There's not really a thing that humans do that can't conceivably be automated.
The arts are already heavily automated.
Automated sex has been around for quite awhile
Sales might be difficult to automate just because it involves people with power, but if you can talk businesses into trusting automated calculations...
At a certain point humans exist basically as a novelty for those humans in power.
But there's the whole Ian Malcolm issue - just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. I keep on hearing that automation is going to suddenly take over all these things, and yet it never quite gets there, because it turns out that while automation is great when everything is fine, all it takes is for one little wrench to go in the gears, and things go pear-shaped rather quickly.
"Never quite" is still continuing to replace a huge amount of the work force.
Automated check outs haven't replaced cashiers entirely but they've replaced a huge amount of them. Automated ordering hasn't removed humans entirely from the supply chain but it's demolished god knows how many brick and mortar companies. And with driverless vehicles on the horizon there's going to be another huge swath of people removed from the service industry as truckers, taxi, delivery, and etc drivers are replaced.
And we absolutely should do it and instead of demanding people compete for jobs, instead support them in doing what they actually want to with a minimum living requirement provided to everyone.
It's interesting that you bring up automated checkouts, because that's an example of my point. Costco just pulled their automated checkouts, replacing them with standard cashier manned lines. Turns out that they don't really save a lot of labor, because there's a lot of stuff that you actually need the attending cashier for. Customer buying an age - restricted item? Attendant. Customer flummoxed by machine? Attendant. Customer borked their order? Attendant. If the attendant is getting called regularly, then the point of automation is lost.
Which is the point - automation is great at regular, repetitive tasks. Put decision making into the mix, and things can go very wrong very fast. Someone brought up automated stock trades, and there have been massive concerns that one of the big parts of our economy is being run by processes we only have partial knowledge of. There have already been "flash crashes" caused by the automated buyers throwing a rod when anomalous data is fed into them, and it's been suggested that a transaction tax be added to stock trades, which would destroy the value of automated trading, which is pretty much built on microarbitrage.
Costco is a single company providing a relatively unique service. The vast majority of supermarkets have no trouble with self checkout because they're limited to under 20 items or whatever. Most people shopping at Costco aren't doing that.
Meanwhile Amazon has essentially destroyed Circuit City, Radioshack, and Borders which are gone entirely. Office Depot, Sears, Barnes & Noble, Aeropostale, and more are shuttering stores all over. Some will continue with an online presence. But that takes decidedly fewer employees in the long term.
Amazon is an interesting example because of how many people who get paid fuck all to work their asses off in their DCs.
Sticking unexpectedly sized thing into other things is difficult to automate.
They moistly come out at night, moistly.
+8
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
Obviously the fact that people need to work to live in our society puts a damper on advancement in automation. Why bother with finding an expensive automated solution to things when you can just pay people shit to do it?
0
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MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
There's not really a thing that humans do that can't conceivably be automated.
The arts are already heavily automated.
Automated sex has been around for quite awhile
Sales might be difficult to automate just because it involves people with power, but if you can talk businesses into trusting automated calculations...
At a certain point humans exist basically as a novelty for those humans in power.
But there's the whole Ian Malcolm issue - just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. I keep on hearing that automation is going to suddenly take over all these things, and yet it never quite gets there, because it turns out that while automation is great when everything is fine, all it takes is for one little wrench to go in the gears, and things go pear-shaped rather quickly.
"Never quite" is still continuing to replace a huge amount of the work force.
Automated check outs haven't replaced cashiers entirely but they've replaced a huge amount of them. Automated ordering hasn't removed humans entirely from the supply chain but it's demolished god knows how many brick and mortar companies. And with driverless vehicles on the horizon there's going to be another huge swath of people removed from the service industry as truckers, taxi, delivery, and etc drivers are replaced.
And we absolutely should do it and instead of demanding people compete for jobs, instead support them in doing what they actually want to with a minimum living requirement provided to everyone.
It's interesting that you bring up automated checkouts, because that's an example of my point. Costco just pulled their automated checkouts, replacing them with standard cashier manned lines. Turns out that they don't really save a lot of labor, because there's a lot of stuff that you actually need the attending cashier for. Customer buying an age - restricted item? Attendant. Customer flummoxed by machine? Attendant. Customer borked their order? Attendant. If the attendant is getting called regularly, then the point of automation is lost.
Which is the point - automation is great at regular, repetitive tasks. Put decision making into the mix, and things can go very wrong very fast. Someone brought up automated stock trades, and there have been massive concerns that one of the big parts of our economy is being run by processes we only have partial knowledge of. There have already been "flash crashes" caused by the automated buyers throwing a rod when anomalous data is fed into them, and it's been suggested that a transaction tax be added to stock trades, which would destroy the value of automated trading, which is pretty much built on microarbitrage.
Costco is a single company providing a relatively unique service. The vast majority of supermarkets have no trouble with self checkout because they're limited to under 20 items or whatever. Most people shopping at Costco aren't doing that.
Actually, retail enthusiasm for automated checkout has been on the wane for a few years now. This is for a number of reasons, such as shrinkage (self-checkout has a much higher rate than manned checkouts), inefficiency (trained cashiers are significantly faster than customers), lack of functionality (the terminals can only handle basic transactions), etc.
Meanwhile Amazon has essentially destroyed Circuit City, Radioshack, and Borders which are gone entirely. Office Depot, Sears, Barnes & Noble, Aeropostale, and more are shuttering stores all over. Some will continue with an online presence. But that takes decidedly fewer employees in the long term.
And none of that has anything to do with automation, as the numerous stories about the working conditions in Amazon's warehouses attest. It's a mixture of economy of scale for Amazon and gross ineptitude on the part of the retailers.
The speed thing is only true if you ignore waiting (i.e. it's not busy).
We almost always use the self-checkout, since there's just more of them (8 self-checkouts take up the space required for two manned check-outs) and we hardly have to wait.
Anytime we had an issue, one of the two people looking over the self-checkouts came over and sorted us out.
Obviously the fact that people need to work to live in our society puts a damper on advancement in automation. Why bother with finding an expensive automated solution to things when you can just pay people shit to do it?
Because those automations eventually become cheaper and more reliable as technology advances. Pretty much every time.
There's not really a thing that humans do that can't conceivably be automated.
The arts are already heavily automated.
Automated sex has been around for quite awhile
Sales might be difficult to automate just because it involves people with power, but if you can talk businesses into trusting automated calculations...
At a certain point humans exist basically as a novelty for those humans in power.
But there's the whole Ian Malcolm issue - just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. I keep on hearing that automation is going to suddenly take over all these things, and yet it never quite gets there, because it turns out that while automation is great when everything is fine, all it takes is for one little wrench to go in the gears, and things go pear-shaped rather quickly.
"Never quite" is still continuing to replace a huge amount of the work force.
Automated check outs haven't replaced cashiers entirely but they've replaced a huge amount of them. Automated ordering hasn't removed humans entirely from the supply chain but it's demolished god knows how many brick and mortar companies. And with driverless vehicles on the horizon there's going to be another huge swath of people removed from the service industry as truckers, taxi, delivery, and etc drivers are replaced.
And we absolutely should do it and instead of demanding people compete for jobs, instead support them in doing what they actually want to with a minimum living requirement provided to everyone.
It's interesting that you bring up automated checkouts, because that's an example of my point. Costco just pulled their automated checkouts, replacing them with standard cashier manned lines. Turns out that they don't really save a lot of labor, because there's a lot of stuff that you actually need the attending cashier for. Customer buying an age - restricted item? Attendant. Customer flummoxed by machine? Attendant. Customer borked their order? Attendant. If the attendant is getting called regularly, then the point of automation is lost.
Which is the point - automation is great at regular, repetitive tasks. Put decision making into the mix, and things can go very wrong very fast. Someone brought up automated stock trades, and there have been massive concerns that one of the big parts of our economy is being run by processes we only have partial knowledge of. There have already been "flash crashes" caused by the automated buyers throwing a rod when anomalous data is fed into them, and it's been suggested that a transaction tax be added to stock trades, which would destroy the value of automated trading, which is pretty much built on microarbitrage.
Costco is a single company providing a relatively unique service. The vast majority of supermarkets have no trouble with self checkout because they're limited to under 20 items or whatever. Most people shopping at Costco aren't doing that.
Actually, retail enthusiasm for automated checkout has been on the wane for a few years now. This is for a number of reasons, such as shrinkage (self-checkout has a much higher rate than manned checkouts), inefficiency (trained cashiers are significantly faster than customers), lack of functionality (the terminals can only handle basic transactions), etc.
Meanwhile Amazon has essentially destroyed Circuit City, Radioshack, and Borders which are gone entirely. Office Depot, Sears, Barnes & Noble, Aeropostale, and more are shuttering stores all over. Some will continue with an online presence. But that takes decidedly fewer employees in the long term.
And none of that has anything to do with automation, as the numerous stories about the working conditions in Amazon's warehouses attest. It's a mixture of economy of scale for Amazon and gross ineptitude on the part of the retailers.
For the first part, the same could be said for checkouts with POS systems 30 years ago. People loathed those things. For the second part it has everything to do with automation. The conditions in the warehouses are indeed shitty. But they're also guided by a computer deciding where people need to get things. And by a computer recommending me things. And by a computer providing a route. And soon by a computer driving/flying that route. Or, for a lot of stuff now, by a computer immediately uploading what I want. Claiming automation has nothing to do with a largely automated process is ridiculous.
