved productivity, which meant more cloth could be made cheaply, which increased the size of the market, boosted purchasing power and opened up new markets for new kinds of work. In the short run, however, things were not so comfortable for the workers of Northern England. The 'compensatory effects' of technological improvement took many years to land. In the meanwhile an entire generation of men were reduced to penury. Perhaps these technologies will open new markets after all. But how quickly? And will the jobs compare? What happens when the work human beings like and are good at disappears? What happens when only trivial jobs remain? What does that do to people and their relation to society?
- lucas_maximus83 9y ago
  This is an incorrect history of the Luddites. They didn't fear for their jobs. Most of them were machine operators and most of the machines they destroyed was over 200 years old at the time. It was a protest about shit working conditions caused.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  "The Luddites were a group of English textile workers and weavers in the 19th century who destroyed weaving machinery as a form of protest. The group was protesting the use of machinery in a "fraudulent and deceitful manner" to get around standard labour practices.[1] Luddites feared that the time spent learning the skills of their craft would go to waste as machines would replace their role in the industry.[2]" "It is a misconception that the Luddites protested against the machinery itself in an attempt to halt progress of technology." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite The modern day equivalent would be the French anti-Uber strike: https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/26/10832204/french-taxi-uber-strike-paris-vtc https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/26/10832204/french-taxi-uber... CATO's agenda, of course, requires depicting the French taxi drivers as "luddites protesting technology" which neatly illustrates exactly why the misconception has persisted for so long: https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewfeeney2/2015/06/30/uber-execs-arrested-in-france-after-luddite-protests https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewfeeney2/2015/06/30/uber-...
crdoconnor 9y ago
>What's new? American elites want: * A convenient scapegoat for outsourced manufacturing jobs which they are to blame for. * A convenient scapegoat for jobs lost to austerity which they are to blame for. * A perennial threat to hang over uppity worker's heads to head off threats of unionization.

ekianjo 9y ago

> What's new? Nothing new indeed, but when something creates fear you can be sure there's always going to be someone that is going to take advantage of it to enact laws, collect taxes and the like.

Growlzler 9y ago

Grinding wheat left byproducts of the stone burrs in the wheat product. This ground the enamel off peoples teeth leaving them nearly toothless by their mid-thirties. It wasn't till recently that "milling" became the norm in flour production. The wheat berry is not crushed in the milling process but is first burst and torn successively into every finer pieces. Some people have never tasted freshly milled flour made into bread. Total pity that...,

dannyw 9y ago
Could you cite a source for grinding wheat leaving sufficient stone burr particles resulting in enamel damage? I could not find a source via Google.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Dental health and disease in ancient Egypt http://www.nature.com/bdj/journal/v206/n8/full/sj.bdj.2009.309.html http://www.nature.com/bdj/journal/v206/n8/full/sj.bdj.2009.3... I got there by googling [wheat enamel damage -gluten stone], there's lots more than just this one article
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    Getting the vast majority of your food from a single starchy source is also not great for dental (or general) health, even without the sand chewing part.

statictype 9y ago

What's different is that the button was being pushed by a human. That human gets paid a salary and earns a living. And that human could presumably choose not to push the button if the expresso machine tries to become sentient (in theory).

