Even if something like food service at McDonald's is automated, it's tough to argue that we should be getting humans to work on things that can be automated.
Imagine working 40 hours a week then seeing that the machine both prepared more product and made fewer mistakes than you, or feeling like you're doing work just because someone (the government) pities you enough to force some jobs to remain non-automated.
Working with more complex, higher-skilled work that makes you feel like you're improving the lives of others is what our brains crave, not repeating menial tasks over and over again.
If a job is so simple, repetitive and brainless that it can be automated, it's in humanity's best interest that it gets automated, and people are freed to do something more useful. Yes, this will suck if you're 50 years old and get laid off the assembly line, but we've been automating jobs out of existence for a few centuries now and the overall consequences have not been particularly terrifying.
Any human worker will increase the cost of labor compared to automation. Even at slave wages, automation wins every single time. Employers are, and long have been, 100% incentivized to automate the instant it becomes technologically feasible.
I agree that automation should be (and many times do) helping people perform their jobs (and daily tasks). However, those who are 'in charge' financially are actively seeking ways to replace humans in a blind race for maximizing short term results.
In a 'healthy' society, automation should be employed to make humans work less hours and with less risks. Somehow many people think this statement is absurd.
I think we'll be better off as a society if we spend time and resources into automating the jobs that are currently done by humans in dangerous and hazardous situations, rather than automating the job of coffee or pizza making just because "As we see the rising costs of labor, it just makes sense" which employ a large number of unskilled/semi-skilled labor.
In an economy where work is increasingly automated, those humans who can do things which machines can't are finding themselves more valued. That seems expected, and I am not convinced it is indicative of any problem or unfairness.
And there are some people who can't cope with the structure of a job. both need to be dealt with - there are always structured jobs that can be done, volunteering at a museum for example.
Doesn't change the fact that if we can automate a job, espeicially if we can improve things at the same time, that's good.
We used to spend 90% of our energy growing enough food for our family to eat. This is far less now, and that allows us to devote more time to other pursuits. That's a good thing for mankind, as is automating any job.
If you don't think replacing people with robots is good, I assume you're against things like ansible, or kickstart, or computers in general.
a huge amount of work today is done by people instead of machines because people are cheaper than machines. If you make people more expensive than machines, the machines will do the work, and the people can stick to doing something they actually want to do (like playing with their kids, working on a hobby, or exploring the world)
Look at the response to a higher minimum wage - McDonalds, which typically runs a store with 8 to 10 people at $7/hour discovered that most of those jobs could be automated (with better results) for the capital expenditure equivalent of less than $15/hour. So now there are McDonalds stores that run with 2 people instead of 10. People still get their hamburgers, but now orders are taken by a computer screen, hamburgers are assembled by a machine instead of a person, etc.
Lawnmowers, street sweepers, taxi cabs, factory lines, farms can all be nearly fully automated these days, but it's cheaper to put a person there right now.
Good. In theory everyone should be better off if we automate shitty jobs away, the only reason that isn't always so is because we've constructed our society to concentrate the results of this increased efficiency rather than distribute it.
The reason we have people working fast-food jobs is that they need the money and it's still cheaper than full automation
Right, that would be part of what I view as a larger problem with society (at least in the US) at the moment. People should no longer have to generate money for food and roofs, or if they do, they should not have to resort to doing repetitive, boring, brainless work all the time.
Unfortunately, there is no simple solution to this, and most feasible solutions require an overhaul of most of our economic structures, not to mention the education system, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Edit: I somehow missed the "still cheaper than full automation" part. I can see that - but certainly having one or two humans at the resturant, with almost full automation would be cheaper?
Automate that work as much as possible and richly reward those who pursue it.
One of the oddities of modern work is that the lowest paid jobs are mostly those nobody wants to do.
Sure, we're not at replicator level, but farming of many crops require far fewer people than many imagine.
Personally I find that many things that could be automated are not yet automated because humans are cheaper. Think cashier, waiter/waitress, and so on.
In white collar work land, an amazing number of jobs could be automated, but are not yet because it's cheaper to use humans. These are the people who essentially just move numbers from one computer to another with a small amount of work in between.
Automation is a good thing. It leads to higher productivity and people can do other things instead. If a job cannot pay a living wage and doesn’t offer a decent work environment it shouldn’t.
If a job doesn't need doing, why waste a human's labor on it?
Though that said, I remember not too long ago a lot of people saying "oh if minimum wage goes over $15 we'll just automate the jobs" and now the McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen.
Indeed. It should be the goal of society to automate away as much work as possible. If there are perverse incentives working against this then we should correct them.
Everyone should welcome automation and reduced working hours, but our system prioritizes underpaid labor so much, that automation is often significantly more expensive. Low labor wages and poor safety nets hinders progress on automation, and it's wheeled out as a threat and bogeyman to scare the poors back into line.
Let the robots come in and do this labor, but that doesn't excuse society's responsibility to take care of its humans.
Then those tasks absolutely need to be automated. If you can't even pay living wages in a poorer country then this isn't a task that humans should perform.
Imagine working 40 hours a week then seeing that the machine both prepared more product and made fewer mistakes than you, or feeling like you're doing work just because someone (the government) pities you enough to force some jobs to remain non-automated.
Working with more complex, higher-skilled work that makes you feel like you're improving the lives of others is what our brains crave, not repeating menial tasks over and over again.
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