Obviously the fact that people need to work to live in our society puts a damper on advancement in automation. Why bother with finding an expensive automated solution to things when you can just pay people shit to do it?
They don't need to work to live. We automate all those shit jobs, increase production in the process, the work still gets done. There are still burgers or whatever.
People do typically do need to do things to feel fulfilled. Feed, house and cloathe everyone, give them access to the internet.
I wouldn't mind living in a world where everyone that labored did so cause the found their work fulfilling. Like where everything was either mass produced totally by machine or the work of an artisan or whatever.
Shrug.
They moistly come out at night, moistly.
+11
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
Besides which, only a fraction of the populace works in amazon warehouses and such. A problem is what zagdrob pointed out here:
As people need to do less and less work, we'll find more and more effective time sinks.
I recall people talking about how computers and the internet would make the 30 hour work week 'inevitable'. Now people get the same amount accomplished in less time, but spend more time screwing around on the internet. Most days, I could probably accomplish the same amount of work I do in an eight hour shift in an hour or two if I really focused and buckled down.
While it might not be screwing around on the internet for everybody, a lot of work is still being busy for that sweet 8 hours a day for no reason other than those being the rules. The standard is a 40 hour work week, so you do whatever it is you do spread out over those 40 hours.
+9
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MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
There's not really a thing that humans do that can't conceivably be automated.
The arts are already heavily automated.
Automated sex has been around for quite awhile
Sales might be difficult to automate just because it involves people with power, but if you can talk businesses into trusting automated calculations...
At a certain point humans exist basically as a novelty for those humans in power.
But there's the whole Ian Malcolm issue - just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. I keep on hearing that automation is going to suddenly take over all these things, and yet it never quite gets there, because it turns out that while automation is great when everything is fine, all it takes is for one little wrench to go in the gears, and things go pear-shaped rather quickly.
"Never quite" is still continuing to replace a huge amount of the work force.
Automated check outs haven't replaced cashiers entirely but they've replaced a huge amount of them. Automated ordering hasn't removed humans entirely from the supply chain but it's demolished god knows how many brick and mortar companies. And with driverless vehicles on the horizon there's going to be another huge swath of people removed from the service industry as truckers, taxi, delivery, and etc drivers are replaced.
And we absolutely should do it and instead of demanding people compete for jobs, instead support them in doing what they actually want to with a minimum living requirement provided to everyone.
It's interesting that you bring up automated checkouts, because that's an example of my point. Costco just pulled their automated checkouts, replacing them with standard cashier manned lines. Turns out that they don't really save a lot of labor, because there's a lot of stuff that you actually need the attending cashier for. Customer buying an age - restricted item? Attendant. Customer flummoxed by machine? Attendant. Customer borked their order? Attendant. If the attendant is getting called regularly, then the point of automation is lost.
Which is the point - automation is great at regular, repetitive tasks. Put decision making into the mix, and things can go very wrong very fast. Someone brought up automated stock trades, and there have been massive concerns that one of the big parts of our economy is being run by processes we only have partial knowledge of. There have already been "flash crashes" caused by the automated buyers throwing a rod when anomalous data is fed into them, and it's been suggested that a transaction tax be added to stock trades, which would destroy the value of automated trading, which is pretty much built on microarbitrage.
Costco is a single company providing a relatively unique service. The vast majority of supermarkets have no trouble with self checkout because they're limited to under 20 items or whatever. Most people shopping at Costco aren't doing that.
Actually, retail enthusiasm for automated checkout has been on the wane for a few years now. This is for a number of reasons, such as shrinkage (self-checkout has a much higher rate than manned checkouts), inefficiency (trained cashiers are significantly faster than customers), lack of functionality (the terminals can only handle basic transactions), etc.
Meanwhile Amazon has essentially destroyed Circuit City, Radioshack, and Borders which are gone entirely. Office Depot, Sears, Barnes & Noble, Aeropostale, and more are shuttering stores all over. Some will continue with an online presence. But that takes decidedly fewer employees in the long term.
And none of that has anything to do with automation, as the numerous stories about the working conditions in Amazon's warehouses attest. It's a mixture of economy of scale for Amazon and gross ineptitude on the part of the retailers.
For the first part, the same could be said for checkouts with POS systems 30 years ago. People loathed those things. For the second part it has everything to do with automation. The conditions in the warehouses are indeed shitty. But they're also guided by a computer deciding where people need to get things. And by a computer recommending me things. And by a computer providing a route. And soon by a computer driving/flying that route. Or, for a lot of stuff now, by a computer immediately uploading what I want. Claiming automation has nothing to do with a largely automated process is ridiculous.
All our customer's newer plants have automated stock moving. It's pretty cool actually, and involves little to no human interaction.
And almost all the planning and scheduling is done by computers. (Which I think is the bigger advantage. It ups effeciency and allows for a much larger scale of production)
I found this piece about people crowdfunding their own basic incomes interesting. It would be awesome if it could actually function as a work around to the rich being dicks about letting basic income become a thing. Unlikely to work without the government involved for several reasons the article points out, but man it would be nice to get it rolling sooner than later. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/what-if-everybody-didnt-have-to-work-to-get-paid/393428/
There's not really a thing that humans do that can't conceivably be automated.
The arts are already heavily automated.
Automated sex has been around for quite awhile
Sales might be difficult to automate just because it involves people with power, but if you can talk businesses into trusting automated calculations...
At a certain point humans exist basically as a novelty for those humans in power.
But there's the whole Ian Malcolm issue - just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. I keep on hearing that automation is going to suddenly take over all these things, and yet it never quite gets there, because it turns out that while automation is great when everything is fine, all it takes is for one little wrench to go in the gears, and things go pear-shaped rather quickly.
"Never quite" is still continuing to replace a huge amount of the work force.
Automated check outs haven't replaced cashiers entirely but they've replaced a huge amount of them. Automated ordering hasn't removed humans entirely from the supply chain but it's demolished god knows how many brick and mortar companies. And with driverless vehicles on the horizon there's going to be another huge swath of people removed from the service industry as truckers, taxi, delivery, and etc drivers are replaced.
And we absolutely should do it and instead of demanding people compete for jobs, instead support them in doing what they actually want to with a minimum living requirement provided to everyone.
It's interesting that you bring up automated checkouts, because that's an example of my point. Costco just pulled their automated checkouts, replacing them with standard cashier manned lines. Turns out that they don't really save a lot of labor, because there's a lot of stuff that you actually need the attending cashier for. Customer buying an age - restricted item? Attendant. Customer flummoxed by machine? Attendant. Customer borked their order? Attendant. If the attendant is getting called regularly, then the point of automation is lost.
Which is the point - automation is great at regular, repetitive tasks. Put decision making into the mix, and things can go very wrong very fast. Someone brought up automated stock trades, and there have been massive concerns that one of the big parts of our economy is being run by processes we only have partial knowledge of. There have already been "flash crashes" caused by the automated buyers throwing a rod when anomalous data is fed into them, and it's been suggested that a transaction tax be added to stock trades, which would destroy the value of automated trading, which is pretty much built on microarbitrage.
Costco is a single company providing a relatively unique service. The vast majority of supermarkets have no trouble with self checkout because they're limited to under 20 items or whatever. Most people shopping at Costco aren't doing that.
Actually, retail enthusiasm for automated checkout has been on the wane for a few years now. This is for a number of reasons, such as shrinkage (self-checkout has a much higher rate than manned checkouts), inefficiency (trained cashiers are significantly faster than customers), lack of functionality (the terminals can only handle basic transactions), etc.
Meanwhile Amazon has essentially destroyed Circuit City, Radioshack, and Borders which are gone entirely. Office Depot, Sears, Barnes & Noble, Aeropostale, and more are shuttering stores all over. Some will continue with an online presence. But that takes decidedly fewer employees in the long term.
And none of that has anything to do with automation, as the numerous stories about the working conditions in Amazon's warehouses attest. It's a mixture of economy of scale for Amazon and gross ineptitude on the part of the retailers.
The speed thing is only true if you ignore waiting (i.e. it's not busy).
We almost always use the self-checkout, since there's just more of them (8 self-checkouts take up the space required for two manned check-outs) and we hardly have to wait.
Anytime we had an issue, one of the two people looking over the self-checkouts came over and sorted us out.
Also no random chit-chat.
This is a classic mistake when we look at situations like this - we overvalue our own anecdotal experience. The simple fact is, given the exact same order, the trained cashier will process it faster than the customer will. Which is perfectly logical - the cashier is doing this operation repeatedly, while the customer is doing it sporadically. Furthermore, the cashier is more robust - they can more easily recover from minor errors (again, thanks to training and experience.)
We think the self-checkout is more "efficient" because we're the ones operating it.
Obviously the fact that people need to work to live in our society puts a damper on advancement in automation. Why bother with finding an expensive automated solution to things when you can just pay people shit to do it?
Because those automations eventually become cheaper and more reliable as technology advances. Pretty much every time.
My point is that automation can be speeded up by making sure people don't need to work for cheap because they don't have any other option. That supermarkets go back to cashiers is not because self-check out doesn't work but because cashiers are still cheaper because people need to work to eat.
