(15th January 2015, 8:18 AM)Dark Jaguar Wrote: http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/22/technology/innovation/fast-food-robot/

It seems a job that provides a major source of income for a huge number of Americans (in fact, most of the people I know work in fast food or other similar service jobs, sad as that may be). It is already starting to happen. The nearby grocery stores have already started rolling out "do it yourself" shopping lanes, where the customer scans in everything themselves (the implementation is still a little wonky though, as I have to have everything on a scale for some sort of badly thought out security reason, see if you can find the problem with such a way to prevent theft). I can easily envision not just a future where ALL the checkout lanes are replaced in this manner, but one wherein the entire way stores function is changed, so that everyone just lines up in a front "lobby", punches in their orders on one of several touch screens, and the rest of store, basically converted into a giant vending machine, delivers everything to the front area while you wait. Basically, it'd have almost no human employees.

The specifics are all that's new, this trend has been going on since before we were born. Ever been to a full-service gas station? (Shut up, weird animal person from Austin riding an old-time bicycle, we're talking about real people here.) At a certain point, gas stations all decided that fueling a car had become so easy that there was no point hiring someone just to put gas in the car, and thus the dangerous midnight "I'm just going to put the pump in and hurriedly dash back into the relative safety of my car" gas run was born. Entire careers have disappeared numerous times ever since they started "bringing in computers to improve productivity". Of course, there are many cases where an "automated" approach has done nothing but hurt the consumer as well as the employee. Automated help lines have risen quite a bit, but how many people have ever actually had their unique issue handled by the automated help line? At this point, I speak in garbled nonsense until the computer just gives up on me and connects me to an actual human being.

I've gone more left than the supposed "left" party in America, but on this issue I think I disagree with the general consensus. On the one hand, I can certainly appreciate the total loss of one of the few reliable jobs someone who's down and out can get. As these low level positions vanish, a significant margin of Americans will have no skill set they can fall back on, and even if they did, the pool of available skillset requiring jobs is too small to accommodate everyone. It's a grim future that threatens to completely overturn the extremely recent reduction in joblessness in America (and the world over, once others start adopting these practices). This can't be ignored. Allow me to ignore it for a moment to talk about something else now.

I'm more or less deaf to the idea that companies should be allowed to pursue profit for it's own sake without any ear towards human suffering it causes, so let's get that out of the way. No, my issues with taking the "protect the jobs from innovation" run a bit deeper, a bit more conceptual.

Basically, the biggest problem with keeping human employees around to do a job that can be done better and cheaper by a machine is just how that must make that employee feel. At any point that employee ever screws up, a boss has the perfect "you're only here out of CHARITY" argument, a constant degredation of their worth as a person and a constant reminder that the ONLY reason they are there is out of a sense of pity, that literally everything they are doing in their work shift is utterly meaningless and useless by ANY metric you can come up with, because it ALL can be done by machine. It's the sort of degradation one might feel being forced to break rocks in an old timey prison, or being made to clean a floor using only a tooth brush in some army movie. You know, pointless "busy work" just so the person can say that they are technically "working". That, to me, is the worst possible fate, the kind Greeks made legends about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus Now hear me out on this, I'm not saying it's better for these people to starve to death on the streets than doing mindnumbing and pointless labor. I'm all for charity, and government sponsored charity at that. I'm just saying let's just go all-out on the charity thing because this half-way point only gives the illusion of providing workers a secure job, and worse, it deprives most of these workers of the time and energy they could devote towards a real skill-based job. (As to why I keep sounding like I think people are too good for this sort of work, well, I do, because ALL MY PARENTS AND TEACHERS growing up kept ramming the warning of "You don't want to be stuck in a dead end job flipping burgers, do you?" at me, so yeah, thanks previous generation, now my generation really DOES think this job is terrible and beneath our dignity, because you TOLD us it was, so don't go crying on fox news about it when it's your fault we think that!) What I'm suggesting is that if technology progresses to the point that entire service industry jobs are outright replaced, this isn't a bad thing IF we are the kind of society that decides that being jobless is a condition that SOCIETY should help fix. I'm saying that Obama's recent initiative to have state sponsered 2 year collage is a good start, and providing homes for people until they can provide for themselves is even better.

More fundamentally, if the service industry goes entirely self-automated, and the food production industry follows, we're at stage one of reaching a post-scarcity economy, and that's a good thing. What's better than the charity I suggested above? Producing technology capable of providing for everyone's needs so they don't NEED to worry about starvation, and are thus free to pursue career paths that'll actually provide them some real job satisfaction. I'm suggesting that artificially limiting this progress is just keeping everyone a slave to money, and I'm all for a technological future where money itself dies because it no longer serves it's purpose (trade isn't needed if everyone can have everything).

(8th July 2021, 2:06 AM)Sacred Jellybean Wrote: I've never had dick weed flavored hummus but I'd give it a go. Is it cruelty free? I prefer substitute penis, for ethical reasons.