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A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

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161–170 of 234 posts

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#161
Robots making food will lower the cost of food, giving more people access to better nutrition. This will also free up labor and capital to do other things.

Machines helped make farming more productive so humans no longer have to live on farms, and dedicate their lives to the next meal on their table. If we were worried about jobs back then, we would've outlawed tractors and other machines. If we really want to create jobs, we would go back to manual labor to make produce our food.

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to wait in line for 3 minutes while some old guy tries to figure out Please rewrite, this is borderline discriminatory and quite offensive. Some "old guys" can be as capable to handle such UI as some "young guys". Disclaimer: half-old guy. [EDIT] thanks for replacing "old guy" with "technophobe".

Not sure why you are being downvoted. Perhaps because ageism is still a borderline ok form of discrimination?

It could have been that parent graciously took my suggestion and replaced "old guy" with "technophobe" in his/her comment, while mine stayed, implicitly making my comment a rather incorrect interpretation and triggering down votes from others. Downvotes are a small price to pay for clarity :-)

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#163

Robots making food will lower the cost of food, giving more people access to better nutrition. This will also free up labor and capital to do other things. Machines helped make farming more productive so humans no longer have to live on farms, and dedicate their lives to the next meal on their table. If we were worried about jobs back then, we would've outlawed tractors and other machines. If we really want to create…

> This will also free up labor and capital to do other things.

Yes we definitely need more people on disability watching Maury

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#165
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mattered to whom? People always matter at least to themselves.

> Mattered to whom? To those that run society and determine policy. > People always matter at least to themselves. Which is neither here nor there as to whether anyone will lend them a helping hand or let them perish e.g. in slums and poverty. Though even at that one would be surprised. People left without a job/role in society often don't matter even to themselves -- low self esteem, turning to drugs, alcohol, etc.

>People left without a job/role in society often don't matter even to themselves -- low self esteem, turning to drugs, alcohol, etc.

I see this argument all the time here, but no one accounts for the fact that we live in a society in which people's worth is largely determined by their ability to secure financial stability. Who's to say that people without jobs, allowed to live without societal derision in a (best case) post work future would be inevitably reduced in spirit?

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#166

We should stop worrying whether AI will cost jobs, but instead think about who reaps the benefits of thousands of years of technological progress, and how those benefits can be distributed more fairly.

Exactly. Comments about"costing jobs" always miss the point, partially or wholly. _Jobs are a cost._ They are what it takes to create _wealth_. At issue is how to best create and distribute wealth.

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#167

Robots making food will lower the cost of food, giving more people access to better nutrition. This will also free up labor and capital to do other things. Machines helped make farming more productive so humans no longer have to live on farms, and dedicate their lives to the next meal on their table. If we were worried about jobs back then, we would've outlawed tractors and other machines. If we really want to create…

That "freed up [food service] labor" was already at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to skill and pay. Where else would that "free" labor be readily applicable that they don't fall into reliance on social safety nets?

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#168
post #88

Why is the UI on these things so atrocious? It took him a number of key presses just to select from a list of 6 and many more to finalize the purchase. Why not have a bunch of large tactile buttons at the bottom of the screen like all normal vending machines do? I don't want to wait in line for 3 minutes while some technophobe tries to figure out how to nagivate a pressure touchscreen with 12 menus deep. It's not his…

Same with the newer ATM's hopeless UX design my back hides the deposit cash function in the "card payments" menue FFS

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#169

My local coffee place has humans who operate an espresso machine, while Starbucks has baristas who push a button, and there are vending machines that produces espresso without having an operator. None of this excites a moral panic. Kitchen labor-saving devices have been being invented for hundreds of thousands of years. What's new? Think about wheat. Wheat used to be ground in stone mills operated by oxen or wind or…

What's new? Well, if we keep replacing low-skill jobs by high-skills ones, we may have a little problem: are humans going to keep up with the training? Is the workforce going to adapt fast enough? When job replacement happens over several generations, it's a pretty easy problem to solve. When it gets faster, turns out some human abilities are not scaling very well.

Another question: How will they pay for that retraining; will the high skill jobs really pay enough to cover 2-4 years of schooling debt?

And that's another one - will that high skill job exist after 2-4 years of retraining?

Re: A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mattered to whom? To those that run society and determine policy. > People always matter at least to themselves. Which is neither here nor there as to whether anyone will lend them a helping hand or let them perish e.g. in slums and poverty. Though even at that one would be surprised. People left without a job/role in society often don't matter even to themselves -- low self esteem, turning to drugs, alcohol, etc.

>People left without a job/role in society often don't matter even to themselves -- low self esteem, turning to drugs, alcohol, etc. I see this argument all the time here, but no one accounts for the fact that we live in a society in which people's worth is largely determined by their ability to secure financial stability. Who's to say that people without jobs, allowed to live without societal derision in a (best cas…

I covered that in the first part of my comment: the masses are rarely nurtured when they are not useful.

So, it's more likely that they'll be left to rot, than that they'll be provided for and allowed to be included is a "post work future".

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