"Repliee Q2 can mimic such human functions as blinking, breathing and speaking, with the ability to recognize and process speech and touch, and then respond in kind.:
Would you like fries with that?
Posted on 12/06/2013 8:54:25 AM PST by SeekAndFind
After you heard President Obama’s call for a hike in the minimum wage, you probably wondered the same thing I did: Was Obama sent from the future by Skynet to prepare humanity for its ultimate dominion by robots?
But just in case the question didn’t occur to you, let me explain. On Tuesday, the day before Obama called for an increase in the minimum wage, the restaurant chain Applebee’s announced that it will install iPad-like tablets at every table. Chili’s already made this move earlier this year.
With these consoles customers will be able to order their meals and pay their checks without dealing with a waiter or waitress. Both companies insist that they won’t be changing their staffing levels, but if you’ve read any science fiction, you know that’s what the masterminds of every robot takeover say: “We’re here to help. We’re not a threat.”
But the fact is, the tablets are a threat. In 2011, Annie Lowrey wrote about the burgeoning tablet-as-waiter business. She focused on a startup firm called E La Carte, which makes a table tablet called Presto. “Each console goes for $100 per month. If a restaurant serves meals eight hours a day, seven days a week, it works out to 42 cents per hour per table — making the Presto cheaper than even the very cheapest waiter. Moreover, no manager needs to train it, replace it if it quits, or offer it sick days. And it doesn’t forget to take off the cheese, walk off for 20 minutes, or accidentally offend with small talk, either.”
Applebee’s is using the Presto. Are we really supposed to believe that the chain will keep thousands of redundant human staffers on the payroll forever?
People don’t go into business to create jobs; they go into business to make money. Labor is a cost. The more expensive labor is, the more attractive nonhuman replacements for labor become. The minimum wage makes labor more expensive. Obama knows this, which is why he so often demonizes ATM machines as job-killers.
Just a few days before Obama’s big speech on income inequality, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos launched a media frenzy by revealing on 60 Minutes that he’s working on the idea of having a fleet of robot drones deliver products straight to your door. I can only imagine the discomfort this caused for any UPS or FedEx delivery guys watching the show. There are still a lot of bugs to be worked out, but does anyone doubt that this is coming?
You might take solace in the fact that there will still be a need for truck drivers to deliver the really big stuff and to supply the warehouses where the drones come and go like worker bees. The only hitch is that technology for driverless cars is already here, it just hasn’t been deployed — yet.
None of this is necessarily bad. Machines make us a more productive society, and a more productive society is a richer society. They also free us up for more rewarding work. As Wired’s Kevin Kelly notes, “Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines.”
While some hippies and agrarian poets may disagree, most people wouldn’t say we’d be better off if seven out of ten people still did backbreaking labor on farms.
That doesn’t mean the transition to a society fueled by robot slaves won’t be painful. The Luddites destroyed cotton mills for a reason. Figuring out ways to get the young and the poor into the job market really is a vital political, economic, and moral challenge. My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, James Pethokoukis, argues that one partial solution might have to be wage subsidies that defray the costs of labor, tipping the calculus in favor of humans at least for a while.
“Of course,” Pethokoukis notes, “wage subsidies are an on-budget, transparent cost — which politicians hate — while the costs of the minimum wage are shifted onto business and hidden. But the costs exist just the same.”
The robot future is coming no matter what, and it will require some truly creative responses by policymakers. I don’t know what those are, but I’m pretty sure antiquated ideas that were bad policy 100 years ago aren’t going to be of much use. Maybe the answers will come when artificial intelligence finally comes online and we can replace the policymakers with machines, too.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. Y
We'll have those, too, though we'll also have engineers and technicians to fix them when the meta-robots can't.
But this is raising a serious question: how will we organize society when every job that can be reliably done by a person of average or below average intelligence can be done at lower cost by a robot? Yes, even picking fruit. For that matter how will we organize society when the use of robots reduces the number of such jobs significantly below the supply of people who aren't suited for other jobs requiring more intelligence? We American conservatives (and our brethren the classical liberals world wide) had better figure out an answer that preserves liberty and individual responsibility, because if we don't the answer the left and the professional managerial class will give us will look like the worst aspects of 1984 and Brave New World rolled into one (maybe with a dash of The Hunger Games thrown in for bad measure).
That question was the real point of The Bell Curve which got lost in the left tarring the book as racist.
Well ... without Agenda 21 ... the net result of the majority of people in the world unable to earn income - is basically “death” (under our present economic system).
"Repliee Q2 can mimic such human functions as blinking, breathing and speaking, with the ability to recognize and process speech and touch, and then respond in kind.:
Would you like fries with that?
