People freed from chores fear for their income. Guess it's about time for universal income.
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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People freed from chores fear for their income. Guess it’s about time for ~~universal income.~~ fully automated luxury gay space communism
I really wanna hear what the proposal is for removing "unqualified" jobs en masse without implementing universal basic income.
The low pay and bad conditions of "unqualified" jobs often gets excused because they, allegedly, are "stepping stones", a means of sustaining oneself while working towards more specialized careers.
If you destroy a significant amount of those positions, where does that leave those people? Are we so drunk on cyberpunk-esque lust of AI evolution that we are fine eliminating the means of entry to society for so many?
You're making a fundamentally bad assumption: that this is in any way "good faith".
The billionaires and giant corporations can make more money by employing less people. That's it.
It's limitless greed. They don't care about living wages or "stepping stones" or funding the country or how many people get thrown out onto the street. It sounds like I'm exaggerating, but it's the truth and we're all witnessing it. This is capitalism run amok: They can become even richer and nothing matters more than that.
We don't have to let corporations rule us. If voters weren't so fucking brainwashed we could make a system that works for everyone. I'm hoping at some point it will be too obvious for anytime not to notice that a system where give swathes of the population are just left to starve isn't something we can tolerate.
The solution is - instead of rejecting technology, which isn't going anywhere and will only progress and can't be stopped, because under capitalism it will lead to workers starving - we reject capitalism.
It's literally the only way that would actually prevent people from suffering (and significantly help the planet, too).
https://www.globallearning-cuba.com/blog-umlthe-view-from-the-southuml/marx-on-automated-industry
The problem is that humans are really bad at caring for unproductive people. If you use wealth generated by natural resources as a proxy for wealth generated by robot labor, humans have a bad record of distributing the material wealth.
If it's anything like Maggie's legacy in the UK. It just leads to generations of poverty and society degradation that even now don't look like they will be reversed. Like it's mad that life was better when people crawled in a hole to mine coal by hand.
But hey it least it was an excuse for a party when she died.
"Technology was a strike issue and one of the very last issues to be resolved,” said Ted Pappageorge, the Culinary Workers Union's secretary-treasurer who led the teams that negotiated new five-year contracts, narrowly averting a historic strike at more than a dozen hotel-casinos on the Strip."
The thing is, once robots are good enough to replace the workers, the hotels won't care about the strike. So now 5 years from now, if the robots are good enough than the jobs are gone.
I think the only time I've ever seen/heard of robots in jobs like this that I can accept would be how in one cafe in Tokyo where disabled people pilot robot staff. If anything, that's the best solution for robotic staff doing customer service jobs if it ever comes down to all humans are replaced by robots.
Robots don't tell the press when the owner has it use ground up sheet rock instead of flour.
Then bones
I always feel like people are gaslighting me when they pretend to be impressed by someone pouring a little heart pattern into the top of a hot drink.
“Oh, this is barista coffee darling!” Why is there not a special job title like that for people who flip burgers good?
We already have fully automatic coffee machines - and they make shit coffee. Adding a robotic arm will not help because it's not about mechanical control it's about getting the process right and consistently repeatable. And that can be done without AI if anyone wanted to invest enough money.
Most coffee places use automatic coffee machines, as long as they have good beans the coffee is good. Getting the correct weight of grounds and tamping them down is not a process difficult to automate.
You are objectively wrong about coffee. You are leaving out a whole world of variables that easily effect the coffee and are the difference between a bad coffee shop and a great one. Water quality, water temperature, grind size, grind consistency, tamp pressure, bed consistency are all huge and we haven’t even gotten to roasting the beans, dialing in an espresso machine for a certain bean, etc…
Most coffee shops use automatic machines for their drip coffee and nothing else
I didn't leave the other variables out. A human in the loop doesn't change grind size or consistency. A human in the loop doesn't change water quality, or temperature. A human in the loop won't change bean quality.
