201–210 of 259 posts
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You mean...like the doorknobs?
If you make doorknobs out of brass, they might still get poop on them, but many types of bacteria and viruses can’t survive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_co... Maybe we can start making public touchscreens out of brass...
Next they'll come for the cooks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCVol2iWcc There are ~487k fast food cooks employed at ~$22.6k average wages. That's more than an $11 billion annual incentive to bring robochefs to retail. And that's just fast food, just in the US. Robo janitors may take a bit longer. Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The jan…
We saved billions of dollars with automation! Why is no one buying our products anymore? Hmm, it must be because they are spending all their money on avocados! I think the only way to go is to do basic income funded by an automation tax. Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.
This is a pernicious myth that needs to die - Ford increased wages to reduce turnover and thus the costs associated with it - if a few employees on the margins could then afford to buy his cars then all the better, but it would not appreciably increase demand. It doesn’t even make sense logically.
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We saved billions of dollars with automation! Why is no one buying our products anymore? Hmm, it must be because they are spending all their money on avocados! I think the only way to go is to do basic income funded by an automation tax. Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.
Taxing automation is absolutely wrong. We want automation. In the same way it would be wrong to say landlords of condos make too much profit because there are so few condos so we are going to tax condos more. More automation is required to contribute to liberate resources to eventually push our civilization to the next level. If anything, incentivize it. We want things behind made with "infinite" productivity. But we…
But we might just not want it _yet_. There’s a lot of work to be done first to prepare people for being layed off, reskilled, or retired en masse.
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>Or we recognise that as we automate further that there's less collective work for humanity This has basically never been true in the history of work-saving technology improvements. Such advances tend to create entirely new, previously impossible jobs.
What entirely new, previously impossible job does automating away McDonald's workers create, that formerly employed McDonald's workers are qualified for? Are we going to send them all to coding bootcamps so they can program the kiosks and... oh wait, those jobs are already taken, never mind. Your statement tends to be true when automation involves some kind of revolutionary technological paradigm shift, and the numbe…
Why would I order with my voice by yelling at a microphone outside my window? How stupid is that? Obviously I order on my smartphone and a creepy robot hand extends the bag to me as I drive by. The UWB radio in my phone will let them know which car is mine. Most of the time I’m ordering the same thing for my family of 4 (not at McDonalds , but you get the point) and so two taps later everything is ordered and paid fo…
"Double Quarter Pounder, just the sandwich, only cheese, no bun. Two side salads no croutons, no dressing, two dip cups of ranch for nuggets. Large diet dr pepper, easy ice." Lets see if the AI can get that right more often than their staff can.
Humans can manage to screw up even the clearest order. Once upon a time I'd go through the McD drive through every workday morning on the way to work, and order a big breakfast with hotcakes. I did this for about a year. Then one day I instead ordered a sausage McMuffin and an Egg McMuffin. I heard the order taker saying in a disbelieving tone to someone else "he ordered something different today!". When I was at the…
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People are a lot like stray cats in that the more you feed them and house them, the more of them you have eventually. At some point, before we are all underwater, we are going to need to have a fertility discussion.
No, quite the other way around: the wealthier a country gets, the less kids are born as parents don't need as many of them to reproduce successfully. In fact this trend is so strong that countries like Japan or Germany are facing a really massive demographic problem as the working population shrinks over the next decades.
And you only need one culturally persistent counterexample for this to end badly.
"Double Quarter Pounder, just the sandwich, only cheese, no bun. Two side salads no croutons, no dressing, two dip cups of ranch for nuggets. Large diet dr pepper, easy ice." Lets see if the AI can get that right more often than their staff can.
Humans can manage to screw up even the clearest order. Once upon a time I'd go through the McD drive through every workday morning on the way to work, and order a big breakfast with hotcakes. I did this for about a year. Then one day I instead ordered a sausage McMuffin and an Egg McMuffin. I heard the order taker saying in a disbelieving tone to someone else "he ordered something different today!". When I was at the…
This over 20 years ago.
Some things stick in the memory, on both sides.
Witness: petrol station pump adverts, hold-queue upsells
Also: the range of accents and ordering styles is likely to be challenging for voice response, particularly at volume and for McD's demographic.
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We saved billions of dollars with automation! Why is no one buying our products anymore? Hmm, it must be because they are spending all their money on avocados! I think the only way to go is to do basic income funded by an automation tax. Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.
If robo cooks are truly inexpensive, we could feed a lot more people in need for less money.