6 ms·
Labor substitution is extremely difficult and almost everybody hand waves it away. Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipp
by ddtaylor 8mo ago
Labor substitution is extremely difficult and almost everybody hand waves it away.
Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none with any proper economics.
Let's be charitable and assume that this type of fast food worker gets paid $50,000 a year. For that job to be displaced it needs to be performed by a robot that can be acquired for a reasonable capital expenditure such as $200,000 and requires no maintenance, upkeep, or subscription fees.
This is a complete non-reality in the restaurant industry. Every piece of equipment they have cost them significant amounts and ongoing maintenance even if it's the most basic equipment such as a grill or a fryer. The reality is that they pay service technicians and professionals a lot of money to keep that equipment barely working.
- password54321 8mo ago>the most unskilled labor People are worried about white-collar not blue-collar jobs being replaced. Robotics is obviously a whole different field from AI.
- Morromist 8mo agoYeah, although in the "Something big is happening" Shumer did say at the end "Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They're not quite there yet. But "not quite there yet" in AI terms has a way of becoming "here" faster than anyone expects." Being the hype-man that he is I assume he meant humanoid robots - I think he's being silly here, and the sentence made me roll my eyes.
- beeflet 8mo agowhat difference does it make if the robots are humanoid or not? It merely reflects the designer's willingness to engage in sci-fi tropes.
- ddtaylor 8mo ago> Robotics is obviously a whole different field from AI I agree, but people are conflating the two. We have seen a lot of advancements in robotics, but as of current that only makes the economics worse. We're not seeing the complexity of robots going down and we're seeing the R&D costs going up, etc. If it didn't make sense a few years ago to buy a crappy robot that can barely do the task because your business will never make money doing it, it probably doesn't make sense this year to buy a robot that still can't accomplish the tasks and is more expensive.
- tsss 8mo agoThe burger cook job has already been displaced and continues to be. Pre-1940s those burger restaurants relied on skilled cooks that got their meat from a butcher and cut fresh lettuce every day. Post-1940s the cooking process has increasingly become assembly-lined and cooks have been replaced by unskilled labor. Much of the cooking process _is_ now done by robots in factories at a massive scale and the on-premise employees do little else than heat it up. In the past 10 years, automation has further increased and the cashiers have largely been replaced by self-order terminals so that employees no longer even need to speak rudimentary English. In conclusion, both the required skill-level and amount of labor needed for restaurants has been reduced drastically by automation and in fact many higher skilled trade jobs have been hit even harder: cabinetmakers, coachbuilders and such have been almost eradicated by mass production. It will happen to you.
- ddtaylor 8mo ago> and the on-premise employees do little else than heat it up This is correct. This also is a lot more complex than it sounds and creates a lot of work. Cooking those products creates byproducts that must be handled. > and the cashiers have largely been replaced by self-order terminals so that employees no longer even need to speak rudimentary English Yet most of the customers still have to interact with an employee because "the kiosk won't let me". Want to add Mac sauce? Get the wrong order in the bag? Machine took payment but is out of receipt paper? Add up all these "edge cases" and a significant amount of these "contactless" transactions involved plenty of contact! > It will happen to you. Any labor that can be automated should be. Humans are not supposed to spend their time doing meaningless tasks without a purpose beyond making an imaginary number go up or down.
- saulpw 8mo ago> Cooking those products creates byproducts that must be handled. Okay so the job of "cook" just became "grease disposal engineer"? > Yet most of the customers still have to interact with an employee because "the kiosk won't let me" That hasn't stopped some places I've visited from only allowing people to order from the kiosk. Literally I've said something to the person behind the counter who pointed to the iPad and when I said I wanted something else, shrugged and said we can't do that.
- slavoingilizov 8mo agoCan you walk me through this argument for a customer service agent? The jobs where the nuance and variety isn’t there and don’t involve physical interaction are completely different to flipping burgers
- ddtaylor 8mo agoA customer service agent that can be automated should be, but it's not working right now. Most support systems are designed to offload as much work as possible to the automated funnel, which almost always has gaps, loops, etc. The result is customers who want to pay for something or use something that get "stuck" being unable to throw money at a company. Right now the cost of fraud is much greater than the cost of these uncaptured sales or lost customers. Eventually that will change and the role of a customer service agent will be redefined.
- Der_Einzige 8mo agoFunny, I go to South Korea and the fast food burger joints literally operate exactly as you say they couldn't. I've had the best burger in my life from a McDonalds in South Korea operated practically by robots. It's a non reality in America's extremely piss poor restaurant industry. We have a competency crisis (the big key here) and worker shortage that SK doesn't, and they have far higher trust in their society.