When I was a kid, my grandfather took me to a restaurant where your order was delivered by a toy train.
Yeah, it's pretty low tech, but it does eliminate the server.
At that point the political battles will shift and it will be those who wish to have a government run by the incorruptible machines versus those who want the machines suppressed to maintain the current corruption/graft system.
Liberalism/socialism will not stand a chance against the irrefutable logic of an AI capable of becoming millions of times smarter than a human so watch for them to be the leaders among the tech suppressors. Their illogical laws and regulations designed to make everyone a potential criminal will need to be stricken and a more sensible system will be required with no room left for pie in the sky ideology. Congress will be made up of coders working to replace our laws with versions that we can all live with under an AI that cannot be tricked or hidden from.
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Agreed. Many, if not most of the problems in this country today are a result of government interference and control.
Those unable to earn an income can at least grow food if they’re rural. Agenda 21 plans to eliminate that subsistence as well.
We supplement our income with a huge garden. We would be unable to do that in an urban environment. We would be forced to eat whatever the elites wanted us to eat.
Beware that road.
How much would the average customer be willing to tip for the mere delivery of food? My guess... not much.
We’ll still need BLADERUNNERS.
Bell Curve bump.
Remembered when it came out, and assumed it was a racism-apologist book, as it was presented by the media.
Recently bought it at a garage sale, and was surprised to find out it was nothing of the kind. The authors address the issues you mention. Every single one of the trends they identified 20 years ago have continued and accelerated.
Yet we are still not having a public discussion of how to address the issues they defined.
What the elites are doing is this. Preparing for a day when YOU and YOUR offspring are no longer necessary to the pursuit of their lives and goals.
The numerical ‘goal’ of 100M worldwide as a desirable population number hasn’t been thrown out there for effect. They really do mean that.
They already support unlimited infanticide and euthanasia. They’re just working up to the real goal. Elimination of most of US. Robotics helps them achieve that goal as painlessly (for them!) as possible.
Eliminating the excess regulations will do nothing to change that goal or the eventual achievement of that goal.
Back in the ‘70s a friend and I made a stopover in Stephenville, Newfoundland. We went to a relatively nice restaurant and when the waiter came over to see if we were ready to order, he gave us a blank form to fill out. We asked why the customer was supposed to fill it out and he just said “it’s traditional here.”
Apparently the chef was able to read our scribbling and the order came out fine. Then we had to total it. LOL.
and under the inevitable single-payer healthcare system that’s sure to come, each seat & booth will have scales/BMI readers.
“Sorry, Mr. Wilson, but you are forbidden from having the double-cheeseburger...perhaps you’d like a salad?”
I think that many people laugh that off, but they could not be more wrong.
Nature always selects the strongest to survive and reproduce. Only humans think intelligence uber alles. There are fertility, immune and other health traits (20/20 vision, good teeth, longevity, cancer risk) that will be dumped if the push for only intelligent peoples having children is put into place. Many uber intelligent people have other striking faults that should be reproductive end games. But, thanks to technology are not.
Fertility problems, for example, were widespread and extreme in my chosen field (STEM) Particularly with the women. And no, not all of us waited until we were 40 to have a kid. It was something conspicuous enough to have been a frequent topic of conversation. Of my friend group of 4 or 5 women, 2 were told they had the eggs of a 45yr old when they were 28-30. Even if they had begun having children at 16 or 18, their total number of children would have been significantly less than an ‘average’ woman who can usually bear children until their early 40’s.
Intelligence may be less genetic than epigenetic. Supplementation with micronutrients (iodine, choline, inositol, omega 3, others) during preconception and pregnancy can have a profound impact on the intelligence of the child. Many of the problems with continental Africa, for example, stem from chronic malnutrition in these and other (b complex vitamins) that stem from subsistence farming. Chicken, egg, chicken, egg.
Social darwinism is a human aspiration. Natural selection is a much more complex thing.
Yep, there was no tipping at Kings. LOL
Well, not much anyway.
There’s really nothing to stop a Soros or a Gates (both absolutely OBSESSED with population control of everyone BUT their own germlines) from buying an army of robots in 10 or 15 years and just turning them loose.
You’d never know who did it. Imagine the gunshot detection technology in use in the cities right now being used to triangulate in on a baby’s cry.
What robotics will do is let the psychopaths have complete run of all their little fantasies. What might be difficult to convince 100 people to do will be completely doable when you need only program the robots.
I’m not sure what your point is. From a Darwinian perspective, the “strongest” is the organism that reproduces itself. Nothing else.
In modern societies there is a very obvious inverse relationship between intelligence/success and reproduction.
Which of course means the “most fit” are the less intelligent and successful. For the logical conclusion of this trend, see the move Ideocracy.
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