Once people don't need to work to eat (because of a basic income for example) they will be far less willing to work as a cashier and certainly not for so little money. Which creates an incentive for improving automation.
Basically society's obsession with people working is holding us back.
+4
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MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
There's not really a thing that humans do that can't conceivably be automated.
The arts are already heavily automated.
Automated sex has been around for quite awhile
Sales might be difficult to automate just because it involves people with power, but if you can talk businesses into trusting automated calculations...
At a certain point humans exist basically as a novelty for those humans in power.
But there's the whole Ian Malcolm issue - just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. I keep on hearing that automation is going to suddenly take over all these things, and yet it never quite gets there, because it turns out that while automation is great when everything is fine, all it takes is for one little wrench to go in the gears, and things go pear-shaped rather quickly.
"Never quite" is still continuing to replace a huge amount of the work force.
Automated check outs haven't replaced cashiers entirely but they've replaced a huge amount of them. Automated ordering hasn't removed humans entirely from the supply chain but it's demolished god knows how many brick and mortar companies. And with driverless vehicles on the horizon there's going to be another huge swath of people removed from the service industry as truckers, taxi, delivery, and etc drivers are replaced.
And we absolutely should do it and instead of demanding people compete for jobs, instead support them in doing what they actually want to with a minimum living requirement provided to everyone.
It's interesting that you bring up automated checkouts, because that's an example of my point. Costco just pulled their automated checkouts, replacing them with standard cashier manned lines. Turns out that they don't really save a lot of labor, because there's a lot of stuff that you actually need the attending cashier for. Customer buying an age - restricted item? Attendant. Customer flummoxed by machine? Attendant. Customer borked their order? Attendant. If the attendant is getting called regularly, then the point of automation is lost.
Which is the point - automation is great at regular, repetitive tasks. Put decision making into the mix, and things can go very wrong very fast. Someone brought up automated stock trades, and there have been massive concerns that one of the big parts of our economy is being run by processes we only have partial knowledge of. There have already been "flash crashes" caused by the automated buyers throwing a rod when anomalous data is fed into them, and it's been suggested that a transaction tax be added to stock trades, which would destroy the value of automated trading, which is pretty much built on microarbitrage.
Costco is a single company providing a relatively unique service. The vast majority of supermarkets have no trouble with self checkout because they're limited to under 20 items or whatever. Most people shopping at Costco aren't doing that.
Actually, retail enthusiasm for automated checkout has been on the wane for a few years now. This is for a number of reasons, such as shrinkage (self-checkout has a much higher rate than manned checkouts), inefficiency (trained cashiers are significantly faster than customers), lack of functionality (the terminals can only handle basic transactions), etc.
Meanwhile Amazon has essentially destroyed Circuit City, Radioshack, and Borders which are gone entirely. Office Depot, Sears, Barnes & Noble, Aeropostale, and more are shuttering stores all over. Some will continue with an online presence. But that takes decidedly fewer employees in the long term.
And none of that has anything to do with automation, as the numerous stories about the working conditions in Amazon's warehouses attest. It's a mixture of economy of scale for Amazon and gross ineptitude on the part of the retailers.
The speed thing is only true if you ignore waiting (i.e. it's not busy).
We almost always use the self-checkout, since there's just more of them (8 self-checkouts take up the space required for two manned check-outs) and we hardly have to wait.
Anytime we had an issue, one of the two people looking over the self-checkouts came over and sorted us out.
Also no random chit-chat.
This is a classic mistake when we look at situations like this - we overvalue our own anecdotal experience. The simple fact is, given the exact same order, the trained cashier will process it faster than the customer will. Which is perfectly logical - the cashier is doing this operation repeatedly, while the customer is doing it sporadically. Furthermore, the cashier is more robust - they can more easily recover from minor errors (again, thanks to training and experience.)
We think the self-checkout is more "efficient" because we're the ones operating it.
That's not what I said.
I agree that the cashier is a lot quicker than I am at processing my order. The problem comes in that there's not one cashier per customer.
It's a lot quicker for me to complete my pruchase, than it is for a cashier to do four.
Obviously the fact that people need to work to live in our society puts a damper on advancement in automation. Why bother with finding an expensive automated solution to things when you can just pay people shit to do it?
Because those automations eventually become cheaper and more reliable as technology advances. Pretty much every time.
My point is that automation can be speeded up by making sure people don't need to work for cheap because they don't have any other option. That supermarkets go back to cashiers is not because self-check out doesn't work but because cashiers are still cheaper because people need to work to eat.
Once people don't need to work to eat (because of a basic income for example) they will be far less willing to work as a cashier and certainly not for so little money. Which creates an incentive for improving automation.
Basically society's obsession with people working is holding us back.
I keep talking about this crazy idea I have for a social insurance program the government runs to provide everything an American citizen needs to be a happy productive member of society. Instead of collecting taxes separately, when a child is born its legal guardian is given the option of buying into this social insurance program. You are under NO obligation to buy into the program, but none of the inherent benefits of a tax driven system will be allowed to you. Periodically your premium will be billed to your bank account in lieu of medicare and social security taxes. Social insurance provides a full education and optional childcare from birth to adulthood. It provides unlimited $0 deduction, $0 copay medical care. It provides unemployment stipends if you lose your job. It covers your home and all of your possessions and guarantees against defect. When you can no longer work, it provides a living wage. Basically it's every type of insurance you could think of all rolled into a single provider and run for (or not) profit by the government. This is a totally insane idea that will never, in a million years happen, but damnit, I think it could work.
To extend the idea further into a post automation society; Into adulthood you are given the option to return to school for any skills you might desire with a guarantee of work in the field you persure. Social insurance provides a basic living wage, food, housing, and transportation to every citizen. The government bears the full cost of the system which is paid for by automated labor in a purely socialist society. The government owns the means of production and provides for everyone to at least be a healthy and happy member of society, if not productive one.
Let us create two classes of citizens? One of them forced to pay fairly significant taxes.
The other super rich?
This seems problematic.
There will still be taxes to pay for general infrastructure, but education, healthcare, and money when you can't work can all be rolled into one plan. If the rich don't want insurance they don't have to buy it. They can attend private schools, go to private hospitals, and saddle the cost when they can't work. You know, exactly how they ALREADY DO. Social insurance covers the other 99% who can't afford those things by moving to a single provider system, dramatically simplifying the process for the consumer while telling insurance companies to go fuck themselves. What's worse? A hundred crooked insurance companies all competing to bring in the biggest profits while doing everything possible to deny coverage to those who need it would cost them the most money, all while answering to no one. Or a single slightly less corrupt company that is at least answerable to the american public? Congress aside, I still trust most of the federal government more than I trust my insurance company.
This whole idea is premised on the idea that people finally realize insurance companies are not working in their best interests which is never going to happen. Obamacare is just one very small step towards a single provider system. It at least says that medical coverage is medical coverage. You can't deny someone just because they are too poor or have a pre-existing condition. It doesn't go nearly far enough in my opinion.
Though this idea might see life as a framework for a post-labor society.
It's a mistake to allow anything important to be part of a voluntary insurance scheme, particularly for minors. Insurance is best used for luxuries, like an accidental damage plan for a gaming laptop. That person doesn't need a $2000 replacement if they drop it, but if they are risk adverse they can get it. For health, insurance is shit, as we've seen. Obamacare works not completely terribly precisely because it is mandatory, which stops healthy people from all opting out and fucking up the premiums, and stops dumb people from opting out and going bankrupt. As we get closer to a post-labor society, it should also be a post-monetary society, and all this stuff should simply be included by virtue of being a person. If your house burns down, you get temporary quarters and put in the queue for the robot builders to make a new one.
For the child angle, well, if you work in a bad guy facing industry (social services, policing, etc), it is really obvious that parents shouldn't be allowed too much leeway to make decisions for their kids. At the very least provide it to all people under 21.
As to the general concept, we can and should automate almost everything, but we need to setup government, economic, legal, and social systems to make them work properly. The current system of society is actually really shit, where a huge number of all people are forced to work an unpleasant job for too little money just to survive, and a post-labor society can be a utopia, but we need to work to make it one. Because the alternative is a lot of bored, angry poor people who have no future and have nothing to lose from burning society down, and I'd go so far as to say a moral right to do so, and that's not a future anyone wants.
There's not really a thing that humans do that can't conceivably be automated.
The arts are already heavily automated.
Automated sex has been around for quite awhile
Sales might be difficult to automate just because it involves people with power, but if you can talk businesses into trusting automated calculations...
At a certain point humans exist basically as a novelty for those humans in power.
But there's the whole Ian Malcolm issue - just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. I keep on hearing that automation is going to suddenly take over all these things, and yet it never quite gets there, because it turns out that while automation is great when everything is fine, all it takes is for one little wrench to go in the gears, and things go pear-shaped rather quickly.
"Never quite" is still continuing to replace a huge amount of the work force.
Automated check outs haven't replaced cashiers entirely but they've replaced a huge amount of them. Automated ordering hasn't removed humans entirely from the supply chain but it's demolished god knows how many brick and mortar companies. And with driverless vehicles on the horizon there's going to be another huge swath of people removed from the service industry as truckers, taxi, delivery, and etc drivers are replaced.
