alt Hacker NewsLabor substitution is extremely difficult and almost everybody hand waves it away.
Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none with any proper economics.
Let's be charitable and assume that this type of fast food worker gets paid $50,000 a year. For that job to be displaced it needs to be performed by a robot that can be acquired for a reasonable capital expenditure such as $200,000 and requires no maintenance, upkeep, or subscription fees.
This is a complete non-reality in the restaurant industry. Every piece of equipment they have cost them significant amounts and ongoing maintenance even if it's the most basic equipment such as a grill or a fryer. The reality is that they pay service technicians and professionals a lot of money to keep that equipment barely working.
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>the most unskilled labor
People are worried about white-collar not blue-collar jobs being replaced. Robotics is obviously a whole different field from AI.
Jobs that require physical effort will be fine for the reasons you state
Any job that is predominantly done on a computer though is at risk IMO. AI might not completely take over everything, but I think we'll see way fewer humans managing/orchestrating larger and larger fleets of agents.
Instead of say 20 people doing some function, you'll have 3 or 4 prompting away to manage the agents to get the same amount of work done as 20 people did before.
So the people flipping the burgers and serving the customers will be safe, but the accountants and marketing folks won't be.
Can you walk me through this argument for a customer service agent? The jobs where the nuance and variety isn’t there and don’t involve physical interaction are completely different to flipping burgers
Funny, I go to South Korea and the fast food burger joints literally operate exactly as you say they couldn't. I've had the best burger in my life from a McDonalds in South Korea operated practically by robots.
It's a non reality in America's extremely piss poor restaurant industry. We have a competency crisis (the big key here) and worker shortage that SK doesn't, and they have far higher trust in their society.
The burger cook job has already been displaced and continues to be. Pre-1940s those burger restaurants relied on skilled cooks that got their meat from a butcher and cut fresh lettuce every day. Post-1940s the cooking process has increasingly become assembly-lined and cooks have been replaced by unskilled labor. Much of the cooking process _is_ now done by robots in factories at a massive scale and the on-premise employees do little else than heat it up. In the past 10 years, automation has further increased and the cashiers have largely been replaced by self-order terminals so that employees no longer even need to speak rudimentary English. In conclusion, both the required skill-level and amount of labor needed for restaurants has been reduced drastically by automation and in fact many higher skilled trade jobs have been hit even harder: cabinetmakers, coachbuilders and such have been almost eradicated by mass production.
It will happen to you.
I lost my job as a software developer some time ago.
Flipping burgers is WAY more demanding than I ever imagined. That's the danger of AI:
It takes jobs faster than creating new ones PLUS for some fields (like software development) downshifting to just about anything else is brutal and sometimes simply not doable.
Forget becoming manager at McDonald's or be even good at flipping burgers at the age of 40: you are competing with 20yr olds doing sports with amazing coordination etc