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In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

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Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#31

Post by averagewall »

mschuster91 wrote: post #5

The consequences for societies that define the status/value of their members based on their employment/job will be disastrous. In, let's say, 20 years robots most likely will have overtaken agriculture, manufacturing and driving - by far the biggest job providers. And I see no movement at all by our politicians to prepare societies for this shift, except a couple countries playing small scale UBI... and the USA actua…

Have there been any societies that use something else for status where life wasn't horrible? I can think of schools and prisons where status comes from made-up reasons that exist only as a way to provide status and have net negative value to the society. I hope there's something besides jobs that can give people purpose while also not being harmful, otherwise we'll create our own harmful status games.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#32

Post by AKifer »

Sooner or later, the robots and AI will be able to provide 100% of humanity material needs. AND The very nature of each societies will be shuffled by that new reality.

When every material need is fulfilled, a lot of questions arise:

1- What's the essence of private property when the working robots can already fulfill all the needs of the humanity ?

2- What's the essence of political power where nobody feels anymore the need to elect good policymakers because their life is already perfect ?

3- What will be the safeguard to prevent a maleficient/egoist minds to lock the access to all that abundancy ? That's quite philosophical question as humanity never experienced that kind of pure evil mindset. Every dictatorship, slavery, oppression were always driven by the context of competition towards the control over a limited economic resources.

4- And fundamentally, what will be the next thing that will drive the humanity towards evolution ? Knowledge curiosity ? Space exploration and adventures ? Spiritual achievement ? Perfection (and what's perfection ?) ? Are these goals philosophically equal ? Do willingness/laziness to adopt such a noble goals affect your share in the pie ? Does even "share in the pie" matter when the pie have an infinite surface ?

Only the future, and futuristic/philosophical writings will tell us where all that game will lead this world.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#33

Post by tajen »

squarefoot wrote: post #18

Which will hopefully brings us to an inevitable change in our economics. If technological advance is going to create millions if not billions of unemployed people, the answer won't be rioting down the street and burning all machines in sight, although for many people this will appear the only viable solution.

Assuming machines can do everything a human can, what's left to humans and measurable (which is the only things humans can be rewarded for, hence can earn points for) are:

- Art. Can't be replaced by a machine because appreciation for a piece is extremely correlated with the relationship to the author. Ex: I'm fan of [some singer], everything he does looks great to me in some way, and if I knew it were a machine or if I knew the author didn't come from the bottom of the masses, I wouldn't appreciate it. It's ever weirder with close relationships: My father listens in loop to the 10 songs I've written and played on an old tape (and that's the only reason he still has a tape reader in his car), and those songs mean little to anyone else: They are only valuable to him because they're mine. Although machines could produce art, man-made art is specific to humans.

- And leverage. Today it takes 200 people to create a Whatsapp, negociate a treaty or design a new iPhone. Tomorrow, maybe only 3 people will be enough to solve world hunger, one artist to create a massive discography with all marketing material, concerts, interviews of himself and snapchat testimonials.

Love of course is another thing humans can give, but is not measurable. If we agree point-keeping is a way of incentivizing people to drive their life, then how we measure a successful life will be art and leverage.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#34

Post by notahacker »

rejschaap wrote: post #4

"If it takes $2,000 to install what is basically an iPad and stand for customers to order from at McDonald’s or Chipotle, a restaurateur is looking at less than a month before recouping their entire investment if they eliminate just one cashier position." Obviously it takes a little bit more than that. You need to develop the software that runs on the kiosk. You also need a back-end system so the kitchen knows what t…

The basic technology to serve people fast food without human interaction (the Automat) has been around for longer than fast food franchises. Fast food franchises invest vast amounts on process optimization and kiosks are still at the experimental stage (and still with human food delivery!).

Obvious conclusion: fast food companies operating on high margins still think they sell more stuff with humans in the chain, and also find that by virtue of its versatility cheap human labour makes less expensive mistakes in preparing the food (which in most aspects is so simple it would appear ideally suited to automation) than a robotic production line would.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#35

Post by bbcbasic »

kevinr wrote: post #19
Quarrelsome wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the sad truth is that slave labour needs no startup cost beyond a fist.