greglindahl 9y ago
The vending machine still has many humans involved: building it involved humans, maintaining it involves humans. The difference is that the button is pushed by the customer. That's the same amount of human labor, actually, it's just that the customer isn't paying someone else for the button press.
- petre 9y ago
  I believe the vending machine has greater work overhead and uses more materials than an actual human. Thnik about it: precut veggies stored in refrigerated (probably plastic) containers. Somebody has to supply and prepare the veggies. Some other human has to resupply the machine when it runs out of veggies. Some other human has to fix the vending machine when it stops working. Some other humans have to design the machine and assemble it, at least in part. With an actual human you'd only have to supply the raw veggies and the human worker would do all the preparation (using food processors), serving and processing payments. One could automate some tasks like payment processing or have two humans operate the salad bar: one that prepares and serves the salads and one that processes payments. This would avoid cooks switching between working with (dirty) cash and preparing salads.
  - lemmings19 9y ago
    I disagree and think the machine has less overhead. Yes there is a large cost upfront to develop and manufacture it. But once the machine has been designed and tested, it will never have to be designed again. Design is a one time cost. Once manufacturing is underway, the process is typically made as efficient as possible and made to scale. The work that went into design and testing can now be scaled to thousands or millions of units which is a great return on investment. Each unit has a one time cost for materials used for parts, with some long term maintenence costs. Operation requires only an electric energy draw. If that energy is from a clean source such as solar, this unit isn't having much of any further negative impact. Operation could last years or decades depending on design and whether or not the product is superceded, at which time its parts can be recycled. Even then, the time spent on design will be used to create the next version. Supplying the machines with goods is already a task handled when goods are delivered to the location and stocked, so there isn't going to be much or any overhead added there. Plus, we can automate that too (self-driving vehicles for transportation, robots for the last leg of delivery and stocking). Human workers do not scale in the same way that machines do, and aren't typically as efficient at this type of task. Finding suitable human workers is difficult and can take considerable time and resources every time one is hired. Human workers are expensive, and this is an ongoing neverending cost. This cost will not scale down as you hire more workers or work them for a longer time (unlike machines). Human reliability is hit and miss. Also, you cannot work them 24/7. There is lots of downtime and you would require at least 3 or 4 humans to replace 1 machine if the task requires 24/7 uptime. The enegry that humans consume and their waste is typically not effecient. Three meals a day, often including animal products which are costly in terms of resources and environmental impact. Then there's waste treatment for them. And the energy costs to deliver the food from a farm to their location, and even farm growing and harvesting. None of this is as effecient or "green" as a renewable energy draw such as solar, wind, or hydroelectric delivered over a power line. On many levels, humans are a poor replacement for machines in predictable tasks such as making a coffee or a sandwich for a chain restaurant. Humans are good for social work, and making coffee is not social. In terms of someone needing a job, even if that job is meaningless and unnecessary, basic income should be provided instead. But that's a whole other conversation and we aren't there yet. Point is: Machines are efficient. Social impact is a different conversation.

christopheml 9y ago

What's new? Well, if we keep replacing low-skill jobs by high-skills ones, we may have a little problem: are humans going to keep up with the training? Is the workforce going to adapt fast enough? When job replacement happens over several generations, it's a pretty easy problem to solve. When it gets faster, turns out some human abilities are not scaling very well.

robert_foss 9y ago
A solution is providing the option of mid-life education. Of course this comes more easily to places with free education.
- gm-conspiracy 9y ago
  and available careers, not just jobs.
- ErrantX 9y ago
  What about if there are a group of people who cannot do mid-to-high skilled jobs (whilst potentially controversial, I think this is accurate)? If we replace all of those jobs what do they do? I have always thought there is a far-future dystopian story in that somewhere; society has evolved IT and automation to the extent that only the top 25% of individuals actually "work" and everyone else has leisure. The 25% decide they want a leisurely life also, causing the collapse of society...
  - robert_foss 9y ago
    Even if there is such a group of people, unable to learn a new trade, surely they're not the majority. So there is lots of room for improving the situation. There are lots of stories of American coal miners going into tech when the mining jobs dried up. But their process of getting there is through charitable organizations, not a proper educational program.
    - megaman22 9y ago

dalbasal 9y ago

I think most of that has excited moral (I would call it political) panic at one point or another. But, there isn't anything special about these salad machines, I agree. The underlying narrative is a fear of automating lots of other things. The new wave of automation is still uncertain, we don't know how to identify nevermind personify the symbols and culprits of it. Automated kitchen robots are a nice stand-in for automation generally. Like the robots in the jetsons.

