https://twitter.com/NerdistExtreme/status/1593796398188986368
Automation in the US currently means two digital ordering kiosks and one person on the register at Mickey D's, instead of two or three people on the register. They're not automating anyone's jobs out of existence, they're just cutting people's hours and fucking up their schedules to minimize labor costs.
Edit: not saying this to argue or even disagree with you. Burger flipping bots are not on the horizon.
one person on the register at Mickey D’s, instead of two or three
That is automating jobs out of existence, it's just at a much smaller scale (and with worse results) than what was hyped.
It's not even automation, it's offloading the job of reporting orders from cashiers to the customer! Now I punch in the thing that tells the people in the back to make my burger order, instead of a cashier punching it in and printing out an order-slip and handing it back there. Credit cards automated who counts the money in a transaction, but VISA doesn't get to use the 'automation' buzzword.
Self-Checkouts are especially annoying for this, you expect me to properly type in product codes for produce instead of having a cashier who knows the code for romaine lettuce off the top of their head! You didn't automate any labour away, you just rearranged who does it, made it take longer, and I don't even get a discount for doing a job you should hire someone else to do.
I don’t even get a discount for doing a job you should hire someone else to do.
You can always give your self a five finger discount at self checkout.
Automating jobs out of existence is one way of viewing it, another is that the socially necessary labour time required to transform so many shipments of frozen burgers and french fries into so much sold fast food is adjusting.
As someone who's eaten a lot of fast food, it doesn't seem to me that they actually cut back on workers. There was always just one or maybe two folks working the registers. Maybe the kiosks prevent lines from forming as much but not like that gets you your food any faster as there are still likely the same number of workers, as the automatic burger flipper has yet to be invented...
As someone who works in manufacturing, "automation" is vastly overrated and people like this who think you could actually replace a significant number of people with automation have absolutely no clue what they are talking about. That or they're selling snake-oil to C-level managers.
Yeah I think people are going to look back on the AI hype of this era the same way we look at the AI hype of the late 1960s today: absurdly overoptimistic beyond all reason.
So...I think you're right...but you're actually right in a way that kinda keeps me up at night.
Fun fact I think about sometimes is that being a manager at a local bank actually used to be a relatively big deal because it was sort of up to your discretion when and who to give out loans to. Eventually this entire vetting process was completely supplanted by the credit score and bank managers became glorified sales reps. Physical bank locations themselves, at this point, have become almost laughable in how redundant they are.
They and the positions filling them have, in fact, become automated.
People talk about the automation revolution being bunk but from my perspective it's actually just happening in the reverse order a lot of people imagined.
One of the reasons I think a lot of middle and even upper management types are so defensive about their positions is that deep down they know (especially as compared to their counterparts generations ago) they don't actually do or contribute anything.
Because the truth is that crunching numbers, running logistics, and solving case instances based on provided situations is and always has been the thing that computers excel at. The computers mostly took over those jobs years ago.
These kinds of dudes have never worked under a dumbass boss in their lives, because they are the dumbass boss
These kinds of dudes have never worked
:this:
Just doing On The Computer jobs where you move one set of numbers on a spreadsheet over to another. Then applaud your own genius until someone leaks your accounting records
Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, Chapter Seven: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value
:maybe-later-kiddo: "The workers couldn't create something if their lives depended on it."
:gigachad-hd: creates all the wealth of planet earth
The plot of Atlas Shrugged is literally this. All the entrepreneurial ubermensch run away and hide in Epstein Valley, and their absence causes the economy to grind to a halt and society to collapse.
Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. - Ricky, Trailer Park Boys
"Money can suck my cock." -Comrade Ricky from Sunnyvale Trailer Park, canon line. :order-of-lenin:
"Carl Mark said that capitalism is a dead vampire that sucks your cock, and the more it sucks you off, the more fucked you are, if that's true then that's fucked." - Comrade Ricky
the interesting thing about slavery is how personal it is. the interesting thing about wage slavery is how impersonal it is.
Chattel slavery was pretty impersonal for a really long time, though. Until it wasn't :JB-shining-aggro:
i was trying to do an aphorism but i'll explain myself. slavery was of course incredibly impersonal, it is as a social relationship arguably defined by its closeness to death. slavery is a thing that happens to people who would have otherwise just been killed. the whole point of the notion of slavery was to find a social abstraction for treating other human beings this way. but it's interesting that within this incredibly depersonalizing act of owning and using slaves, it was also incredibly personal. what else is more personal than forcing another human being to be subservient to your entire will? on the other hand, capitalism promises to deify the individual. it claims to be the definition of that which is personal. it locks us up in the politics of interpersonal squabbles because the politics of the material has been removed from the hands of power. but in this, you get losers like the guy in the tweet. the alienation of wage labor. it's a machine that in no way intrinsically requires humans as fuel, that's just what it currently runs on. slavery is a machine that can only be formed between two human beings.
Then why did the Soviet Union pioneer space travel then, genius? Why is Cuba making medical breakthroughs like crazy then, you ungrateful decadent?
what do liberals think will happen if even their wildest automation fantasies come true
do they think most workers will just go start a podcast or what
They think they'll live in a magical little walled garden. A privatized utopia that runs itself at a profit, with a nudge now and then from the unlimited genius of whomever the fuck this is.
:wtf-am-i-reading:
can't wait to see :melon-musk: create his way out of a catastrophic site failure at twitter