And we absolutely should do it and instead of demanding people compete for jobs, instead support them in doing what they actually want to with a minimum living requirement provided to everyone.
It's interesting that you bring up automated checkouts, because that's an example of my point. Costco just pulled their automated checkouts, replacing them with standard cashier manned lines. Turns out that they don't really save a lot of labor, because there's a lot of stuff that you actually need the attending cashier for. Customer buying an age - restricted item? Attendant. Customer flummoxed by machine? Attendant. Customer borked their order? Attendant. If the attendant is getting called regularly, then the point of automation is lost.
Which is the point - automation is great at regular, repetitive tasks. Put decision making into the mix, and things can go very wrong very fast. Someone brought up automated stock trades, and there have been massive concerns that one of the big parts of our economy is being run by processes we only have partial knowledge of. There have already been "flash crashes" caused by the automated buyers throwing a rod when anomalous data is fed into them, and it's been suggested that a transaction tax be added to stock trades, which would destroy the value of automated trading, which is pretty much built on microarbitrage.
Costco is a single company providing a relatively unique service. The vast majority of supermarkets have no trouble with self checkout because they're limited to under 20 items or whatever. Most people shopping at Costco aren't doing that.
Actually, retail enthusiasm for automated checkout has been on the wane for a few years now. This is for a number of reasons, such as shrinkage (self-checkout has a much higher rate than manned checkouts), inefficiency (trained cashiers are significantly faster than customers), lack of functionality (the terminals can only handle basic transactions), etc.
Meanwhile Amazon has essentially destroyed Circuit City, Radioshack, and Borders which are gone entirely. Office Depot, Sears, Barnes & Noble, Aeropostale, and more are shuttering stores all over. Some will continue with an online presence. But that takes decidedly fewer employees in the long term.
And none of that has anything to do with automation, as the numerous stories about the working conditions in Amazon's warehouses attest. It's a mixture of economy of scale for Amazon and gross ineptitude on the part of the retailers.
The speed thing is only true if you ignore waiting (i.e. it's not busy).
We almost always use the self-checkout, since there's just more of them (8 self-checkouts take up the space required for two manned check-outs) and we hardly have to wait.
Anytime we had an issue, one of the two people looking over the self-checkouts came over and sorted us out.
Also no random chit-chat.
This is a classic mistake when we look at situations like this - we overvalue our own anecdotal experience. The simple fact is, given the exact same order, the trained cashier will process it faster than the customer will. Which is perfectly logical - the cashier is doing this operation repeatedly, while the customer is doing it sporadically. Furthermore, the cashier is more robust - they can more easily recover from minor errors (again, thanks to training and experience.)
We think the self-checkout is more "efficient" because we're the ones operating it.
That's not what I said.
I agree that the cashier is a lot quicker than I am at processing my order. The problem comes in that there's not one cashier per customer.
It's a lot quicker for me to complete my pruchase, than it is for a cashier to do four.
Which is great - for you. Problem is, you're not the only person that the store needs to be concerned with. Nor is how fast you can get through the system a solution to the many other issues with automated checkouts.
Again, this is something that occurs regularly - a good example is MMO players complaining about a certain mechanic, like a drop rate, based on their personal experience - ignoring that the game developers can actually see the full statistics of collection by the user base.
There's not really a thing that humans do that can't conceivably be automated.
The arts are already heavily automated.
Automated sex has been around for quite awhile
Sales might be difficult to automate just because it involves people with power, but if you can talk businesses into trusting automated calculations...
At a certain point humans exist basically as a novelty for those humans in power.
But there's the whole Ian Malcolm issue - just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. I keep on hearing that automation is going to suddenly take over all these things, and yet it never quite gets there, because it turns out that while automation is great when everything is fine, all it takes is for one little wrench to go in the gears, and things go pear-shaped rather quickly.
"Never quite" is still continuing to replace a huge amount of the work force.
Automated check outs haven't replaced cashiers entirely but they've replaced a huge amount of them. Automated ordering hasn't removed humans entirely from the supply chain but it's demolished god knows how many brick and mortar companies. And with driverless vehicles on the horizon there's going to be another huge swath of people removed from the service industry as truckers, taxi, delivery, and etc drivers are replaced.
And we absolutely should do it and instead of demanding people compete for jobs, instead support them in doing what they actually want to with a minimum living requirement provided to everyone.
It's interesting that you bring up automated checkouts, because that's an example of my point. Costco just pulled their automated checkouts, replacing them with standard cashier manned lines. Turns out that they don't really save a lot of labor, because there's a lot of stuff that you actually need the attending cashier for. Customer buying an age - restricted item? Attendant. Customer flummoxed by machine? Attendant. Customer borked their order? Attendant. If the attendant is getting called regularly, then the point of automation is lost.
Which is the point - automation is great at regular, repetitive tasks. Put decision making into the mix, and things can go very wrong very fast. Someone brought up automated stock trades, and there have been massive concerns that one of the big parts of our economy is being run by processes we only have partial knowledge of. There have already been "flash crashes" caused by the automated buyers throwing a rod when anomalous data is fed into them, and it's been suggested that a transaction tax be added to stock trades, which would destroy the value of automated trading, which is pretty much built on microarbitrage.
Costco is a single company providing a relatively unique service. The vast majority of supermarkets have no trouble with self checkout because they're limited to under 20 items or whatever. Most people shopping at Costco aren't doing that.
Actually, retail enthusiasm for automated checkout has been on the wane for a few years now. This is for a number of reasons, such as shrinkage (self-checkout has a much higher rate than manned checkouts), inefficiency (trained cashiers are significantly faster than customers), lack of functionality (the terminals can only handle basic transactions), etc.
Meanwhile Amazon has essentially destroyed Circuit City, Radioshack, and Borders which are gone entirely. Office Depot, Sears, Barnes & Noble, Aeropostale, and more are shuttering stores all over. Some will continue with an online presence. But that takes decidedly fewer employees in the long term.
And none of that has anything to do with automation, as the numerous stories about the working conditions in Amazon's warehouses attest. It's a mixture of economy of scale for Amazon and gross ineptitude on the part of the retailers.
The speed thing is only true if you ignore waiting (i.e. it's not busy).
We almost always use the self-checkout, since there's just more of them (8 self-checkouts take up the space required for two manned check-outs) and we hardly have to wait.
Anytime we had an issue, one of the two people looking over the self-checkouts came over and sorted us out.
Also no random chit-chat.
This is a classic mistake when we look at situations like this - we overvalue our own anecdotal experience. The simple fact is, given the exact same order, the trained cashier will process it faster than the customer will. Which is perfectly logical - the cashier is doing this operation repeatedly, while the customer is doing it sporadically. Furthermore, the cashier is more robust - they can more easily recover from minor errors (again, thanks to training and experience.)
We think the self-checkout is more "efficient" because we're the ones operating it.
That's not what I said.
I agree that the cashier is a lot quicker than I am at processing my order. The problem comes in that there's not one cashier per customer.
It's a lot quicker for me to complete my pruchase, than it is for a cashier to do four.
Which is great - for you. Problem is, you're not the only person that the store needs to be concerned with. Nor is how fast you can get through the system a solution to the many other issues with automated checkouts.
Again, this is something that occurs regularly - a good example is MMO players complaining about a certain mechanic, like a drop rate, based on their personal experience - ignoring that the game developers can actually see the full statistics of collection by the user base.
Right, but there are still store employees, just less and more skilled (and hopefully better paid) that help us out whenever there's a problem.
Which is the current state of automation (and has been for years).
If worse comes to worse, the supervisor can just scan your groceries using the auto-checkout themselves (which is something that actually happened to me, for some reason)
MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
I wish the automated cashiers for movies was a thing here.
We had them in South Africa, and it was great. Especially as a group.
Made the movie going experience a lot better when you could pick your movie, and seating arrangments directly without going through a teenager.
And it's possible here, they have the same setup, just the computer screens are facing the wrong way.
Only reason I can think of is that here the movie ticket purchases and concessions are the same thing, so having any automated stations would potentially cut into their concessions sales.
There's not really a thing that humans do that can't conceivably be automated.
The arts are already heavily automated.
Automated sex has been around for quite awhile
Sales might be difficult to automate just because it involves people with power, but if you can talk businesses into trusting automated calculations...
At a certain point humans exist basically as a novelty for those humans in power.
But there's the whole Ian Malcolm issue - just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. I keep on hearing that automation is going to suddenly take over all these things, and yet it never quite gets there, because it turns out that while automation is great when everything is fine, all it takes is for one little wrench to go in the gears, and things go pear-shaped rather quickly.
"Never quite" is still continuing to replace a huge amount of the work force.
Automated check outs haven't replaced cashiers entirely but they've replaced a huge amount of them. Automated ordering hasn't removed humans entirely from the supply chain but it's demolished god knows how many brick and mortar companies. And with driverless vehicles on the horizon there's going to be another huge swath of people removed from the service industry as truckers, taxi, delivery, and etc drivers are replaced.
And we absolutely should do it and instead of demanding people compete for jobs, instead support them in doing what they actually want to with a minimum living requirement provided to everyone.
