This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link