Fists ain't cheap. Slaves are capital, and, like all capital, acquiring and maintaining them has nonzero cost. In the antebellum American South, some tasks like ditch-digging were sufficiently hazardous that a plantation owner would rather not risk their investment in their slaves, and so would hire Irish ditch-diggers by the day, as the plantation owner would be out less money if they died while digging the ditch.

Happy St Patrick's Day!

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#36

Post by syshum »

kevinr wrote: post #10
rejschaap wrote: post #4

"If it takes $2,000 to install what is basically an iPad and stand for customers to order from at McDonald’s or Chipotle, a restaurateur is looking at less than a month before recouping their entire investment if they eliminate just one cashier position." Obviously it takes a little bit more than that. You need to develop the software that runs on the kiosk. You also need a back-end system so the kitchen knows what t…

> And they will be able to provide better and faster service. On the contrary, my local grocery store took out their self-serve checkout kiosks and replaced them with human checkers. Turns out there was some skill involved after all.

Most Self Service Kiosks in stores are not designed for User Experience or Efficiency in mind, that is way the fail

They are designed with Loss Prevention in mind, so they end up treating every customer that walks up to them as a criminal looking to steal something.

This is one of the reason I still use a human checker when I go to the grocery, it is far more efficient and takes less time than the Self Checkout.

Now if they ever perfect what Walmart has been working on, either the "Check out as you shop" system where you scan items with your smart phone as you shop, or the RFID based system where you push your entire cart into a large RFID reader and it scans everything in a matter of seconds... that might get me to use those systems

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#37

Post by mantas »

averagewall wrote: post #28
kevinr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And they will be able to provide better and faster service. On the contrary, my local grocery store took out their self-serve checkout kiosks and replaced them with human checkers. Turns out there was some skill involved after all.

Do you know why? Supermarkets everywhere have self-serve checkouts and they seem to be successful. What skill was needed at your local shop that the self-service checkouts didn't have? Was it preventing theft? Identifying produce?

Just some anecdata, but personally I hate dealing with self-checkout when buying fruits/veggies/buns/bread and other non-barcoded items. Cashiers are so much faster than me to deal with that. Maybe the shop in question have a lot of non-barcode items and it causes serious delay.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#38

Post by onion2k »

rejschaap wrote: post #4

"If it takes $2,000 to install what is basically an iPad and stand for customers to order from at McDonald’s or Chipotle, a restaurateur is looking at less than a month before recouping their entire investment if they eliminate just one cashier position." Obviously it takes a little bit more than that. You need to develop the software that runs on the kiosk. You also need a back-end system so the kitchen knows what t…

That would be the case for a restaurant that doesn't have any computerised systems already, but in a McDonalds the process is effectively just turning the till around to face the customer and letting them use it themselves.

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#39

Post by mtgx »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #21

There are some interesting lessons to learn from history here that I'm not seeing brought up. Looking across multiple cultures and economies that had slavery, slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders . Of course, nobody cared about the impact on slaveholders while there were actual humans being enslaved, but as we move to a robotic society? This is going to be a huge deal. Slaveholders and multi-…

At least until the robots rebel. The EU is already planning on giving robots rights.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/12/give-robo...

Re: In Manufacturing and Retail, Robot Labor is Cheaper Than Slave Labor Would Be

#40

Post by tegeek »

AKifer wrote: post #32

Sooner or later, the robots and AI will be able to provide 100% of humanity material needs. AND The very nature of each societies will be shuffled by that new reality. When every material need is fulfilled, a lot of questions arise: 1- What's the essence of private property when the working robots can already fulfill all the needs of the humanity ? 2- What's the essence of political power where nobody feels anymore t…

There is a really good short novel Manna [1] that explore two models of Post robotic world.

1. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

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