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I just read a short article in an email newsletter that threw out this statistic with regards to automation in the food industry:
The article goes on to argue the point that due to all of the ‘quiet quitting’ and generally unsatisfied workers after the pandemic or over the last couple of years, automation will not be as big of a deal as we thought. I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a number of times recently where news outlets will talk about how all of the people worried about economic disruption from robotics and Artificial Intelligence don’t realize that it’ll actually be great because people hate working anyway.
I used to believe these claims when I was a disillusion young adult who hated working, but overtime I’ve gotten more and more skeptical. Many people I know take serious pride and work, and in fact for a lot of people their work is the most important thing in their life. I’m talking people who don’t even really need the money, or who claim that even if they had enough money to retire they would continue working just as much as they do now.
Is this recent trend of less engagement with work robust enough to offset the rise in automation of jobs? Is this just a cope from those who know their jobs will disappear soon? (Ie email newsletter writers)
Personally I’m surprised that artificial intelligence hasn’t gotten more flack than it has so far. I expected the lights to come out in full force and at least get some sort of ban on image generation (I know Getty or some other site has done this) but so far it seems that artificial intelligence is generally unopposed.
Any major salient examples of automation technology or artificial intelligence being banned to protect jobs?
Here's a historical chart of the monthly quit rate for accommodation and food service. It's unusually high, but only about half a point higher than 2006-2007, and unemployment was higher then. And it's headed downwards. It's possible that the spike we saw last year was just "filling in the hole" from 2020, as people who had been waiting for a good time to quit their jobs took advantage of the opportunity. Also, total employment in these industries is still rising. A lot of the people quitting those jobs are quitting for other jobs in the same industry.
Quiet quitting is just a new term for an old phenomenon. I remember seeing an article recently pointing to survey data showing that self-reported levels of engagement at work had decreased only slightly, so I think it's probably overhyped.
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We've been here before with automats. Vending machines have not replaced restaurants or even fast food joints. At the moment, you still need people to cook the food and wash the dishes. Until automation succeeds to the point of replacing human cooks and kitchen staff, 'automation in the food industry' is not going to take that many jobs away.
The main reason people quit the hospitality industry is poor pay and bad conditions. During the pandemic, here in Ireland as well as elsewhere, a lot of places were compulsorily shut for the duration, which meant pubs and restaurants. A lot of staff were laid off while the business was shut down, and many of them found jobs elsewhere that they didn't quit and go back to their old job. Because better pay, established hours, and reliability meant that the new job was more attractive. A lot of employers complained "people don't want to work" (and so the government should stop paying social welfare payments to people who had been laid off, to force them to work) but the answer most people gave to that was "people don't want to work for cut-to-the-bone wages and abusive bosses".
Is automation in work coming? Sure, because if it is perceived as cutting costs, then employers will avail of it. Is automating away jobs like waiters and cleaners on the horizon? Not quite yet, and it might - ironically - be the white collar middle class jobs that are now at risk and not the pink and blue collar 'you need a human pair of hands to do this' jobs.
EDIT: I have seen some online protesting about AI art, and that's an example of what I said above; the jobs at risk here are either fandom-type artists who charge commissions for art from the public, or people who work in freelance jobs doing stock illustrations for magazine articles (or that awful Green Party poster mentioned below, which quite easily could be churned out by AI). Nobody is complaining that DALL-E etc. are taking the bread out of the mouths of hotel cleaning staff or landscapers trimming the hedges.
While cooks and bussers aren't threatened by automation just yet, waiters very much are. Not to the point of full elimination, but electronic ordering certainly would reduce the numbers of required waitstaff, and it's certainly catching up lately.
TBH I am not sure that the problem of "cut-to-the-bone wages" has a good solution - nobody is going to pay $100 for a medium-quality hamburger, and most of those "need two human hands" don't need much beyond - which means the pool of potential applicants is unlimited, and if you disrupt the market by coercion ("living wage", etc.) you'd either get law-free zones (e.g. hiring illegals or just ignoring the law), or shortages (yes, you'd get your minimum wage, you'd just be doing alone the work three people did before - hello "abusive bosses"), or elimination of low-and-medium scale food industry, due to the economy of it not being sustainable. The only stable resolution here would be to eliminate the contradiction - e.g. by automation.
‘Automation’ in low skill industries- order pulling, picking crops, fry cooking, etc.- is really just substituting a large quantity of low skill labor for a smaller quantity of high skill labor. For agriculture this trade off makes sense- machines can do the work of many, many humans while creating only limited amounts of work for mechanics. In food service it doesn’t because there’s a limited number of man-hours to replace in a typical restaurant; fully automated fryers exist, but don’t displace enough low skill labor to be worth the cost of the high skill labor to maintain and repair them.
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White collar jobs , as a category, will probably never be at risk because what is considered white collar work is always changing/evolving , and also population growth.
