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> unless something changes People will be replaced by robots, this is what will change. It is already happening. McDonalds is canonical example of that.

Hokusai 5y ago
That is there best argument to fight now for good conditions, the more robots in the future the less leverage to negotiate. On a second note, if robots replace humans. Who is going to buy products? Because humans without jobs do not have money. Why have warehouses if nobody can but anything? That hypothetical future were robots replace workers is way more complicated that many people thinks.
- asteroidbelt 5y ago
  > That is there best argument to fight now for good conditions, the more robots in the future the less leverage to negotiate. Humans in warehouse don’t have leverage and will have even less leverage in the future regardless of what they would be able to negotiate now. > Who is going to buy products? People making robots (designing, configuring, installing, fixing etc). Or people doing service work like nannies, teachers, massage therapists, waiters, diving instructors, receptionists etc. All the work which can be automated, but humans are still preferable than robots.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  Science fiction has been making about universal basic income, zero cost basic living goods and housing, and comprehensive social support services. They also suffer a lot of wealth stratification and “we don’t talk about how we load cash into the money pump” blind spots. It’s the right question to ask; isn’t all revenue eventually deprecated by robotics? Thankfully, the reality is that we can’t create safe and resilient automatons, so we don’t have to worry about humans being replaced any time soon, if not for centuries. For example, we have landed zero fully autonomous rovers on Mars, and we have no autonomous rover repair bot, even if we did, so it would break down because we’re terrible at producing technology that works for a decade or more between failures. The wealthy humans who don’t like paying humans are thrilled to let us think that the wealth gaps are due to automation and globalization, because otherwise there’d be pitchfork mobs at their doors. But it’s not robots we need to be afraid of. It’s greed we need to be afraid of. That’s what drives Amazon to externalize humanity as a cost to be paid by anyone else but them. That’s what drives Uber to destroy taxis and then try to harvest automaton driver training data. There are no robotic taxis that can survive human beings who realize that the taxis are so risk-averse that they can be taken advantage of, cut off in traffic, trapped and damaged or harvested for parts, etc. We seriously are like fifty or a hundred years away from automation being able to do a single job for a year without human maintenance. Everyone’s afraid of robots replacing us (beep beep boop boop) but in reality we can’t even advance past VCRs that flash 12:00, and it’s been one week since Tesla locked their entire worldwide customer base out of their cars with a 500 Server Error. Automatons are not a relevant big bad. Here’s a simple litmus test for whether you should worry about automation at a macroeconomic level: How long has it been since your production web server responded with a single unhandled exception to a user? Not 404s, not “your cookie is defective, bounty hunter”, but like 429 Too Many or 500 Proxy time-out or whatever. Everyone will say “well, it’s really difficult to have such effective HA that you trap outbound errors and try to resolve them, and POST requests aren’t repeatable, and you can’t control the Internet”. If we can’t deliver static HTML without blips and outages, then we certainly don’t need to be afraid of a human-facing, human-serving automaton. It’s a great litmus test. I call it “zero nines”, because there’s no 9s in 100% uptime.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > On a second note, if robots replace humans. Who is going to buy products? Because humans without jobs do not have money. Why have warehouses if nobody can but anything? That hypothetical future were robots replace workers is way more complicated that many people thinks. Production will shift towards serving those with wealth versus those that need to work to survive. It's already happening to the housing market.
  - asteroidbelt 5y ago
    > Production will shift towards serving those with wealth That's right. Serving those who created wealth. It is already happening everywhere. Grocery store cashiers are serving while collar workers.
- johnsimer 5y ago
  If robots replaced humans there’d be significant deflation and some UBI policy would be enough for people to afford said deflated goods Maybe. Idk really though. Sure it depends on the good
cronix 5y ago
Tesla Bot enters the chat. https://youtu.be/HUP6Z5voiS8?t=87 https://youtu.be/HUP6Z5voiS8?t=87
floatingatoll 5y ago
Given how often I have to reboot my car stereo — Subaru stereos are all powered by a decades-old Windows CE platform — I’m not thinking that McDonalds will successfully overcome the traumas of unattended automation to the degree that their reputation requires. Apparently something like a tenth or a quarter (I forget) of their automatic soft serve machines are down nationwide at any given second of the day. If a tenth of McDonalds were closed worldwide at any given open-hours time due to removing human workers and replacing them with current-grade automation, their reputation would be forever destroyed.