It's interesting that you bring up automated checkouts, because that's an example of my point. Costco just pulled their automated checkouts, replacing them with standard cashier manned lines. Turns out that they don't really save a lot of labor, because there's a lot of stuff that you actually need the attending cashier for. Customer buying an age - restricted item? Attendant. Customer flummoxed by machine? Attendant. Customer borked their order? Attendant. If the attendant is getting called regularly, then the point of automation is lost.
Which is the point - automation is great at regular, repetitive tasks. Put decision making into the mix, and things can go very wrong very fast. Someone brought up automated stock trades, and there have been massive concerns that one of the big parts of our economy is being run by processes we only have partial knowledge of. There have already been "flash crashes" caused by the automated buyers throwing a rod when anomalous data is fed into them, and it's been suggested that a transaction tax be added to stock trades, which would destroy the value of automated trading, which is pretty much built on microarbitrage.
Costco is a single company providing a relatively unique service. The vast majority of supermarkets have no trouble with self checkout because they're limited to under 20 items or whatever. Most people shopping at Costco aren't doing that.
Actually, retail enthusiasm for automated checkout has been on the wane for a few years now. This is for a number of reasons, such as shrinkage (self-checkout has a much higher rate than manned checkouts), inefficiency (trained cashiers are significantly faster than customers), lack of functionality (the terminals can only handle basic transactions), etc.
Meanwhile Amazon has essentially destroyed Circuit City, Radioshack, and Borders which are gone entirely. Office Depot, Sears, Barnes & Noble, Aeropostale, and more are shuttering stores all over. Some will continue with an online presence. But that takes decidedly fewer employees in the long term.
And none of that has anything to do with automation, as the numerous stories about the working conditions in Amazon's warehouses attest. It's a mixture of economy of scale for Amazon and gross ineptitude on the part of the retailers.
The speed thing is only true if you ignore waiting (i.e. it's not busy).
We almost always use the self-checkout, since there's just more of them (8 self-checkouts take up the space required for two manned check-outs) and we hardly have to wait.
Anytime we had an issue, one of the two people looking over the self-checkouts came over and sorted us out.
Also no random chit-chat.
This is a classic mistake when we look at situations like this - we overvalue our own anecdotal experience. The simple fact is, given the exact same order, the trained cashier will process it faster than the customer will. Which is perfectly logical - the cashier is doing this operation repeatedly, while the customer is doing it sporadically. Furthermore, the cashier is more robust - they can more easily recover from minor errors (again, thanks to training and experience.)
We think the self-checkout is more "efficient" because we're the ones operating it.
That's not what I said.
I agree that the cashier is a lot quicker than I am at processing my order. The problem comes in that there's not one cashier per customer.
It's a lot quicker for me to complete my pruchase, than it is for a cashier to do four.
Which is great - for you. Problem is, you're not the only person that the store needs to be concerned with. Nor is how fast you can get through the system a solution to the many other issues with automated checkouts.
Again, this is something that occurs regularly - a good example is MMO players complaining about a certain mechanic, like a drop rate, based on their personal experience - ignoring that the game developers can actually see the full statistics of collection by the user base.
Which is great for the vast majority of people who don't want to just stare in to space waiting for the cashier to finish with the three people in front of them.
You're doing the very thing you're advocating against. Using your personal experience to declare X will never be viable for everyone.
I wish the automated cashiers for movies was a thing here.
We had them in South Africa, and it was great. Especially as a group.
Made the movie going experience a lot better when you could pick your movie, and seating arrangments directly without going through a teenager.
And it's possible here, they have the same setup, just the computer screens are facing the wrong way.
Only reason I can think of is that here the movie ticket purchases and concessions are the same thing, so having any automated stations would potentially cut into their concessions sales.
Eh? In Hawaii and Maryland I've had them. They're awesome!
Though if we were traveling with a group we'd prolly just order online.
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
There's not really a thing that humans do that can't conceivably be automated.
The arts are already heavily automated.
Automated sex has been around for quite awhile
Sales might be difficult to automate just because it involves people with power, but if you can talk businesses into trusting automated calculations...
At a certain point humans exist basically as a novelty for those humans in power.
But there's the whole Ian Malcolm issue - just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. I keep on hearing that automation is going to suddenly take over all these things, and yet it never quite gets there, because it turns out that while automation is great when everything is fine, all it takes is for one little wrench to go in the gears, and things go pear-shaped rather quickly.
"Never quite" is still continuing to replace a huge amount of the work force.
Automated check outs haven't replaced cashiers entirely but they've replaced a huge amount of them. Automated ordering hasn't removed humans entirely from the supply chain but it's demolished god knows how many brick and mortar companies. And with driverless vehicles on the horizon there's going to be another huge swath of people removed from the service industry as truckers, taxi, delivery, and etc drivers are replaced.
And we absolutely should do it and instead of demanding people compete for jobs, instead support them in doing what they actually want to with a minimum living requirement provided to everyone.
It's interesting that you bring up automated checkouts, because that's an example of my point. Costco just pulled their automated checkouts, replacing them with standard cashier manned lines. Turns out that they don't really save a lot of labor, because there's a lot of stuff that you actually need the attending cashier for. Customer buying an age - restricted item? Attendant. Customer flummoxed by machine? Attendant. Customer borked their order? Attendant. If the attendant is getting called regularly, then the point of automation is lost.
Which is the point - automation is great at regular, repetitive tasks. Put decision making into the mix, and things can go very wrong very fast. Someone brought up automated stock trades, and there have been massive concerns that one of the big parts of our economy is being run by processes we only have partial knowledge of. There have already been "flash crashes" caused by the automated buyers throwing a rod when anomalous data is fed into them, and it's been suggested that a transaction tax be added to stock trades, which would destroy the value of automated trading, which is pretty much built on microarbitrage.
Costco is a single company providing a relatively unique service. The vast majority of supermarkets have no trouble with self checkout because they're limited to under 20 items or whatever. Most people shopping at Costco aren't doing that.
Actually, retail enthusiasm for automated checkout has been on the wane for a few years now. This is for a number of reasons, such as shrinkage (self-checkout has a much higher rate than manned checkouts), inefficiency (trained cashiers are significantly faster than customers), lack of functionality (the terminals can only handle basic transactions), etc.
Meanwhile Amazon has essentially destroyed Circuit City, Radioshack, and Borders which are gone entirely. Office Depot, Sears, Barnes & Noble, Aeropostale, and more are shuttering stores all over. Some will continue with an online presence. But that takes decidedly fewer employees in the long term.
And none of that has anything to do with automation, as the numerous stories about the working conditions in Amazon's warehouses attest. It's a mixture of economy of scale for Amazon and gross ineptitude on the part of the retailers.
The speed thing is only true if you ignore waiting (i.e. it's not busy).
We almost always use the self-checkout, since there's just more of them (8 self-checkouts take up the space required for two manned check-outs) and we hardly have to wait.
Anytime we had an issue, one of the two people looking over the self-checkouts came over and sorted us out.
Also no random chit-chat.
This is a classic mistake when we look at situations like this - we overvalue our own anecdotal experience. The simple fact is, given the exact same order, the trained cashier will process it faster than the customer will. Which is perfectly logical - the cashier is doing this operation repeatedly, while the customer is doing it sporadically. Furthermore, the cashier is more robust - they can more easily recover from minor errors (again, thanks to training and experience.)
We think the self-checkout is more "efficient" because we're the ones operating it.
That's not what I said.
I agree that the cashier is a lot quicker than I am at processing my order. The problem comes in that there's not one cashier per customer.
It's a lot quicker for me to complete my pruchase, than it is for a cashier to do four.
Which is great - for you. Problem is, you're not the only person that the store needs to be concerned with. Nor is how fast you can get through the system a solution to the many other issues with automated checkouts.
Again, this is something that occurs regularly - a good example is MMO players complaining about a certain mechanic, like a drop rate, based on their personal experience - ignoring that the game developers can actually see the full statistics of collection by the user base.
Right, but there are still store employees, just less and more skilled (and hopefully better paid) that help us out whenever there's a problem.
Which is the current state of automation (and has been for years).
If worse comes to worse, the supervisor can just scan your groceries using the auto-checkout themselves (which is something that actually happened to me, for some reason)
I'll say that, right now, the ones helping with the self checkout are paid the same minimum wage (or close to it) as the register biscuits are. I have had to scam people's groceries for them through the self scans before, and it's always frustrating because it tends to happen when it's busiest and all of your units need attention, but one fucker is taking up all of your time and ugh I don't want to go back to work tomorrow.
Also, my company has been trading self checkout units out if our stores. Mostly this is because of theft (which would be mitigated if we had the labor to man the damn things all day long), but there is a not insignificant number of customers who hate them and will very loudly tell everyone they can about it.
Captain Marcusnow arrives the hour of actionRegistered Userregular
Ban it and ban free trade. Automation helps Richy Rich and takes bread out of the mouth of the working man while giving him nothing in return. "B-but aren't we competing with India? With the PRC?" I hear you cry. Not with tariffs we aren't! And we want to put in tariffs, both to protect our own industry and because it's inherently unfair for our businesses to compete with nations that put children to work in coal mines and garment factories.
Don't ban automation and instead stop treating people like machines.
But that's not going to happen anytime soon.