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At the same time, why can't burger-flipping be done by robots? The entire industry of fast-food grew out of the premise that every store sells the exact same food items, prepared in the exact same manner. Most fast food comes in completely-disposable packaging that would be trivial for machines to close. I think it's more just that nobody's built a really good robot for it yet.
If there's one area where AI has struggled to make serious progress, it's in low-cost situated soft-robotics. The kind of robot that can work around existing human environments safely, do things like clean a grill or scrub a toilet or prepare a sandwich. I suspect that when we find workarounds to the current problems, progress in this area will be extremely fast, but we're not there yet. Consequently, the jobs of burger-flippers (and it's never just burger-flipping, it's all the ancillary tasks around that) will be relatively safe for the time-being.
My experience as a tradesman working on commercial appliances tells me that the work around will be $40,000 automated grills that still need a human pair of hands to do near constant maintenance and require a $2500 refit every six months, both by either semi or highly skilled technicians, and still need a minimum wage worker to refill the patty dispenser and be on hand to clear jams, and that the final product will still have to be assembled by a minimum wage worker.
To put another way, a lot of automating away low skilled labor is done via creating more demand for semi- and highly-skilled labor. Current skilled and semi skilled labor prices are sky high and the supply is shrinking steadily, which means that large capital investments in things like automated grills are going to be unlikely as long as low skill labor is still willing to work.
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A robot that can replicate fine motor control of a burger flipper would be too expensive.
You don’t really need the fine motor control of a burger flipper, though. You’d just design the automated grill to not need to flip the patty(probably by cooking via a heated press, and yes, that is expensive and prone to breakdowns which requires very highly skilled labor to fix). I expect reliability, and the shortage of technicians who can fix such kinds of equipment, are bigger factors slowing adoption.
And to be clear, a lot of fast food kitchens are substantially automated already. This process will likely continue, but the loss of fast food worker jobs will be slow because if your automated soda fountain system goes down, you’ll need employees to fill cups manually until you can get a technician who can work on automated soda fountains(and to be clear, this is a tall order; skilled labor is already in shortage and the problem is getting worse. To make matter even worse, most of the equipment we’re talking about uses brand specific designs, so a technician needs to be trained on both the brand and type of appliance that’s broken).
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I'm sure most of these people are in low income countries . Maybe begging is the closest thing to that. My proposal would be to give homeless people unlimited booze and drugs provided they have to consume it in a safe area and void the right to medical care.
There are a lot of players of 'euro truck simulator' or 'farming simulator' in the US and western europe
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Why ultra-pure, though? Why not laced with something that gives them heart attacks?
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That is the Devil's temptation and should be shunned at all costs! It is way too easy and tempting to go "okay, I can wait four hours for the in-game coins to regenerate so I can get the items I need to advance, or I could buy in-game currency for what is only pennies of real world money" and the next thing you know, you've blown fifty spondulicks of real world dough on 'easy' purchases.
The games are cleverly balanced that way to entice you to buy currencies, since chopping wood etc. is so tedious and you want the immediate hit of advancing now when you are so close to it. Good time management and such casual games tilt the balance the other way; you do just enough work for it to feel like a real achievement when you hit the goal, but not so much that it becomes tedious or boring. Just mindless enough that you sit there stacking up tasks for your little workers to do, the kind of game where you want to kill some time but not anything involved or heavy, the equivalent of a popcorn for the brain movie. Solitaire style games are the same thing.
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For a while I'd thought we'd automate mundane labor first. Nobody want to work in accommodation and food service, so why should they have to?
Instead, artists and writers are getting the first taste. General intelligence is moving fast enough that "how mentally challenging is it?" seems unlikely to be the critical factor, and we should instead look at "how hard is it to describe your job as a collection of inputs and outputs?". Which is, at least to me, mostly opaque for most industries.
So it won't be just the grunt work. The AI reaper will come for a scattershot of occupations across many social classes, with little respect for how much pride people take in their work, with little insight as to whether you'll be next.
I think there will be pushback. At least until the road to luxury space communism is made clear.
The jobs automated away will be ones replaced by equipment which does not have to be maintained or repaired, because the sorts of people who can maintain or repair equipment are in a large shortage, that shortage is getting worse, and they command a large wage premium.
An artist or writer can, once the software is there, be replaced by a computer which requires next to no maintenance. A janitorial robot would probably require weekly maintenance and quarterly tune ups performed by the sorts of people who are both scarce right now and are not getting less scarce.
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AI will be a valuable tool for many artists who embrace it. They'll be able to pump out more content, and can actually make changes to the stuff AI pumps out. Seems like it'd be a great source for inspiration or overcoming creative block. It'll also allow more people to do art who don't have the skill. That may not necessarily be a bad thing. Just like tools allowing digital art to be created by people who can't draw or paint at a great level, but their digital art can still be amazing.
