The Robots Are Coming, And They Are Replacing Warehouse Workers And Fast Food Employees

TEC ^ | 05/24/2014 | Michael Snyder

[Dark Knight]

What will be a “marketable” skill in the future? 92% of fast food jobs is an interesting prediction, but WORTHLESS without a time frame. Doing the market analysis is a capital/labor decision, with price, demand and supply as the factors.

What NO ONE wants to deal with is we live in interesting times. If workers can be replaced by robots, then there are downward market pressures on their market skills. I may like the interaction between myself and the grocery checker, but how much extra will I pay for that? I may like having Johnny Cab to talk to, but will I hire someone’s car out to help them outset the cost through my Tablet app?

Are we seeing the end of capitalism as the source of how we allocate goods and services? If very few have marketable skills, and the robots services are really cheap, how will the allocation of goods and services happen? Communism? Slave economy? Some new and unimaginable?

Google car is the better example. When no one is driving a car, and that drops off as a marketable skill what percentage of the population will lose their source of living...livelihood? When no one would think of using a human surgeon...

The economics is where the real decisions will be make. Whether our current kleptocracy likes it or not, those decisions will be made by the market.

DK

[cripplecreek]

What better definition of a robot is there?

Perfect description. Once a robot makes a mistake it keeps making that same mistake until someone comes along and corrects it.

[Carry_Okie]

With their wonderful educations, maybe they can be "sex workers."

Gives a whole new meaning to the term, "entry level job."

[gingerbread]

Now, that is funny. We have a group of uneducated, refused to be educated, demanding that businesses should pay them more money that what they are worth, and businesses are just saying: “NOPE, WE’LL JUST HIRE OURSEVES SOME ROBOTS, TO DO THE JOB FOR NOTHING”. Just think about it. No head aches, trying to mollify all these ignorant people. No more outside signs saying “EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK”. Or “WE WANT $25/HR. FOR DOING NOTHING”.

[reformedliberal]

So what in the world are we going to do when robots start taking millions upon millions more of our jobs?

Eliminate the minimum wage.
_____________________

More likely they will institute a Guaranteed Income subsidy, a Guaranteed Housing subsidy and a Guaranteed Nutritional subsidy for everyone.

The technologically adept will not be safe as newer models of robots will self-diagnose and self-repair or just turn themselves in to the factory for upgrades performed by other robots. One engineer will be able to entirely oversee a large operation, with help from robotic techs.

AIs could eventually take over the creative programming and perhaps even the political and legal fields. Who knows? One day all our music, drama and literature could be composed by artificial intelligences and the performing arts will utilize digital performers.

The paradigm will change. That’s been the truth forever. This may be the impetus for Pelosi’s remarks about how everyone can now become an artist or a poet or whatever. She likely is already looking at machines to replace the illegals working in her families’ businesses.

I have spent a few minutes trying to think of present endeavors/jobs that cannot be done by a sufficiently intelligent and dexterous robot. Not only can’t I think of one, I can see leased personal helpers available to everyone for the same cost as we pay for communication and entertainment today. I can even see how this could be incorporated into whatever Guaranteed Subsidy program eventually emerges.

Boredom will be the scourge of this sort of future.

[Texicanus]

“When you replace a human worker with a robot, you solve a whole bunch of problems.”

And you create a whole new set of problems that must be dealt with.

“Robots never take a day off, they never get tired, they never get sick, they never complain, they never show up late”

But when they do somebody has to fix or replace them.

If I were a young man, I believe I would be looking at new opportunities in the field of robotics and getting an education or experience with such.

But then again, don’t we need more neighbourhood activists, not scientists and engineers :}).

Crazy question just crossed my mind, will my robotic bodyguard have to have a gun permit and be licensed to kill?

[ClearCase_guy]

From wikipedia:

The word robota means literally "corvée", "serf labor", and figuratively "drudgery" or "hard work" in Czech and also (more general) "work", "labor" in many Slavic languages (e.g.: Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Polish, Macedonian, Ukrainian, archaic Czech). Traditionally the robota was the work period a serf (corvée) had to give for his lord, typically 6 months of the year. The origin of the word is the Old Church Slavonic (Old Bulgarian) rabota "servitude" ("work" in contemporary Bulgarian and Russian), which in turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *orbh-. Robot is cognate with the German root Arbeit (work).

The mechanical devices that perform work are slaves and they will help the Political Elite re-institute a feudal system in which most humans are serfs.

[Nowhere Man]

For conservatives the challenge will be to find a way to maintain opportunity in an increasingly complex and technologically challenging world for our aging population and for our broader society with an utterly failed educational system. Wealth will be created by machines and distributed according to capital and technical know-how, leaving millions adrift. If we do not want the government to take over the distribution of those profits, we better come up with some creative solutions that preserve freedom, give the technologically challenged a stake in the political system without making them dependent, yet leaving undisturbed incentives for the creative to do their thing.

Good points where we might be headed to some sort of system/to where ideology will not matter. We know the left has poor answers so far on this one but I really don't find our side capable of addressing this one either.

I think first we need to limit immigration to near zero with an exception for spouses and asylum seekers. Close the borders down for 5 or 10 years, longer maybe.

After that, out of pragmatism, being a realist, we might have to consider things that are generally against what some of us believe. If robots take more jobs, we will at some point have to consider a living guaranteed wage enough for a basic house/apartment, car, living, medical and so on. Still as grandma says, "idle hands are the Devil's workshop." So maybe another idea it to limit robot use by law to where they are restricted to jobs too hazardous for people ala "Battlestar Galactica" (the 1978 novel). In short, if a human could do it, then the robot is outlawed. Although not by law, but more due to population pressure, India prefers to use men with shovels to dig ditches than machinery when they can.

