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If a job doesn't need doing, why waste a human's labor on it? Though that said, I remember not too long ago a lot of people saying "oh if minimum wage goes ove

by jjk166 5y ago

If a job doesn't need doing, why waste a human's labor on it? Though that said, I remember not too long ago a lot of people saying "oh if minimum wage goes over $15 we'll just automate the jobs" and now the McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen.

_-david-_ 5y ago
They are rolling out computer tellers all around my area. If they haven't done it in your area it is coming. There are a few companies working on automated meal makers and they are slowly being rolled out. It is just going a bit slow right now.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  I love this in other countries. I don’t always speak the local language well enough but I can tap on pictures and wait for my number to come up.
- JacobThreeThree 5y ago
  >It is just going a bit slow right now. Ahh yes, as the AI marketing department always says, we're 99% of the way there, it's just that the last 1% is the hardest! https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/waymo-s-self-driving-cars-are-99-of-the-way-there-the-last-1-is-the-hardest https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/waymo-s-s...
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    I don't think the comparison to AI is apt since meal making robots do currently function and are in restaurants right now. It is literally just being rolled out slowly.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I love them. Still, it seems that even those that clearly are solved problem can be done badly. Recently KFC rolled out here. And their kiosk seem to miss the basic options to customize the meals. Like just removing things. Can't do that with meals... Have list of extra options of stuff possibly not even in the product... Actually they don't even tell anywhere what is in their burgers. But I digress. All other chains including the local one manage to have these options present... So in the end automation won't always solve everything immediately...
- brimble 5y ago
  The ones I've seen (yes, at McDonalds specifically) are terrible, take forever to use, are abusive in attempting to push crap on the user and make some (what I'm sure are higher-margin) items easier to buy than others, and are yet another case of pushing labor onto the "consumer" and calling it automation(?!), like "automated checkouts" at grocery stores—a fucking lie, the buyer is doing almost as much work as paid workers used to, "automated" would be if you could just let go of your cart and a machine took care of the rest while you waited. Or like shifting from having workers fetch items for you to modern-style stores where you have to find everything yourself (that change was long enough ago that the idea that you should feel put-out at having to do this part of a store's job is lost to time). Or filling your own drinks, which is at least semi-compensated by being able to refill as much as you want or even "steal" an extra cup, but since a large soda costs the store pennies that's not much of a benefit. I'm struggling to think of a consumer-facing "automation" that wasn't actually just making consumers do more work. It's bad enough that we have to do the work of regulating prices (think of the time and brain-space you devote to figuring out whether the sale price on, say, apples is actually a decent one, keeping that figure/heuristic up-to-date, et c., now multiply by your entire shopping list, now multiply by the entire population)
lostapathy 5y ago
Pandemic driven wage increases haven’t been happening long enough to drive just too much automation yet - supply chains and all that would greatly limit how fast that will roll out. It will be interesting if in 5 years I’d wages stay at current levels how much automation displaces them.
- pixl97 5y ago
  This pandemic is also coupled with a chip supply shortage that will also increase the cost/difficulty of automating for a bit.
Verdex 5y ago
Well, not common. However, I wouldn't say 'nowhere'. https://misorobotics.com/flippy-2/ https://misorobotics.com/flippy-2/ Looks like it's a work in progress.
- morelisp 5y ago
  This looks more like deskilling than automation. There's not someone constantly on the fryers in most fast food outlets, this just makes it a button press instead of having to learn by sight/smell/feel when something is done. That can make things a little faster, but at 30% faster you're paying now paying a whole person's salary to... save at most a person's worth of work, with a much bigger business risk if anything goes wrong.
toast0 5y ago
> McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen. Who's pouring the drinks at your McDonalds? Over the past five or so years, the robots have taken that over. McDonalds has never been a stranger to labor savings, although I don't think they use burger conveyors like other chains, they do lots of little things. They've also been putting in two lane ordering all over the place, which increases throughput. All these things work together to reduce the people hours to put together an order. Sometimes that means one less person on a shift.
- morelisp 5y ago
  > Who's pouring the drinks at your McDonalds? Generally, prior to COVID-19, the customers themselves.
  - staticassertion 5y ago
    Via a machine.
  - toast0 5y ago
    How about in the drive through? Moving the pouring of dine in/take out to the customers happened mid 200x, and saved labor back then, too.
    - morelisp 5y ago
      > Moving the pouring of dine in/take out to the customers happened mid 200x At least 10 years earlier. Probably more but that's outside my memory range.
      - toast0 5y ago
        Here's a discussion from 2002 where someone says 'all the new McDonald's have serve-yourself-drinks' but older stores still had them behind the counter. At some point, most existing stores retrofitted self-serve, too. Other chains had it way earlier for sure. https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mcdonalds-refill-policy-in-america/104498/13 https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mcdonalds-refill-policy-in...
jelliclesfarm 5y ago
That’s because we rely on China for parts to make the robots and there has been a huge shortage. At least in America, we need to back to being self reliant. Software is not going to eat anything without hardware. It’s all happening in Asia and we outsource our manufacturing to them. This won’t end well for America.