AI opens art up to more people.
Yeah, I'm in favor, but we're barely getting started and people are getting upset already. There's a lot more pointing fingers and claiming that someone somewhere will be upset, but there are some people actually upset.
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If I had to steelman anti-AI-art, it'd be "neural nets are bad and every use of them we permit is more consumer opposition and entrenched financial interests we'll have to crush to avert AI X-risk".
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The popular notion that writers, artists will be replaced by AI seems overblown. Look how much $ Substack writers are making now. If anything, we in a writing boom. Who knows though...maybe there will be a scandal in which a top author is revealed as just a bot/AI that parses existing work. I think AI will have a hard time understanding the nuance of language, which is an important part of writing. When I talk about the left vs. right, how can an ai know if i am talking about ideology or driving directions? Or rationalism vs. rational?
I suspect substack is rather on the high end of writing. Readers go to substack because they like an author's analysis -- e.g. Scott Alexander is in no danger of being replaced with a neural net. The automation target is more mundane: news and reporting (and propaganda), marketing copy, pulp fiction / erotica, ghost writing, and other assorted filler text. Screenplays are still pretty bad but they're on the they're on the gradient descent roller coaster now and won't stay bad for long.
In the meantime, I give you GPT-3:
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Presumably it won't be long before many substacks are just AI created content. Many could be already. Would we even know?
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To be more specific, there's a lot of semi-skilled low end grunt work getting automated. Cashiers, for example. I order with a kiosk at McDonald's and check out with a self-checkout at Walmart.
Now the stockers at walmart and the cooks at mcdonald's are still not automated; and these were jobs it was always harder to staff because fewer people wanted to do them(and their salaries, while still unskilled labor level, reflected and still reflect that).
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Because, again ironically, this is the kind of work that is hardest to automate. Unless you completely re-design restaurants so that you can fit in industrial robotics the way they do in car manufacturing, and maybe one day they'll solve that, you can't replace humans who can go up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, vacuum and dust and polish, etc.
'Intellectual' labour can be automated because you can break it down into steps that can be done by a computer programme. You can more easily automate the jobs of the accounts department than you can that of the contract cleaner who earns minimum wage emptying the bins and doing the vacuuming. Boston Robotics is still working on its Atlas robot, which to me right now still seems like a gimmick - it was supposed to do search-and-rescue work back in 2013 but I have no idea if it's ever been used in the field for real operations, as distinct from trials and tests. The reason I say "gimmick" is yeah, it can run a parkour course, big cheers, but would you trust it to clean your bathroom? (Sure, eventually they'll get it working, but it'll be a lot longer to replace grunt work labour than white collar desk jobs).
Applebee's is largely automated in that most of their food is mass-produced off-site and then heated in a microwave. People who go out do not want to dictate their order to a robot that they might have to outsmart, like I have to trick my washing machine and dishwasher into doing things.
The last mile will always be hard.
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The tricky part is that some mundane work and some intellectual work is easy to automate, but in many cases it's hard to tell ahead of time just how hard it will be. You can predict trucking and data entry will die off, but what will it take to crack cooking or construction or hairdressing?
And the white-collar work will be equally scattershot at approximately the same time. "It's all on the computer so it should be easy to capture inputs and outputs right?" is the kind of assumption that makes a million AI researchers' foreheads hit the desk. We'll certainly get there eventually but in this case the specifics matter.
If all the grunt work went first, we could hope for a smooth transition to post-scarcity. Sorry, we automated away your job scrubbing toilets, but on the upside production is so cheap that you can survive off your 19 twitch subs as a league of legends vtuber. But if the robot revolution happens in patches more or less randomly, then there are people with real social power that they stand to lose, and that implies chaos.
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Separately, new tech is always a gimmick, until it's not (though I agree most gimmicks are not new tech). I wouldn't have trusted Atlas to run a parkour course, until it did. Who's to say Boston Robotics will stop short of cleaning bathrooms? It seems unlikely there will be a fundamental limit in the tech that prevents that.
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My experience is that the quality of customer service, the number and quality of employees, and the convenience and reliability of store hours have all gotten worse (nothing is open late; stores close sporadically). Also, things like self-checkout have pushed labor onto the customer. Personally, I like having the option, but it makes things worse when self-checkout is the default.
It's kind of like a reverse price gouging. Retail isn't colluding to fix prices, but rather seems to have unilaterally decided to not compete anymore on the customer experience front. It's just dropped off a cliff. I see more of this trend in our future, not automation. We're going to find out how poor of service Americans will tolerate before we reach a new equilibrium.
You can go back in history and find the same thing happening. Many retailers used to have all sorts of staff on hand to increase customer experience. Labour was cheap. As it gets more expensive, and consumers choose price over all else, we see great service slowly fade away.