Hokusai 5y ago

That is there best argument to fight now for good conditions, the more robots in the future the less leverage to negotiate. On a second note, if robots replace humans. Who is going to buy products? Because humans without jobs do not have money. Why have warehouses if nobody can but anything? That hypothetical future were robots replace workers is way more complicated that many people thinks.

asteroidbelt 5y ago
> That is there best argument to fight now for good conditions, the more robots in the future the less leverage to negotiate. Humans in warehouse don’t have leverage and will have even less leverage in the future regardless of what they would be able to negotiate now. > Who is going to buy products? People making robots (designing, configuring, installing, fixing etc). Or people doing service work like nannies, teachers, massage therapists, waiters, diving instructors, receptionists etc. All the work which can be automated, but humans are still preferable than robots.
floatingatoll 5y ago
Science fiction has been making about universal basic income, zero cost basic living goods and housing, and comprehensive social support services. They also suffer a lot of wealth stratification and “we don’t talk about how we load cash into the money pump” blind spots. It’s the right question to ask; isn’t all revenue eventually deprecated by robotics? Thankfully, the reality is that we can’t create safe and resilient automatons, so we don’t have to worry about humans being replaced any time soon, if not for centuries. For example, we have landed zero fully autonomous rovers on Mars, and we have no autonomous rover repair bot, even if we did, so it would break down because we’re terrible at producing technology that works for a decade or more between failures. The wealthy humans who don’t like paying humans are thrilled to let us think that the wealth gaps are due to automation and globalization, because otherwise there’d be pitchfork mobs at their doors. But it’s not robots we need to be afraid of. It’s greed we need to be afraid of. That’s what drives Amazon to externalize humanity as a cost to be paid by anyone else but them. That’s what drives Uber to destroy taxis and then try to harvest automaton driver training data. There are no robotic taxis that can survive human beings who realize that the taxis are so risk-averse that they can be taken advantage of, cut off in traffic, trapped and damaged or harvested for parts, etc. We seriously are like fifty or a hundred years away from automation being able to do a single job for a year without human maintenance. Everyone’s afraid of robots replacing us (beep beep boop boop) but in reality we can’t even advance past VCRs that flash 12:00, and it’s been one week since Tesla locked their entire worldwide customer base out of their cars with a 500 Server Error. Automatons are not a relevant big bad. Here’s a simple litmus test for whether you should worry about automation at a macroeconomic level: How long has it been since your production web server responded with a single unhandled exception to a user? Not 404s, not “your cookie is defective, bounty hunter”, but like 429 Too Many or 500 Proxy time-out or whatever. Everyone will say “well, it’s really difficult to have such effective HA that you trap outbound errors and try to resolve them, and POST requests aren’t repeatable, and you can’t control the Internet”. If we can’t deliver static HTML without blips and outages, then we certainly don’t need to be afraid of a human-facing, human-serving automaton. It’s a great litmus test. I call it “zero nines”, because there’s no 9s in 100% uptime.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> On a second note, if robots replace humans. Who is going to buy products? Because humans without jobs do not have money. Why have warehouses if nobody can but anything? That hypothetical future were robots replace workers is way more complicated that many people thinks. Production will shift towards serving those with wealth versus those that need to work to survive. It's already happening to the housing market.
- asteroidbelt 5y ago
  > Production will shift towards serving those with wealth That's right. Serving those who created wealth. It is already happening everywhere. Grocery store cashiers are serving while collar workers.
johnsimer 5y ago
If robots replaced humans there’d be significant deflation and some UBI policy would be enough for people to afford said deflated goods Maybe. Idk really though. Sure it depends on the good

cronix 5y ago

Tesla Bot enters the chat. https://youtu.be/HUP6Z5voiS8?t=87 https://youtu.be/HUP6Z5voiS8?t=87

floatingatoll 5y ago

Given how often I have to reboot my car stereo — Subaru stereos are all powered by a decades-old Windows CE platform — I’m not thinking that McDonalds will successfully overcome the traumas of unattended automation to the degree that their reputation requires. Apparently something like a tenth or a quarter (I forget) of their automatic soft serve machines are down nationwide at any given second of the day. If a tenth of McDonalds were closed worldwide at any given open-hours time due to removing human workers and replacing them with current-grade automation, their reputation would be forever destroyed.