- ddtaylor 8mo ago> McDonald’s global CEO has famously stated that while they invest in "advanced kitchen equipment," full robotic kitchens aren't a broad reality yet because "the economics don't pencil out" for their massive scale. > While a highly automated McDonald’s in South Korea (or the experimental "small format" store in Texas) might look empty, the total headcount remains surprisingly similar to a standard restaurant
- iberator 8mo agoI lost my job as a software developer some time ago. Flipping burgers is WAY more demanding than I ever imagined. That's the danger of AI: It takes jobs faster than creating new ones PLUS for some fields (like software development) downshifting to just about anything else is brutal and sometimes simply not doable. Forget becoming manager at McDonald's or be even good at flipping burgers at the age of 40: you are competing with 20yr olds doing sports with amazing coordination etc
- Borg3 8mo agoUgh.. sorry to hear :( I am myself unemployed right now. Its really hard to land a job in tech.. Luicky, I dont need to flip burgers for now...
- fragmede 8mo agoWho's gonna play you to flip burgers with no experience doing it and everyone else needing a job as well?
- ddtaylor 8mo agoThere is a huge demand for low-skill labor in other industries. Stuff like plumbing, HVAC, and a ton of other traditionally unsexy jobs that can barely keep enough people in a town to perform these jobs at higher costs than normal.
- mattlondon 8mo agoJobs that require physical effort will be fine for the reasons you state Any job that is predominantly done on a computer though is at risk IMO. AI might not completely take over everything, but I think we'll see way fewer humans managing/orchestrating larger and larger fleets of agents. Instead of say 20 people doing some function, you'll have 3 or 4 prompting away to manage the agents to get the same amount of work done as 20 people did before. So the people flipping the burgers and serving the customers will be safe, but the accountants and marketing folks won't be.
- ddtaylor 8mo ago> So the people flipping the burgers and serving the customers will be safe, but the accountants and marketing folks won't be. And that's probably something most people are okay with. Work that can be automated should be and humans should be spending their time on novel things instead of labor if possible.
- techpression 8mo agoWhat society is ready for that? We are looking at an possible outcome that will make the Great Depression look like a strong financial era of growth and prosperity. I don’t think most people are ok with the road to the goal in this case, doesn’t matter if you have work or not, mass unemployment destroys societies.
- phil21 8mo ago> Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none with any proper economics. In actual reality, McDonalds has already automated to a vast degree. People were talking about burger-flipping robots as a trope 30+ years ago. Their future has come, just not in the way imagined. If the McDonalds franchises near me are anything to go by we went from a busy lunch rush needing a staff of 20 or so individuals to properly handle, to around half a dozen. At least a half reduction in peak staffing needs - nearly entirely due to various forms of automation and supply chain optimization. The latter of which is just another name for automation further upstream and abstracted from the point of sale. > This is a complete non-reality in the restaurant industry. Every piece of equipment they have cost them significant amounts and ongoing maintenance even if it's the most basic equipment such as a grill or a fryer. Perhaps grills are the hardest bit to automate, so they may never not be staffed by humans. I'd argue some places have done a fairly good job "automating" this aspect too if you squint a little. Stuff like double-sided grills where the top comes down and cooks a burger from both sides at once. Doubles your line throughput. Call this mechanization if you want, but it's in the same bucket to me. But look at soft drink machines. They are now fully automated with some locations able to go from 3-4 people staffing two machines during a busy lunch rush, down to a single person who simply puts caps on stuff coming off the tiny conveyor belt. Mistakes are also cut down to close to zero, including stuff like "less ice" or "more ice" customizations. The locations I'm aware of now operate fryers on a rotation so the "wait for fresh fries" experience is a thing of the past. This probably wasn't a major capital investment - just an improvement in the automation of data collection, modeling, and demand prediction. Still an automation though, as it replaces some manager making those decisions. Ordering kiosks are the obvious one everyone knows about, so not worth discussing. They are universal in large cities these days, and I'm starting to see them more and more even in small towns during road trips. App-based ordering is also not someone anyone predicted 20 years ago either. Locations went from 6-8 cashiers on duty down to 1 or 2. It already happened. Fast food is getting more out of less workers, just as predicted. It just happened incrementally over decades. Sure, a typical fast food franchise will never be operated in a "lights out" style manner with a roving team of highly paid technicians simply responding to alerts. But the labor force has been reduced and optimized for efficiency, and will continue to be chipped away little by little as technology gets better.