Well, there is always this option, "sabotage," where in 1803, FRench weavers threw their shoes (sabot) into the mechanical looms of the day thus making a name for themselves and becoming the origin for the word.

Come to think of it, the Romans had excellent opportunities to advance things towards some sort of mechanized industrial revolution but did not, human labor was abundant and there were lots of people, for that era, around. There was no need to. What really got the industrial revolution was the lack of human labor from the wars and Black Death in the 1300 to 1600's although it took some time to kick off.

We are headed to uncharted waters and not ready as a society. Civilizations, in my theory (I believe we might have had one or two technical civilizations on this planet before ours), when they reach a certain point, there is a race between technology and the morals to use it as well as to get into space before at some point there is a trigger where it gets knocked back. Think of the Tower of Babel or the story of Atlantis. This will add just one more lynch pin that can be pulled where the whole thing comes down.

If God would come down and give me a button to stop this as well as bring down the internet and cellphones, thus returning us to what we had in the 1970's and 1980's, I would most likely press it to give society and morals more time to catch up.

[staytrue]

You forgot travel agents and telephone operators.

[cripplecreek]

From Wikipedia

The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested against newly developed labour-saving machinery from 1811 to 1817. The stocking frames, spinning frames and power looms introduced during the Industrial Revolution threatened to replace the artisans with less-skilled, low-wage labourers, leaving them without work.

The good old days when we churned our own butter and spun our own wool.

[staytrue]

“Instead, you get people sniveling that the employers have the upper hand on employees because they employee can be replaced by a robot.”

The employer never has the upper hand unless he is granted a government sanctioned monopoly.

The day the employer gets lazy or fails to innovate and keep up, that is the day the business is headed for bankruptcy.

[Wiser now]

We will always need programmers and health care services. Robots replacing everything is a long way off.

[Nowhere Man]

I think we are on the same frequency. I would not like this world at all yet we are headed to it. Maybe the Amish do have some points. B-P

[Carry_Okie]

I have proposed one set of jobs that will not be easily automated, a new industry that could put millions to productive work: wildland restoration. I own a patent on the business method, as intended to eliminate completely the need for government regulatory agencies that are too often both corrupt and incompetent.

Habitat restoration is not a skill set easily adaptable to robots. On my property, I weed 124 plant species. I must recognize most of them in their juvenile states under vastly different settings, tangled in other plants, and lighting conditions. Extraction often involves considerable dexterity, particularly when speed is at issue. The terrain is rugged and dirty, involving remote locations far from a battery charger.

Having been doing this kind of work for 25 years, I know badly habitat restoration is needed. Our forests for the most part are overstocked and impacted with weeds. Fuels have become a hazard. Our reservoirs are filling with sediment unnecessarily. Our fisheries are degraded. Our soils are in need of rehabilitation (which is a very demanding skill set). Stream channels are incised and water infiltration and retention seriously degraded, to the point of spreading desertification across much of the West. Flooding is an increasing problem. The general productivity of the system, whether for forage or cropping, is in huge areas less than half what it once was. These are serious problems involving engineering, biochemistry, hydrology, animal and veterinary sciences, entomology, machine design, chemistry... there is so much research and development to be done that it boggles the mind, and the implementation involves every skill level and manual ability.

What we need is to get the government out of land management, for which I have developed the legal bases.

I have been an engineer in highly automated electronic manufacturing involving pick and place operations, machine vision, and locomotion. Believe me, this kind of work will not be automatable any time soon and the data collection, management, and information systems needed will dwarf anything we have now. In fact, what is needed is an enormous amount of design and manufacturing work to build the infrastructure of a mobile and low-impact semi-nomadic cohort that could operate on a self-sustaining basis for long periods. I cannot over-emphasize the impact such a "society" would have on liberty, as it is the antidote to the extreme hazards to the entire nation presented by the Agenda 21 Sustained Development racket. The left is putting a gun to the heads of urban civilization and setting them up for extermination, all to save a "Nature" about which they have deep misunderstandings.

For the most part, the "thinkers" of this world have no clue of the opportunities what I just wrote present, and are unlikely to have the tools with which to perceive them. I have researched the origins of that mentality, but even if people understood its serious misconceptions, that habit of perception is so entrenched that without serious reeducation, they will have no idea what I mean, much less the capability to envision.

[usconservative]

If God would come down and give me a button to stop this as well as bring down the internet and cellphones, thus returning us to what we had in the 1970's and 1980's, I would most likely press it to give society and morals more time to catch up.

An interesting and thought provoking comment. Not sure I'd agree with going back to the 70's and 80's (the sexual revolution followed by the rise of feminism) but agree that we as human's need time to catch-up to where the technology is taking us.

[cripplecreek]

Robots certainly aren’t replacing as many people as illegals are.

[bgill]

Good. Maybe robots will get the orders correct and not demand a living wage for entry level work.

[TexasGunLover]

EXACTLY. When labor is too expensive, businesses will find another way, as they should.

[logi_cal869]

Not a given. All you mention are on my table as ‘hobbies’, a better career having been chosen by me.

Backup is good kung fu...

The irony of the article is they already have vending machines making pizzas.

http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3159855/posts

Of course burgers are just around the corner. Fast food will soon resemble a cross between a self-checkout lane and Star Trek ‘food synth’ delivery...

All the lefists did by foisting the ‘livable minimum wage’ BS argument on us was accelerate this move.

[MinorityRepublican]

I agree. One source of employment for millions of Americans would be highway construction and repair. Limit automation there.