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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

#41

Post by gspetr »

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…

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

Who owns the robots? That's the trillion dollar question.

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

Kings and emperors already had lives almost as perfect as they could be and they still chose to fight wars. Robots will not magically change human nature. There will likely always be people who will want to play the modern equivalent of "game of thrones", so to speak.

The will to power and the desire for world domination.

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

#42

Post by dazc »

mantas wrote: post #37
averagewall wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In Spain it's common that you have to weigh and label such items as you buy them, so you are just scanning a bar code when it comes to the checkout bit. The only snag is that below a certain price point some stores will intervene to check you really have just bought one croissant, which kind of defeats the whole purpose?

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

#43

Post by mafribe »

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?

Not the OP, but one might argue that slavery disincentivises the slave-holder from innovating the labour process.

The (Nietzschean?) counterargument here is that slave-labour enables division of labour and frees enough from non-specialised labour (e.g. individuals being responsible for all of producing food, building dwellings, providing security, raising children, caring for the elderly etc, and thus not being particularly good at any of them) to allow the emergence of a 'caste' of full-time scientists, engineers. Such a 'caste', such division of labour is required to drive technological progress to a level where slavery becomes unnecessary.

My historically uninformed and naive suggestion would be that ancient Greece was an example of the latter while most other societies with substantial slavery (such as South America and Africa) were examples of the former.

Aside: Any serious discussion of slavery must begin with the question: what do you mean by "slavery", for the term is used in wildly different ways.

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

#44

Post by ThomPete »

mafribe wrote: post #43
aaron695 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not the OP, but one might argue that slavery disincentivises the slave-holder from innovating the labour process. The (Nietzschean?) counterargument here is that slave-labour enables division of labour and frees enough from non-specialised labour (e.g. individuals being responsible for all of producing food, building dwellings, providing security, raising children, caring for the elderly etc, and thus not being parti…

Then it's a negative to society but only if all of society was run by slave owners.

In any other case the slave owner would have a benefit over the non slave owner when it came to cost of production.

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

#46

Post by thenomad »

syshum wrote: post #36
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.

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…

The UK has had the "check out as you shop" systems for a while in most major supermarkets. They work very well.

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

#47

Post by visarga »

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-…

> Once we enter an era where every person is effectively coddled by multiple robotic "slaves" that do their every whim

We're already there. Cars, computers and all sorts of machines serve our every whim - at least compared to a few hundred years ago. Our modern day affordances are simply amazing.

For example, the Empress Sissi of Habsburg was the first person in Vienna to have a water toilet, 150 years ago. It was considered an eccentricity. Now, even the poorest people have access to WC. (https://ro.pinterest.com/pin/452822937508014749/)

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

#48

Post by ghshephard »

bsder wrote: post #29
ghshephard wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting - I don't know if I've ever heard of someone going the other direction. As long as everything is bar coded, and you've got excellent industrial scanners (that's the key - not those crappy scanners that cashiers normally have to deal with) - Checkout via Kiosk is pretty effortless. In 12+ months of using them, I have not had a single bar code failure - which is pretty amazing. About the only thing t…

> That's interesting - I don't know if I've ever heard of someone going the other direction. You've never dealt with some of the cretins we have in the US. It's a tradeoff between space vs. time. If square footage is cheap, you can add more lines until there are enough that even with your guaranteed cretin blockage there will always be a line open. If square footage is expensive, then having cashiers to manhandle the…

What's interesting, is that Land here in Singapore isn't precisely cheap - but all the fair price stores that I frequent have automated kiosks. Particularly if you have Apple Pay (or "Pay Wave") as they call it here, if you have just a few items, you can scan, bag, pay in under 60 seconds. It's pretty awesome.

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

#49

Post by xyzzy123 »

ThomPete wrote: post #44
mafribe wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but one might argue that slavery disincentivises the slave-holder from innovating the labour process. The (Nietzschean?) counterargument here is that slave-labour enables division of labour and frees enough from non-specialised labour (e.g. individuals being responsible for all of producing food, building dwellings, providing security, raising children, caring for the elderly etc, and thus not being parti…

Then it's a negative to society but only if all of society was run by slave owners. In any other case the slave owner would have a benefit over the non slave owner when it came to cost of production.

It's both hilarious and excellent to watch both of you try to justify the utility of human labour.

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

#50

Post by ghshephard »

mantas wrote: post #37
averagewall wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Our stores with kiosks have hand bags of fruit, fruit/vegetables already bar coded, and, in the dozen or so cases where you have to buy-by-weight, they have hand scales/bar code printers. So, for about 10-20 items out of 10,000 in stock you need to worry. You are right - having 100% universal bar codes makes all the difference.
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