coldtea 9y ago

>labor-saving devices have been being invented for hundreds of thousands of years. What's new? An extremely larger population that any other period in time (more than double what was merely 100 years ago), combined with the most extreme productivity improvements and new technologies like AI and robotics that can make most of them redundant in a few large fell swoops. Plus, the fact that for most of humanity's existence, the masses mattered mostly if they were useful to some end, not for their intristic value as human beings.

eru 9y ago
Mattered to whom? People always matter at least to themselves.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Mattered to whom? To those that run society and determine policy. >People always matter at least to themselves. Which is neither here nor there as to whether anyone will lend them a helping hand or let them perish e.g. in slums and poverty. Though even at that one would be surprised. People left without a job/role in society often don't matter even to themselves -- low self esteem, turning to drugs, alcohol, etc.
  - smelterdemon 9y ago
    >People left without a job/role in society often don't matter even to themselves -- low self esteem, turning to drugs, alcohol, etc. I see this argument all the time here, but no one accounts for the fact that we live in a society in which people's worth is largely determined by their ability to secure financial stability. Who's to say that people without jobs, allowed to live without societal derision in a (best case) post work future would be inevitably reduced in spirit?
    - coldtea 9y ago
      I covered that in the first part of my comment: the masses are rarely nurtured when they are not useful. So, it's more likely that they'll be left to rot, than that they'll be provided for and allowed to be included is a "post work future".

jbreckmckye 9y ago

> None of this excites a moral panic. It has done, in the past, and these concerns have not been without merit. The Ur-Case is that of the Luddites. When weaving machines came onto the fore in 19th century Britain, groups of saboteurs fearing for their jobs wrecked the machines with rocks and hammers. The Crown response was swift and unflinching. Machine-breaking was made a capital offence and the Luddites were put down with the violence typical of 19th century law enforcement. Nowadays we look on and shake our heads. In the long run the Luddites' fears were unfounded. Mechanisation improved productivity, which meant more cloth could be made cheaply, which increased the size of the market, boosted purchasing power and opened up new markets for new kinds of work. In the short run, however, things were not so comfortable for the workers of Northern England. The 'compensatory effects' of technological improvement took many years to land. In the meanwhile an entire generation of men were reduced to penury. Perhaps these technologies will open new markets after all. But how quickly? And will the jobs compare? What happens when the work human beings like and are good at disappears? What happens when only trivial jobs remain? What does that do to people and their relation to society?

lucas_maximus83 9y ago
This is an incorrect history of the Luddites. They didn't fear for their jobs. Most of them were machine operators and most of the machines they destroyed was over 200 years old at the time. It was a protest about shit working conditions caused.
crdoconnor 9y ago
"The Luddites were a group of English textile workers and weavers in the 19th century who destroyed weaving machinery as a form of protest. The group was protesting the use of machinery in a "fraudulent and deceitful manner" to get around standard labour practices.[1] Luddites feared that the time spent learning the skills of their craft would go to waste as machines would replace their role in the industry.[2]" "It is a misconception that the Luddites protested against the machinery itself in an attempt to halt progress of technology." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite The modern day equivalent would be the French anti-Uber strike: https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/26/10832204/french-taxi-uber-strike-paris-vtc https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/26/10832204/french-taxi-uber... CATO's agenda, of course, requires depicting the French taxi drivers as "luddites protesting technology" which neatly illustrates exactly why the misconception has persisted for so long: https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewfeeney2/2015/06/30/uber-execs-arrested-in-france-after-luddite-protests https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewfeeney2/2015/06/30/uber-...

crdoconnor 9y ago

>What's new? American elites want: * A convenient scapegoat for outsourced manufacturing jobs which they are to blame for. * A convenient scapegoat for jobs lost to austerity which they are to blame for. * A perennial threat to hang over uppity worker's heads to head off threats of unionization.