Posted on 02/03/2014 2:15:40 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Ten years ago it might have seemed far-fetched that a customer could order food in a restaurant without speaking to anyone. But it's a reality now as service employers across the country—including Chili's, Chevys Fresh Mex and California Pizza Kitchen—introduce tabletop ordering devices. A few clicks on an iPad-like device and the food is on its way.
Technology has made these changes possible, but that's not what's driving their implementation. Steady federal and state increases to the minimum wage have forced employers in retail and service industries to rely on technology as the government makes entry-level labor more expensive. Now Democrats are pushing to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 from $7.25 at the behest of President Obama, who argued in his State of the Union address that the increase would "help families." Lawmakers should consider the technology trend a warning.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates made the connection in a recent interview on MSNBC. Asked if he supported a higher minimum wage, Mr. Gates urged caution and said the policy would create an incentive for employers to "buy machines and automate things."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Part of the evil dynamic of Rats proposing an increase in the minimum wage is that they get to claim that they are trying to help the working poor, thus securing their vote; while actually forcing more of them on unemployment and greater dependency on government programs and locking in their votes even more.
But the displaced humans will vote Democrat almost immediately. Unintended consequences all around.
They exist:
http://www.businessinsider.com/burger-robot-could-revolutionize-fast-food-industry-2012-11
They’re just too expensive right now to be cost effective. If FF salaries rise too high though that’ll change.
Not yet, anyway. Democrats will be calling for Comprehensive Robot Reform and the GOP will nod in agreement.
How much to tip? Just leave a can of 3-n-1 oil and a couple double A batteries.
Just about everyone here uses office devices, tools, labor saving devices, or even chemicals and products that eliminate secretaries, assistants, helpers, reduces dependency on tradesmen, maids, cooks, stable help.........
But in this case it is not quite the same, as others have pointed out, there could be attempts to have robots, connected through human supervisors, replace humans in all blue collar working jobs, in management and business positions, in teaching jobs, construction, nursing, salesmanship,engineering and that is just in the near future. Which again, could mean we now have many tens of millions of Americans who have spent their lives learning specific trades that are obsolete and therefore have become wholly unemployable.
Which in this case is not something to celebrate. I just don’t see how rapidly growing technology combined with a gov’t that cannot manage a functioning economy at all is a good thing. If we could get our economy back to, say, the level of the Reagan years it would be different, but we will most likely be building whole nations on Mars and perfecting time travel to the future and past and reanimating the dead before that happens.
But back then, people were much more capable of building a functioning economy that America is today. Therefore, any jobs being replaced by machines cannot really be considered a good thing.
Not good nor bad...it is what it is.
Last I knew the new set of software keys each year ran $12,000 per single station. The cost of upgrading a ten axis Kinetix servo control cabinet with RS Logix 5000 runs about $300,000. That's without someone to write, debug, and test the logic. Tie it into a network for the sake of production data collection and remote servicing using General Electric's "Proficy", and add another $200,000. All that is without the actual machine you are controlling. That's just to automate it.
Then you add the three electrical support people to keep it all current with engineering and marketing's seemingly insignifigant, but huge change demands, and there is another $325,000 per year. Then the spares to keep on hand for when a thunderstorm or power surge hits, and that ties up another $300,000. Then hire three mechanics to change out motors, bearings, shafts, and gearboxes, and there goes another $200,000 per year.
To which all the slaves said, “Amen”.
People don't build an economy, though they sure can muck it up.
An economy is just the collective business, farming, trading, hunting activity of a people, a community, a region, a nation, a world.
Invisible hand and all that.
This could also lead to way more people on a sort of permanent welfare and unemployment, since if robots actually can effectively replace the jobs of tens of millions of Americans, rendering them effectively unemployable, it will lead to welfare programs being vastly expanded too. It would be great to eliminate these programs entirely, however we as a society are not even close to being prepared to let these huge swaths of Americans not have anything to eat or go without shelter of any kind due to the fact that robots are rendering them unemployable. And so the economy will ultimately get much further burdened than it already is.
Well yes, but with robots doing all that business, farming, trading and hunting for us, humans will have nothing to do other than ruin economies. Add to that the fact that, as I noted above, given the current state of affairs, robots replacing humans entirely will necessarily lead to massive increases in welfare programs and unemployment aid could in tons of cases become permanent.
It’s not the big changes that seem to upset people. It’s the incremental, “evolution, not revolution” things that seem to confuse them. Something that is familiar, yet slightly changed seems weird to some. Self service checkouts in grocery stores were like that for me. now that i’ve gotten used to them I love them, they’re a lot faster, especially when you have a few items.
CC
Are you going to like it when technology combined with our nation’s current inability to produce a functioning economy leads to the majority of Americans not working at all and being on welfare of some sort?
I hate “Chili’s” but, was in San Diego last year with no alternative to my hunger.
Gotta say I luv’d their automated table service.
I plugged in my request and was met by a server maybe 10 minutes later with my food.
Still sucked but, they had salsa and I can hide anything under fire.
I think restaurants would be well served, as would the customer, by automating ordering.
They could even automate frying burgers and fries.
Seems lame anymore to pay someone that a large manufacturer like Swanson Meals has automated.
Scale it Down to McD’s and their competition.
Will you still have that enthusiasm for automated solutions to everything once your own job also becomes completely obsolete thanks to automated gadgets?
That's not the way technological advancement works. We may all have to change jobs but computer driven machines will simply provide humans will a different array of things they might accomplish...not replace them.
Think of the way in the industrial revolution created millions of jobs. They weren't always attractive jobs but they paid more than farming at the time.
This was the beginning of the creation of the middle class.
Nowadays our jobs are cleaner and more analytical and creative. They can still be stifling, but they are a step forward.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.