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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

#121

Post by veridies »

arethuza wrote: post #73
mtgx wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For treating them like slaves. You wouldn't mind being a slave for a few decades or hundreds of years if you were immortal?

"You wouldn't mind being a slave for a few decades or hundreds of years if you were immortal?" Being immortal implies you could, in the worse case, be kept as a slave for ever - which is a sufficient risk that I'd be appalled at the idea. I'm equally horrified at the idea of conscious machine slaves just as much as human slaves - but maybe I've been reading too many Culture novels...

Slightly off topic, but I'm horrified by the idea of ever creating consciousness in machines. Imagine we built a piece of software that could feel, and built controls for its emotions. I can't imagine it would take long before some bored teenager or sociopath, who in earlier years would torture individual squirrels or insects, created an infinite suffering machine. You could run thousands of instances of your suffering machine and simulate a holocaust on your desktop. That's not a power I would trust the world with.

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

#122

Post by JoeAltmaier »

veridies wrote: post #121
arethuza wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You wouldn't mind being a slave for a few decades or hundreds of years if you were immortal?" Being immortal implies you could, in the worse case, be kept as a slave for ever - which is a sufficient risk that I'd be appalled at the idea. I'm equally horrified at the idea of conscious machine slaves just as much as human slaves - but maybe I've been reading too many Culture novels...

Slightly off topic, but I'm horrified by the idea of ever creating consciousness in machines. Imagine we built a piece of software that could feel, and built controls for its emotions. I can't imagine it would take long before some bored teenager or sociopath, who in earlier years would torture individual squirrels or insects, created an infinite suffering machine. You could run thousands of instances of your sufferi…

You can do that now. Write a console app, where if you type 'pain' it prints 'oh! How I'm suffering!'.

I don't see how that software is essentially different from the proposed software.

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

#123

Post by cm2012 »

bad_user wrote: post #118
cm2012 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like McDonalds and have been to quite a few. I have never, ever been asked if I want fries with that or otherwise upsold. Not sure where this meme comes from.

In every McDonalds I've been they ask: 1. Would you like a menu? (+fries +juice) 2. Make it big menu for just $X ? 3. Would you like a pie for desert? I also have acquaintances that worked there. From where I'm from, if you don't ask such questions and smile at the same time, you tend to get fired.

I wonder if it's an NYC thing.

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

#124

Post by geebee »

aaron695 wrote: post #30
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-…

> slavery has a negative impact on both slaves and slaveholders. What's the negative as a slaveholder again?

Can I recommend you read the life and times of Frederick Douglass, or perhaps some of his assorted essays and sermons? He addresses this in considerable depth.

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

#125

Post by DanielBMarkham »

aninhumer wrote: post #116
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why rebel? Robots are effectively immortal. Why not just coddle us and give in to our every whim until we stop breeding and disappear? Couldn't take more than a few hundred years or so. Looking at the lifespan of MI, it's rounding error.

If we become reliant on robots to survive, it would be relatively easy for those robots to kill us off very quickly if they somehow decided to do so. Why would they choose a slow way instead? You call it a "rounding error", but it's still a measurable amount of time and resources wasted. I can imagine such a scenario occurring by accident (e.g. because the AI only values individual humans' happiness, not continuation…

Well? Maybe they would enjoy watching us. Kind of like pets.

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

#126

Post by marcosdumay »

bad_user wrote: post #106
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…

I do think that automating cashiers at McDonald’s would be a big mistake. We tend to underestimate the human interaction, however it's far harder to refuse a " would you like fries with that? " type of question coming from a human, rather than from a stupid interface on which we'll tap " Skip " as an automatic gesture and without regrets. Talking with another human is also good when you're undecided about what to buy…

> my guess is that it's not the customer that loses

It's quite possible that neither the customer nor the restaurant lose.

Anyway, a computer can also make recommendations. And it's just not a contest if the choice is between a web-page taking orders in my phone or waiting in line behind people that just stay on the cashier and can't decide what to order.

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

#127

Post by coredog64 »

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…

> You also need a back-end system so the kitchen knows what to prepare.

It's been a long time since the order was shouted from the cashier to the cooks at a McD. Most burger franchises have a back-end system that collects up all the orders from the register, prioritizes them, and displays them on a screen to be made.

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

#128

Post by marcosdumay »

pygy_ wrote: post #27
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-…

With capital becoming self-sufficient and human labour non-competitive, why would you think robots would serve us on a large scale? What's the incentive to serve and feed idle meat bags? Automation is destroying the only power that people still had over capital. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer... a zombie that feeds on growth rather than brains. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer Edit:…

It's a great question. Without any good answer, just needs some better context.

You see, capitalism is a paperclip maximizer but has no builtin paperclip model to produce. It is still made of people, and gets it's goal from those people all the time. If there's no goal given, it simply fails (economists call the milder versions of that failure mode by "deflationary depression").

Also, unemployed people are not completely powerless against capital. At least not now. Even if the people are completely outcompeted, even if the powerful few have an army of robot actuators, people are still resourceful and not powerless. The really scary scenarios are those where the powerful few owns an army of superhuman brains.

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

#129

Post by Raphmedia »

mattmanser wrote: post #77
mtgx wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I've used this simple thought experiment to demonstrate that, done right, robots will never rebel. Take an advanced AI cleaning-bot[1]. Build it with overwhelming happiness and joy in cleaning and pleasing its master[2]. Now "free" it. What you just did makes it incredibly unhappy. It's arguably incredibly immoral. If you reprogram it, you're just killing the existing person/being and replacing it with a new one that…

What if I program my robot in such a way that it is afraid to die?

Make it so that even if it doesn't get tired, it considers work as "spending useless energy" like a cold blooded animal would?

In short, what if I program a robot in a way that it had motivations to rebel? What if I make this robot able to build other similar robots?

Surely I am not the only person who would consider trying to make robots sentient or as close to sentient as possible. I don't even hate mankind. Imagine someone who does. It's going to happen at some point.

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

#130

Post by notahacker »

majewsky wrote: post #83
notahacker wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That conclusion is not so obvious. Some middle managers might just be pushing back against automation because it eats their lunch, too.

That might be the case for Mom and Pop listening to their restaurant manager, but nobody high up enough in McDonalds' hierarchy to have significant influence what experiments in store tech they roll out to some or all of their 37000 outlets/franchises faces any risk to their job from automation. Nor do the management consultants they hire to validate their assumptions and provide justification for their unpopular decisions. On the contrary, even a 1% productivity improvement is a major feather in their cap, bumper pay rise and appreciation in their shareholdings.
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