We've moved from a culture where you lived down the street from your boss and said hi to him in church to one where people routinely commute twenty, fifty, a hundred miles to work. CEOs have private helicopters so they can fly in to New York from other states and they make hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The average Joe is just a number on a spreadsheet to them; a number that costs money.
I'd argue that the way workers could get a slice of that pie is to decrease the pool of potential workers to increase their value and re-introduce competition, and the fastest way to do that would be to ban free trade (he's not valuable if his job can be moved to Korea at any time), outsourcing (ditto), and automation (he's not valuable if his job is taken by a robot). It's the same reason why we on the right are against illegal immigration (it introduces a vast amount of cheap competition for American workers), although I feel that focusing in on illegals and ignoring shipping jobs to other countries is missing the elephant in the room.
As far as the "BRICS rising" thing goes, we lead the world in innovation and creativity- there's a reason why everyone steals our intellectual property. There's no reason why we can't lead the world in worker happiness except for Silicon Valley libertarian dipshits.
Automation stopping or being banned isn't going to stop any time soon. Deciding we should become luddites isn't a viable option. Culture will change same as it has with every advance ever.
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Captain Marcusnow arrives the hour of actionRegistered Userregular
Yeah, for the worse. Already it's possible to order your groceries through an app, thereby avoiding the chance of personal contact at the grocery store. It's also possible to have your apartment cleaned by an invisible, faceless person while you're at work through the "Alfred" app. At least in the old days you gave the butler a Christmas bonus. Now the butler doesn't share in the wealth at all, and the rich get to turn into hikikomori.
Automation is pretty much inevitable. If we stick with the current fucked up state of affairs, the greedy rich will push for it because they can't get more money, by having to hire less people. If we get out of the shitty setup, we'd still automate things because their are plenty of shit jobs, that no one really wants to work. After that, there are plenty of difficult jobs, where a well designed bot could do a much better job than humans.
When one loses their jobs to the bots, really depends on how easy it is to program a bot to do the job. I think we'll get some great laughs towards the end because it's not going to be a gradually progression from unskilled labor to careers that require doctorates degrees. We've already hit the point, where there is some skipping because the steps for some jobs can't be cleanly delegated to bots, since they aren't quite yet capable of seeing or thinking the way humans do.
Don't ban automation and instead stop treating people like machines.
But that's not going to happen anytime soon.
We've moved from a culture where you lived down the street from your boss and said hi to him in church to one where people routinely commute twenty, fifty, a hundred miles to work. CEOs have private helicopters so they can fly in to New York from other states and they make hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The average Joe is just a number on a spreadsheet to them; a number that costs money.
I'd argue that the way workers could get a slice of that pie is to decrease the pool of potential workers to increase their value and re-introduce competition, and the fastest way to do that would be to ban free trade (he's not valuable if his job can be moved to Korea at any time), outsourcing (ditto), and automation (he's not valuable if his job is taken by a robot). It's the same reason why we on the right are against illegal immigration (it introduces a vast amount of cheap competition for American workers), although I feel that focusing in on illegals and ignoring shipping jobs to other countries is missing the elephant in the room.
As far as the "BRICS rising" thing goes, we lead the world in innovation and creativity- there's a reason why everyone steals our intellectual property. There's no reason why we can't lead the world in worker happiness except for Silicon Valley libertarian dipshits.
Uh.... This period of time where management was not horrible?
When are you talking about? I'm going to guess some point in time just after a world war, where American was overly industrialized, unions where strong, and the rest of the world was putting itself back together?
I mean, much before that and we basically had a command economy, before that were huge recessions and Pinkerton Detectives gunning down union organizers.
And well, then there was the 70s and 80s after?
They moistly come out at night, moistly.
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Captain Marcusnow arrives the hour of actionRegistered Userregular
Uh.... This period of time where management was not horrible?
At least not as horrible as current management- the other part of the sentence "What is good for General Motors is good for America" was "and what is good for America is good for General Motors". Back when companies were run by inventors or engineers, not MBAs who lay off an entire plant for a five-dollar increase in the stock price.
When are you talking about? I'm going to guess some point in time just after a world war, where American was overly industrialized, unions where strong, and the rest of the world was putting itself back together?
I mean, much before that and we basically had a command economy, before that were huge recessions and Pinkerton Detectives gunning down union organizers.
And well, then there was the 70s and 80s after?
In the 70s and 80s we still had factories where you could get a good job right out of high school, so yes, I'd be for a return to those times. I like cashiers, I like people being employed, and I hate watching the middle and working class fight amongst themselves for the scraps the ultra-rich throw to them. Passing legislation to halt automation and end free trade is more feasible than convincing the rich to give a shit about the rest of us, and you guys still haven't convinced me as to why kicking people out of jobs is a good thing. I'm arguing that we should try to halt this thing, or at least slow it down, and everyone in the thread's throwing up their hands and going "welp, this sure sucks". Automation doesn't help the consumer (the profits go to the CEO and the shareholders), it actively harms the working man, and the only person it helps is the billionaire.
Really I thought you guys would be angrier about this, but it sounds like you're going along with it.
Uh.... This period of time where management was not horrible?
At least not as horrible as current management- the other part of the sentence "What is good for General Motors is good for America" was "and what is good for America is good for General Motors". Back when companies were run by inventors or engineers, not MBAs who lay off an entire plant for a five-dollar increase in the stock price.
When are you talking about? I'm going to guess some point in time just after a world war, where American was overly industrialized, unions where strong, and the rest of the world was putting itself back together?
I mean, much before that and we basically had a command economy, before that were huge recessions and Pinkerton Detectives gunning down union organizers.
And well, then there was the 70s and 80s after?
In the 70s and 80s we still had factories where you could get a good job right out of high school, so yes, I'd be for a return to those times. I like cashiers, I like people being employed, and I hate watching the middle and working class fight amongst themselves for the scraps the ultra-rich throw to them. Passing legislation to halt automation and end free trade is more feasible than convincing the rich to give a shit about the rest of us, and you guys still haven't convinced me as to why kicking people out of jobs is a good thing. I'm arguing that we should try to halt this thing, or at least slow it down, and everyone in the thread's throwing up their hands and going "welp, this sure sucks". Automation doesn't help the consumer (the profits go to the CEO and the shareholders), it actively harms the working man, and the only person it helps is the billionaire.
Really I thought you guys would be angrier about this, but it sounds like you're going along with it.
Because the arguments you're using have been the arguments that people who are wrong have been using since the invention of any machine ever.
Video Games will make your children mass murderers!
Industrialization will destroy the world!
The Printing Press will destroy education!...
..Wheel bonk Ogg!
Needing higher education to get a job is only a problem because we haven't made getting higher education easy enough yet.
You're arguing that we need a dumber population held back from technological advancement because you would rather recreate a time that never actually existed.
You're advocating the destruction of the USA as a modern country because you can't tell that Leave it to Beaver was fiction.
Really I thought you guys would be angrier about this, but it sounds like you're going along with it.
We're going with it because you could fit the power of an Apple II into a chip the size of a period 35 years after its first inception, and a top-of-the-line PC from 15 years ago is the equal to a $9 wallet-sized circuit board today. When a set of server racks can out-imagine world class chefs, sum up brief pro and con arguments on most debate topics on the fly, offer precise treatment suggestions to doctors, file legal documents faster than an army of interns, and beat Ken Jennings like a rented mule at Jeapordy, it's hard to see how you think we haven't already gone along with this. The inexorable advancement of computing technology and programming techniques has taken us from spread sheets and word processing to literal learning machines, and thinking you could stop this by breaking a few metaphorical looms and crippling the national economy is ludicrous.
Basically the answer to people no longer having to work shitty jobs isn't to demand people continue to work shitty jobs.
That's the most important part of this. Automation is removing shitty jobs. Obviously we need to work on the social structures, but no one says, "Yeah, thank god I'm a cashier! This is what I've always wanted to do!" Or the same for taking a metal object, punching a hole 1 cm +/- 0.01 cm from all edges, and then repeating that 2000 more times per day, every day, for twenty years. It'll be a union job, so less bad than being a subsistence farmer or whatever, but not exactly the pinnacle of human achievement, and the machines can do it better.
Moreover, trying to turn back the clock is almost certainly both impossible and extremely dangerous. I don't want to get into a trade war, and then in 2100 in America we'll live in some blue collar bubble that includes just us, while China is deciding if they want to send in the Terminators or not to subjugate us, because they didn't reject the future.
Read "The Jungle". It's only 109 years old at this point.
What does a book about the plight of immigrants and food safety matter to this thread?
It's a book about humans being the replaceable commodity. About an unorganized, non-unionized workforce with no power and no choice but to accept dangerous and often deadly employment for a pittance. It's about no workplace safety laws, no child labor laws, about companies literally owning peoples lives. Just who do you think could afford a butler to give a bonus to back then? Not the guy losing a hand in the rendering plant. Or the coal miner dying of black lung. Or the construction worker crushed to death by an unsecured load. And certainly not any of their families, who got nothing. No, that would be the millionaires giving their butlers bonuses, back when unchecked capitalism meant corporations were chewing through the working class. You know, back in the old days.
Or maybe you meant back when women didn't work outside the home, or if they did, it was in an extremely hostile environment rife with sexual harassment.
