Brexit Britain Could Replace Migrants with Robots

I agree that things won't change enough in service jobs to matter by 2019. But as to this:

> The tech necessary to replace front line service workers is not there. If it was we'd all be buying one ... what happens when ... some customer needs help in unexpected ways

History does tell us that sometimes the market will throw away jobs that are becoming inconvenient to society, even if that means doing without the services that class of worker provides, or receiving worse and less convenient services.

Consider household servants.

They used to be seen as necessary for middle and upper-class households, because professional households required staggering amounts of manual labor just to keep everyone fed and clothed.

Those jobs vanished, right around the time that clothes and dish-washing machines were invented. But it's interesting to look at why.

Clothes and dish-washing machines are, frankly, not as great as servants (my feeling 'icky' about having someone else wash my clothes aside). You have to do the work yourself, and accept more cognitive load. But they win on cost -- the costs of employing a servant went up, and eventually worse service was worth it for a simpler and cheaper self-serve solution.

Could something similar happen in service work?

Well, look at the Amazon store, and compare it to a current grocery store.

Now imagine a Starbucks with touchscreen-and-voice enabled ordering, no visible employees (maybe one employee, nominally a store manager, working the fleet of coffee machines behind the screens, and doing some light sweeping in the restaurant, etc) and a communal co-working space that more or less preserves the current experience, just minus the baristas.

One of the key points in some AI/robotics piece that I read recently was that expecting robots to navigate in and interact with humans in a world designed by humans for other humans can be a very difficult problem.

Driving is a case in point. Essentially everything about the current road system, signals, etc. are built around normal human levels of visual acuity, reflexes, and ability to reason about a typical traffic environment. Especially in places like cities, that's a very tall order for an AI. (But, unlike a factory, you can't just assume away the people who live and work there. i.e. the whole reason for the city's existence in the first place.)

> When it starts affecting people who vote, they'll start to push back

i'm not sure it works this way...

Part of the justification for current anti-immigrant sentiment, and Brexit, boils down to "they took our jobs!"

More accurately: Immigrants did jobs that citizens were unwilling to do for market rates. The market hasn't changed. Low-cost labor is still required, and robots will fill those roles.

If anything, I'd be worried about a net reduction in jobs as a result of removing immigrants... smaller businesses that lack the capital for automated labor may themselves priced out of business trying to employee citizens.

At this point good creative work is probably the closest thing to automation immunity, as well as patient-facing healthcare (ie nurses)... for the rest of us education and experience is the only job security we have.

Or extra BIG ASS FRIES... (Carl's Jr from Idiocracy)

ObOnTopic: Cashiers are doing a very automatable job.. Like, it's done already to good effect. And if you do like our Krogers does at night, you dont have a choice to not use automation.

The harder thing is mechanics and QC for food production. But with cheaper motors and actuators, makes more complicated food automation cheaper, easier, and higher quality than human workers. And robots don't complain, or whine about bad working conditions... And they show up to work without fail.