by jjk166 5y ago

_-david-_ 5y ago

They are rolling out computer tellers all around my area. If they haven't done it in your area it is coming. There are a few companies working on automated meal makers and they are slowly being rolled out. It is just going a bit slow right now.

withinboredom 5y ago
I love this in other countries. I don’t always speak the local language well enough but I can tap on pictures and wait for my number to come up.
JacobThreeThree 5y ago
>It is just going a bit slow right now. Ahh yes, as the AI marketing department always says, we're 99% of the way there, it's just that the last 1% is the hardest! https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/waymo-s-self-driving-cars-are-99-of-the-way-there-the-last-1-is-the-hardest https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/waymo-s-s...
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  I don't think the comparison to AI is apt since meal making robots do currently function and are in restaurants right now. It is literally just being rolled out slowly.
Ekaros 5y ago
I love them. Still, it seems that even those that clearly are solved problem can be done badly. Recently KFC rolled out here. And their kiosk seem to miss the basic options to customize the meals. Like just removing things. Can't do that with meals... Have list of extra options of stuff possibly not even in the product... Actually they don't even tell anywhere what is in their burgers. But I digress. All other chains including the local one manage to have these options present... So in the end automation won't always solve everything immediately...
brimble 5y ago
The ones I've seen (yes, at McDonalds specifically) are terrible, take forever to use, are abusive in attempting to push crap on the user and make some (what I'm sure are higher-margin) items easier to buy than others, and are yet another case of pushing labor onto the "consumer" and calling it automation(?!), like "automated checkouts" at grocery stores—a fucking lie, the buyer is doing almost as much work as paid workers used to, "automated" would be if you could just let go of your cart and a machine took care of the rest while you waited. Or like shifting from having workers fetch items for you to modern-style stores where you have to find everything yourself (that change was long enough ago that the idea that you should feel put-out at having to do this part of a store's job is lost to time). Or filling your own drinks, which is at least semi-compensated by being able to refill as much as you want or even "steal" an extra cup, but since a large soda costs the store pennies that's not much of a benefit. I'm struggling to think of a consumer-facing "automation" that wasn't actually just making consumers do more work. It's bad enough that we have to do the work of regulating prices (think of the time and brain-space you devote to figuring out whether the sale price on, say, apples is actually a decent one, keeping that figure/heuristic up-to-date, et c., now multiply by your entire shopping list, now multiply by the entire population)

lostapathy 5y ago

Pandemic driven wage increases haven’t been happening long enough to drive just too much automation yet - supply chains and all that would greatly limit how fast that will roll out. It will be interesting if in 5 years I’d wages stay at current levels how much automation displaces them.

pixl97 5y ago
This pandemic is also coupled with a chip supply shortage that will also increase the cost/difficulty of automating for a bit.

Verdex 5y ago

Well, not common. However, I wouldn't say 'nowhere'. https://misorobotics.com/flippy-2/ https://misorobotics.com/flippy-2/ Looks like it's a work in progress.

morelisp 5y ago
This looks more like deskilling than automation. There's not someone constantly on the fryers in most fast food outlets, this just makes it a button press instead of having to learn by sight/smell/feel when something is done. That can make things a little faster, but at 30% faster you're paying now paying a whole person's salary to... save at most a person's worth of work, with a much bigger business risk if anything goes wrong.

toast0 5y ago

> McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen. Who's pouring the drinks at your McDonalds? Over the past five or so years, the robots have taken that over. McDonalds has never been a stranger to labor savings, although I don't think they use burger conveyors like other chains, they do lots of little things. They've also been putting in two lane ordering all over the place, which increases throughput. All these things work together to reduce the people hours to put together an order. Sometimes that means one less person on a shift.

morelisp 5y ago
> Who's pouring the drinks at your McDonalds? Generally, prior to COVID-19, the customers themselves.
- staticassertion 5y ago
  Via a machine.
- toast0 5y ago
  How about in the drive through? Moving the pouring of dine in/take out to the customers happened mid 200x, and saved labor back then, too.
  - morelisp 5y ago
    > Moving the pouring of dine in/take out to the customers happened mid 200x At least 10 years earlier. Probably more but that's outside my memory range.
    - toast0 5y ago
      Here's a discussion from 2002 where someone says 'all the new McDonald's have serve-yourself-drinks' but older stores still had them behind the counter. At some point, most existing stores retrofitted self-serve, too. Other chains had it way earlier for sure. https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mcdonalds-refill-policy-in-america/104498/13 https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mcdonalds-refill-policy-in...

jelliclesfarm 5y ago

That’s because we rely on China for parts to make the robots and there has been a huge shortage. At least in America, we need to back to being self reliant. Software is not going to eat anything without hardware. It’s all happening in Asia and we outsource our manufacturing to them. This won’t end well for America.