Or maybe you meant back when blacks used separate drinking fountains, and entered through separate entrances, and the best they could hope for was to be part of the servant class, or to do backbreaking manual labor with zero job security.
Or maybe you meant Johnson's chicken tax, you know, the "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" deal he made with the UAW to curtail foreign imports of light trucks because the domestic market was already struggling to compete. In 1964. Back when companies were run by "inventors or engineers." Hm, lets see, just who was running GM in 1964? Why, Frederic G. Donner, who
"...graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in economics, worked briefly for a Chicago accounting firm, and then joined General Motors's New York staff as an accountant."
Really I thought you guys would be angrier about this, but it sounds like you're going along with it.
We're going with it because you could fit the power of an Apple II into a chip the size of a period 35 years after its first inception, and a top-of-the-line PC from 15 years ago is the equal to a $9 wallet-sized circuit board today. When a set of server racks can out-imagine world class chefs, sum up brief pro and con arguments on most debate topics on the fly, offer precise treatment suggestions to doctors, file legal documents faster than an army of interns, and beat Ken Jennings like a rented mule at Jeapordy, it's hard to see how you think we haven't already gone along with this. The inexorable advancement of computing technology and programming techniques has taken us from spread sheets and word processing to literal learning machines, and thinking you could stop this by breaking a few metaphorical looms and crippling the national economy is ludicrous.
Because Watson is so interesting to me: Watson might have won primarily on the back of having perfect reaction times. By virtue of having a given point you are allowed to buzz in and Watson always buzzing in near that time, Watson could beat anybody even if they knew all the answers. And since Jeopardy is primarily surface level trivia, I'd say the majority of (strong) contestants probably could get more than half the answers; the questions are designed to be a mix of questions between totally obvious to everybody at home, to pretty obvious for anybody who knows the field; if you take the online Jeopardy practice test I'm almost certain any random person could get 50% or better. I'd be interested to see if Watson could compete at e.g. collegiate Quiz Bowl, where you can buzz in at any point but the clues are much more vague until the end; that would be a huge refinement and show the flexibility of the program.
Likewise, medical reporting is interesting because there are issues that prevent its complete adoption; patient records may not be complete and symptoms may still need to be spotted by doctors, so you still need doctors to deal with what is basically a very robust WebMD. I don't think that's a huge candidate for immediate automation so much as it is a candidate for assistance and maybe lightening the workload of doctors, and possibly leading to a hiring drought similar to what recent law school graduates have complained about.
Going broader, I think in general there are three issues with automation. There's how automatable the job is, operating costs, and fixed (one-time) costs. Going with the supermarket example:
The job isn't fully automatable, because certain things (age-restricted items, troublesome customers, extreme couponing, theft/misrepresenting produce) require support. So the service quality from an automated checkout may go down compared to performing the same checkout with an experienced cashier. In terms of operating costs, it may still cost a significant amount of money to operate, since you may still need two full-time employees to supervise the (less efficient) self checkout stand and a technician to work on them occasionally; while it may save money, it doesn't fully eliminate operating costs. Finally, the fixed costs might be hard to justify in some cases since the technology might be expensive; it's probably pretty low, though.
Pretty much all jobs have some issues like that. Automating operators at an oil refinery might save a ton on operating costs (pun not intended), but it's likely to pose safety issues and the implementation would have huge fixed costs (like, 10 year ROI) that wouldn't be worth justifying given the increased risk of process failure. For now, a lot of places aren't willing to spend the long term investment on unproven automation technology in positions that are only sort-of automatable. I think that while it won't fit perfectly, it's definitely the lower-skill jobs that are going to be fully automated long before higher-skill, more decision based jobs are automated. WebMD-bot isn't the same as having a real doctor look at you, while TruckBot is pretty much going to get from point A to point B the same way a trucker would (once the unloading/loading problem is solved).
Posts
Amazon is an interesting example because of how many people who get paid fuck all to work their asses off in their DCs.
Sticking unexpectedly sized thing into other things is difficult to automate.
The speed thing is only true if you ignore waiting (i.e. it's not busy).
We almost always use the self-checkout, since there's just more of them (8 self-checkouts take up the space required for two manned check-outs) and we hardly have to wait.
Anytime we had an issue, one of the two people looking over the self-checkouts came over and sorted us out.
Also no random chit-chat.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Because those automations eventually become cheaper and more reliable as technology advances. Pretty much every time.
For the first part, the same could be said for checkouts with POS systems 30 years ago. People loathed those things. For the second part it has everything to do with automation. The conditions in the warehouses are indeed shitty. But they're also guided by a computer deciding where people need to get things. And by a computer recommending me things. And by a computer providing a route. And soon by a computer driving/flying that route. Or, for a lot of stuff now, by a computer immediately uploading what I want. Claiming automation has nothing to do with a largely automated process is ridiculous.
They don't need to work to live. We automate all those shit jobs, increase production in the process, the work still gets done. There are still burgers or whatever.
People do typically do need to do things to feel fulfilled. Feed, house and cloathe everyone, give them access to the internet.
I wouldn't mind living in a world where everyone that labored did so cause the found their work fulfilling. Like where everything was either mass produced totally by machine or the work of an artisan or whatever.
Shrug.
While it might not be screwing around on the internet for everybody, a lot of work is still being busy for that sweet 8 hours a day for no reason other than those being the rules. The standard is a 40 hour work week, so you do whatever it is you do spread out over those 40 hours.
All our customer's newer plants have automated stock moving. It's pretty cool actually, and involves little to no human interaction.
And almost all the planning and scheduling is done by computers. (Which I think is the bigger advantage. It ups effeciency and allows for a much larger scale of production)
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/what-if-everybody-didnt-have-to-work-to-get-paid/393428/
This is a classic mistake when we look at situations like this - we overvalue our own anecdotal experience. The simple fact is, given the exact same order, the trained cashier will process it faster than the customer will. Which is perfectly logical - the cashier is doing this operation repeatedly, while the customer is doing it sporadically. Furthermore, the cashier is more robust - they can more easily recover from minor errors (again, thanks to training and experience.)
We think the self-checkout is more "efficient" because we're the ones operating it.
My point is that automation can be speeded up by making sure people don't need to work for cheap because they don't have any other option. That supermarkets go back to cashiers is not because self-check out doesn't work but because cashiers are still cheaper because people need to work to eat.
Once people don't need to work to eat (because of a basic income for example) they will be far less willing to work as a cashier and certainly not for so little money. Which creates an incentive for improving automation.
Basically society's obsession with people working is holding us back.
That's not what I said.
I agree that the cashier is a lot quicker than I am at processing my order. The problem comes in that there's not one cashier per customer.
It's a lot quicker for me to complete my pruchase, than it is for a cashier to do four.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Oh I totally agree.
It's a mistake to allow anything important to be part of a voluntary insurance scheme, particularly for minors. Insurance is best used for luxuries, like an accidental damage plan for a gaming laptop. That person doesn't need a $2000 replacement if they drop it, but if they are risk adverse they can get it. For health, insurance is shit, as we've seen. Obamacare works not completely terribly precisely because it is mandatory, which stops healthy people from all opting out and fucking up the premiums, and stops dumb people from opting out and going bankrupt. As we get closer to a post-labor society, it should also be a post-monetary society, and all this stuff should simply be included by virtue of being a person. If your house burns down, you get temporary quarters and put in the queue for the robot builders to make a new one.
For the child angle, well, if you work in a bad guy facing industry (social services, policing, etc), it is really obvious that parents shouldn't be allowed too much leeway to make decisions for their kids. At the very least provide it to all people under 21.
As to the general concept, we can and should automate almost everything, but we need to setup government, economic, legal, and social systems to make them work properly. The current system of society is actually really shit, where a huge number of all people are forced to work an unpleasant job for too little money just to survive, and a post-labor society can be a utopia, but we need to work to make it one. Because the alternative is a lot of bored, angry poor people who have no future and have nothing to lose from burning society down, and I'd go so far as to say a moral right to do so, and that's not a future anyone wants.
Which is great - for you. Problem is, you're not the only person that the store needs to be concerned with. Nor is how fast you can get through the system a solution to the many other issues with automated checkouts.
Again, this is something that occurs regularly - a good example is MMO players complaining about a certain mechanic, like a drop rate, based on their personal experience - ignoring that the game developers can actually see the full statistics of collection by the user base.
Right, but there are still store employees, just less and more skilled (and hopefully better paid) that help us out whenever there's a problem.
Which is the current state of automation (and has been for years).
If worse comes to worse, the supervisor can just scan your groceries using the auto-checkout themselves (which is something that actually happened to me, for some reason)
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
We had them in South Africa, and it was great. Especially as a group.
Made the movie going experience a lot better when you could pick your movie, and seating arrangments directly without going through a teenager.
And it's possible here, they have the same setup, just the computer screens are facing the wrong way.
Only reason I can think of is that here the movie ticket purchases and concessions are the same thing, so having any automated stations would potentially cut into their concessions sales.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Which is great for the vast majority of people who don't want to just stare in to space waiting for the cashier to finish with the three people in front of them.
You're doing the very thing you're advocating against. Using your personal experience to declare X will never be viable for everyone.
Eh? In Hawaii and Maryland I've had them. They're awesome!
Though if we were traveling with a group we'd prolly just order online.