Tamp pressure is more consistent with automated machines vs humans. It is much easier to dial in a shot for particular beans/roast, you can literally dial it in, that's why coffee shops use automatic machines. Those machines are not the cheap ones they can cost up to $10k. Over half the coffee shops in my area use automatic machines.
I'm from Australia, and visit Germany regularly.
Australian coffee is sublime. Made manually, it's a profession of pride for many, and in all my travels to many countries, the coffee of Australia has never been bested.
German coffee is made through exact, automated machines, and it's crap. It's some of the worst coffee I've experienced.
Machine after machine, I've tried them all, and I've given up.
I don't know what the human does, but whatever they do that the machine is not doing, makes av huge difference, and no manufacturer has cracked the magic formula yet.
I can't help but feel like your sampling might be skewed.
Vollautomaten (I. E. Fully automated coffee machines that brew espressos and cappuccinos etc) tend to make worse coffee, I agree. That's why I don't use the one in the office.
Having an experienced barista grind you an exactly measured dose fresh for your coffee at a good Café is quite nice, on the other hand.
But that's nothing to do with Germany or Australia.
I've had the opposite experience, my regular coffee shop uses an automatic machine. They have the best espresso in the area, it might help that they roast their own beans.
Experienced humans know all the variables - roast levels, grind size, water temperature, slight differences in timing depending on exact coffee in question... And more importantly they can apply them intuitively without mentally processing each variable separately.
Machines could do all that but such a machine would need good programming (expensive) and a lot of sensors (expensive).
So you're saying there's a chance? How far away do you estimate this threshold is reached? My personal guess would be within 15-20 years.
It already happened 15-20 years ago for 90% of people.
Coffee snobs (myself included) sometimes forget that the vast majority of people just want a cup of brown that makes them feel slightly less like shit.
I've been hearing talk of mechanised coffee makers/baristas taking over for over 20 years now. In this current AI hype environment it's pretty easy to believe that now's the time. And sometimes hype can make that happen if everyone believes it's the time for it.
I'm not in the robotics space but I can imagine that more pervasive ML and/or DL techniques can bring the field forward. Whether they translates to better automatic coffee machines though? I think I'm doubtful just because of how much of the job is random fine motor control stuff. Though, to be fair, so many coffee places, even good ones, have so much variance in the quality of their product that they don't control for because they don't have to that I can see machines doing on average a better job in many cases ... where again, with AI hype, people may just be happy to accept and embrace that. I'd certainly go try coffee from a coffee robot now.
Which of course gets to the potentially oncoming reality for a lot of people ... climate change + job automation ... over a 5-30 year time scale, shit's about to get whack.
Crazy to read about the McDonald's where you don't interact with anyone but pretty sure they still have people in the back cooking the food
Oh yea ... and happening more and more.
Just a local burger joint near me started installing automatic ordering interfaces/computers. At first I was confused that it'd be worth it for them as they don't have the most amount of business. Then I realised that their demand spikes massively and is rather variable. So, instead of hiring people for shifts that are too long such that they will just stand around for most of it ... they're investing in machines so that what little staff they can afford can be stretched more during peak demand times.
I was on the outskirts of this robotics transformation.
The robotic arm stuff is the game changer. It's such a general purpose machine. It's very impressive but not quite perfect and the vision is very impressive but not quite perfect. When I seen it, it was very almost there but because it couldn't do that 1% it couldn't replace humans at all. It really feels like it just needs to be that little bit better and the world will change.
Well that was almost 5 years ago. One day, maybe it's here, the floodgates will open.
Yep, that makes complete sense.
This would be good news in less shit economic system where access to food/shelter etc isn't tied to employment.
We need to focus less on protecting jobs, and more on protecting people.
The problem is that any job is going to be targeted for automation in high income countries because the cost of the worker is going to be far higher than the equipment.
The problem is the system that requires people to have jobs just to live.
Yeah, but it is going to be an adjustment for society to decide what to do when a large segment of the population will never be economically or otherwise productive.
Toss them out