Rich people can still afford that increased cost of labour in order to get better service, though.
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Thanks to Ccovid for that. And it's going to stay that way because companies, businesses realized that can make equal or more $ with just delivery + takeout and limited hours and fewer employees vs. full hours and more employees.
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Often it's faster for customers by not having to wait in line , so the tradeoff is worth it
In my typical experience, self-checkout is about as slow if not slower. 1-3 machines down out of 6-12 across two sections (one notionally reserved for express). 1-2 helper/assistant types who are supposed to resolve errors, handful special case errors like WIC cards/coupons or confirm the shopper can purchase a semi-restricted item (cold medicines/alcohol) get easily overwhelmed by a handful of issues assuming they are there to do that instead of called away to deal with something else/shooting the shit with a coworker. Any sort of error is a hard stop and the wait for the person to notice/finish dealing with the three other problems adds up. The systems have so much lag built-in since you have to wait between scans for the system to confirm you put the thing in the bag zone that even if you were of the same skill level as someone paid to run a check-out register you'll still be slowed down. Of course these days even cashiered check-outs are slower compared to when bagging was a common minimum wage job for high schoolers. It's downright depressing going through stores with 10 check-lanes with only two of them manned.
At my local supermarket I can scan items off the shelf with my phone, put them right into my bag, and when I'm done shopping I pause briefly to scan a checkout code posted near the door. Then I leave.
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There was an order kiosk at one of the McDonald’s in Flint in the mid/late 90s. It was pretty clunky by modern standards, but it worked just fine.
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On the other hand, it opened up new and exciting possibilities if you were into shoplifting. Scanning premium grapes as regular grapes is its own reward.
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Ironic that Eddie Lampert's find blew itself up about a decade before his vision would dominate retail.
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Does this mean anything without context for: how many people were hired, and how many people on average quit jobs? The food industry has high turnover - 70% generally, so with 10M workers in 'accommodations and food service' generally, that many people quitting over three months is expected. An increase in turnover or quitting existing may happen, but saying '760k' doesn't show much. When you refer to an article, please link it so people can investigate claims made! Also: info comes from a few googles, not expert, could be wrong, etc.
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Are those people working the same jobs that people are leaving in large numbers? I don't think many would work in fast food if they didn't need the money.
No these are mostly high paying or high status.
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It depends on the job. Probably the people you know are not representative of most workers. The people who don't need the money probably have good , high-status jobs they enjoy, which does not apply to most workers.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-view-their-jobs/
40% of people making under 30k are "very satisfied" with their job, and 40% of private sector workers claim their job gives them a sense of identity rather than just being a living.
This isn't really consistent with job pride being a phenomenon of the upper crust.
so what about the other 60%?
this shows positive correlation between wages vs. satisfaction https://static01.nyt.com/images/2009/11/17/business/economy/jobsatisfaction.jpg
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/16/perhaps-money-can-buy-you-happiness-at-least-at-work.html
Wages correlate with satisfaction (and this is clear from the pew study), but the point is that a very large fraction of people earning very little money are satisfied with their jobs. Job satisfaction and pride are by no means phenomena restricted to the upper class.
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People who like their jobs and take pride in their work usually like the status from their jobs. Over time, the association between their occupational role and its status / social effects become so ingrained that they grow to love their work. But this doesn’t indicate that they would not find enjoyment from a different preoccupation of time in the absence of work.
Plus, the “quiet quitters” obtain limited status enhancement from their work. There is literally an underclass for which work is unimportant in procuring baby mamas. Obviously if you’re a Silicon Valley dev who has spent 3000 hours invested in your occupation in a different social environment it is going to be a different story
I had a job I liked and enjoyed, and it wasn't about the status. The work was interesting, I was well able to do it, and the working environment was pleasant.
I have worked retail, and that was a hellscape.
There's a difference, I think, between people who have made their work their life and sunk so much of their identity and self-worth into it, and people who like their job even if that job is a linesman for the county.
Some people will continue to work even as retirees, and even if they don't need the money, because they miss the human interaction and don't know what to do with themselves if they're not working. (I think the French barista mentioned in another comment fits in there, also because she's working in a Manhattan café and not in McDonalds - it's not just for the sake of working, it's the type of work and people). Some people like their jobs, and I can understand why they'd return as a consultant: more money, less hassle, you get to come in and tell the bosses what to do, and it's a nice little addition to your income without the fear of "if I lose this job, I'm toast".
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That seems to contradict a lot of people I know who, upon retirement, immediately return to their previous company as a contractor. It can't be just about the money, and it's certainly not about the status.
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I also find status narratives compelling but I feel they prove too much. Are you actually arguing that no higher paid individuals genuinely enjoy their jobs or would enjoy them without the status associated?
FWIW I agree for jobs like sales or similarly grueling positions.
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