I'll say that, right now, the ones helping with the self checkout are paid the same minimum wage (or close to it) as the register biscuits are. I have had to scam people's groceries for them through the self scans before, and it's always frustrating because it tends to happen when it's busiest and all of your units need attention, but one fucker is taking up all of your time and ugh I don't want to go back to work tomorrow.
Also, my company has been trading self checkout units out if our stores. Mostly this is because of theft (which would be mitigated if we had the labor to man the damn things all day long), but there is a not insignificant number of customers who hate them and will very loudly tell everyone they can about it.
And hear me out here
Don't ban automation and instead stop treating people like machines.
We've moved from a culture where you lived down the street from your boss and said hi to him in church to one where people routinely commute twenty, fifty, a hundred miles to work. CEOs have private helicopters so they can fly in to New York from other states and they make hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The average Joe is just a number on a spreadsheet to them; a number that costs money.
I'd argue that the way workers could get a slice of that pie is to decrease the pool of potential workers to increase their value and re-introduce competition, and the fastest way to do that would be to ban free trade (he's not valuable if his job can be moved to Korea at any time), outsourcing (ditto), and automation (he's not valuable if his job is taken by a robot). It's the same reason why we on the right are against illegal immigration (it introduces a vast amount of cheap competition for American workers), although I feel that focusing in on illegals and ignoring shipping jobs to other countries is missing the elephant in the room.
As far as the "BRICS rising" thing goes, we lead the world in innovation and creativity- there's a reason why everyone steals our intellectual property. There's no reason why we can't lead the world in worker happiness except for Silicon Valley libertarian dipshits.
amazon is automating their warehouses
like
right now
they deployed 15000 of those fkin robots over christmas
robots are coming beep boop it is inevitable i am a robot
This was actually a big part of the discussion on page 1, and is also addressed in the title.
So far our possible seem to be: Basic Income or Mad Max.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Read "The Jungle". It's only 109 years old at this point.
Yes I agree at current standards people can't survive in the long term.
Which means the best option is to change the standards. Not demand society stagnate.
When one loses their jobs to the bots, really depends on how easy it is to program a bot to do the job. I think we'll get some great laughs towards the end because it's not going to be a gradually progression from unskilled labor to careers that require doctorates degrees. We've already hit the point, where there is some skipping because the steps for some jobs can't be cleanly delegated to bots, since they aren't quite yet capable of seeing or thinking the way humans do.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
Uh.... This period of time where management was not horrible?
When are you talking about? I'm going to guess some point in time just after a world war, where American was overly industrialized, unions where strong, and the rest of the world was putting itself back together?
I mean, much before that and we basically had a command economy, before that were huge recessions and Pinkerton Detectives gunning down union organizers.
And well, then there was the 70s and 80s after?
At least not as horrible as current management- the other part of the sentence "What is good for General Motors is good for America" was "and what is good for America is good for General Motors". Back when companies were run by inventors or engineers, not MBAs who lay off an entire plant for a five-dollar increase in the stock price.
In the 70s and 80s we still had factories where you could get a good job right out of high school, so yes, I'd be for a return to those times. I like cashiers, I like people being employed, and I hate watching the middle and working class fight amongst themselves for the scraps the ultra-rich throw to them. Passing legislation to halt automation and end free trade is more feasible than convincing the rich to give a shit about the rest of us, and you guys still haven't convinced me as to why kicking people out of jobs is a good thing. I'm arguing that we should try to halt this thing, or at least slow it down, and everyone in the thread's throwing up their hands and going "welp, this sure sucks". Automation doesn't help the consumer (the profits go to the CEO and the shareholders), it actively harms the working man, and the only person it helps is the billionaire.
Really I thought you guys would be angrier about this, but it sounds like you're going along with it.
Because the arguments you're using have been the arguments that people who are wrong have been using since the invention of any machine ever.
Video Games will make your children mass murderers!
Industrialization will destroy the world!
The Printing Press will destroy education!...
..Wheel bonk Ogg!
Needing higher education to get a job is only a problem because we haven't made getting higher education easy enough yet.
You're arguing that we need a dumber population held back from technological advancement because you would rather recreate a time that never actually existed.
You're advocating the destruction of the USA as a modern country because you can't tell that Leave it to Beaver was fiction.
We're going with it because you could fit the power of an Apple II into a chip the size of a period 35 years after its first inception, and a top-of-the-line PC from 15 years ago is the equal to a $9 wallet-sized circuit board today. When a set of server racks can out-imagine world class chefs, sum up brief pro and con arguments on most debate topics on the fly, offer precise treatment suggestions to doctors, file legal documents faster than an army of interns, and beat Ken Jennings like a rented mule at Jeapordy, it's hard to see how you think we haven't already gone along with this. The inexorable advancement of computing technology and programming techniques has taken us from spread sheets and word processing to literal learning machines, and thinking you could stop this by breaking a few metaphorical looms and crippling the national economy is ludicrous.
That's the most important part of this. Automation is removing shitty jobs. Obviously we need to work on the social structures, but no one says, "Yeah, thank god I'm a cashier! This is what I've always wanted to do!" Or the same for taking a metal object, punching a hole 1 cm +/- 0.01 cm from all edges, and then repeating that 2000 more times per day, every day, for twenty years. It'll be a union job, so less bad than being a subsistence farmer or whatever, but not exactly the pinnacle of human achievement, and the machines can do it better.
Moreover, trying to turn back the clock is almost certainly both impossible and extremely dangerous. I don't want to get into a trade war, and then in 2100 in America we'll live in some blue collar bubble that includes just us, while China is deciding if they want to send in the Terminators or not to subjugate us, because they didn't reject the future.
It's a book about humans being the replaceable commodity. About an unorganized, non-unionized workforce with no power and no choice but to accept dangerous and often deadly employment for a pittance. It's about no workplace safety laws, no child labor laws, about companies literally owning peoples lives. Just who do you think could afford a butler to give a bonus to back then? Not the guy losing a hand in the rendering plant. Or the coal miner dying of black lung. Or the construction worker crushed to death by an unsecured load. And certainly not any of their families, who got nothing. No, that would be the millionaires giving their butlers bonuses, back when unchecked capitalism meant corporations were chewing through the working class. You know, back in the old days.
Or maybe you meant back when women didn't work outside the home, or if they did, it was in an extremely hostile environment rife with sexual harassment.
Or maybe you meant back when blacks used separate drinking fountains, and entered through separate entrances, and the best they could hope for was to be part of the servant class, or to do backbreaking manual labor with zero job security.
Or maybe you meant Johnson's chicken tax, you know, the "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" deal he made with the UAW to curtail foreign imports of light trucks because the domestic market was already struggling to compete. In 1964. Back when companies were run by "inventors or engineers." Hm, lets see, just who was running GM in 1964? Why, Frederic G. Donner, who
Inventor and engineer indeed!
Because Watson is so interesting to me: Watson might have won primarily on the back of having perfect reaction times. By virtue of having a given point you are allowed to buzz in and Watson always buzzing in near that time, Watson could beat anybody even if they knew all the answers. And since Jeopardy is primarily surface level trivia, I'd say the majority of (strong) contestants probably could get more than half the answers; the questions are designed to be a mix of questions between totally obvious to everybody at home, to pretty obvious for anybody who knows the field; if you take the online Jeopardy practice test I'm almost certain any random person could get 50% or better. I'd be interested to see if Watson could compete at e.g. collegiate Quiz Bowl, where you can buzz in at any point but the clues are much more vague until the end; that would be a huge refinement and show the flexibility of the program.
Likewise, medical reporting is interesting because there are issues that prevent its complete adoption; patient records may not be complete and symptoms may still need to be spotted by doctors, so you still need doctors to deal with what is basically a very robust WebMD. I don't think that's a huge candidate for immediate automation so much as it is a candidate for assistance and maybe lightening the workload of doctors, and possibly leading to a hiring drought similar to what recent law school graduates have complained about.
Going broader, I think in general there are three issues with automation. There's how automatable the job is, operating costs, and fixed (one-time) costs. Going with the supermarket example:
The job isn't fully automatable, because certain things (age-restricted items, troublesome customers, extreme couponing, theft/misrepresenting produce) require support. So the service quality from an automated checkout may go down compared to performing the same checkout with an experienced cashier. In terms of operating costs, it may still cost a significant amount of money to operate, since you may still need two full-time employees to supervise the (less efficient) self checkout stand and a technician to work on them occasionally; while it may save money, it doesn't fully eliminate operating costs. Finally, the fixed costs might be hard to justify in some cases since the technology might be expensive; it's probably pretty low, though.
Pretty much all jobs have some issues like that. Automating operators at an oil refinery might save a ton on operating costs (pun not intended), but it's likely to pose safety issues and the implementation would have huge fixed costs (like, 10 year ROI) that wouldn't be worth justifying given the increased risk of process failure. For now, a lot of places aren't willing to spend the long term investment on unproven automation technology in positions that are only sort-of automatable. I think that while it won't fit perfectly, it's definitely the lower-skill jobs that are going to be fully automated long before higher-skill, more decision based jobs are automated. WebMD-bot isn't the same as having a real doctor look at you, while TruckBot is pretty much going to get from point A to point B the same way a trucker would (once the unloading/loading problem is solved).