Will Fast Food Workers Be Replaced By Computers?

But there are jobs created to help deal with those "sucky people".

That's why you fire one person and hire another.


Human Resources jobs main reason for existing right there.

 

I just fundamentally disagree with the former part of your post there that corporations are fairly paying what their work is worth.

What work is worth is often arbitrary.

 

Yeah I've been in and out of industries that have lots of employee turnover. It gets old having to deal with the incompetence they bring with them.

I understand that people have advantages over machines. Rationality and being able to use moral judgment outside the realms of standard procedure is the greatest advantage in my opinion. Machines only follow standard procedure; they aren't programed to handle a difficult situation when life throws them a curve-ball.

 

...And sometimes criminally disproportionate.:angelsad2:


CEO Pay Grew 127 Times Faster Than Worker Pay Over Last 30 Years:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/02/ceo-pay-worker-pay_n_1471685.html

"American CEOs saw their pay spike 15 percent last year, after a 28 percent pay rise the year before, according to a report by GMI Ratings cited by The Guardian. Meanwhile, workers saw their inflation-adjusted wages fall 2 percent in 2011, according to the Labor Department....

That trend comes despite workers nearly doubling their productivity during the same time period, when compensation barely rose. Worker productivity spiked 93 percent between 1978 and 2011 on a per-hour basis, and 85 percent on a per-person basis, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St." Louis.

 

A prospective employer can offer a wage to a prospective employee, and the prospective employee can accept, refuse or request a higher wage which the prospective employer should also be allowed to accept, refuse, or offer a compromise wage.

Employees always retain the freedom to move on to a new job which offers a higher wage, but often employers find it difficult due to unions or other government rules and regulations to get rid an unproductive employee.

 

To your first paragraph, yes that is how it should work in theory removing all the other more complicating factors, such as the individual needing to take the job out of desperation. It means the individual does not have the sway or leverage needed to negotiate in a lot of cases which brings us to the point of your second paragraph.

When it comes to rules and regulations levied against the employer, my support for or against a regulation varies on a case by case basis on a myriad of factors:



Yes in some cases, regulations are meritless, a needless hassle, and a cost on business growth. But in other cases, such as the food provider SYSCO recently having been caught storing perishable food in non-refrigerated containers nationwide, which is illegal in California state law, I would say that regulations like those MAKE SENSE to have around.

And California is known for being a nanny state, so it's law is the perfect example to use especially since it's minimum wage is one of the highest in the country and quality of life is pretty high, despite its slums.

---

I do agree with you on one area of union abuses, and that is when it comes to teachers union, they are a perfect example of what is holding back quality salaries in six figures in trade for getting rid of k-12 teacher tenure. I think it's a fair trade and teacher's unions won't have it. So in that case I agree, but in do not agree with your overall ideology about this that I hear from those on the right, coming from Republicans and Libertarians alike.

 

The prospective employee's idea about the cost of living is weakened; the employer can delude him with the value of the work to a misunderstanding of the things he "can buy for his life-interest and bribing sense." v/n:2thumbsup: And all this for good inflation.

 

Exactly! And especially the CEO's of the big banks, who got paid well despite their lack of job performance.

This understanding fueled the upset that was then occupy movement. Only problem was that the occupy movement lacked a cohesive leader on which to build a pragmatic ultimatum platform of arguments they want to see changed in law regarding banking-lending, credit card protections, tax code transparency, and default wage increases given annual economic statistics like inflation and the cost of living reports.

Occupy, didn't form that, and so they sounded like whiny, lazy, jealous, stereotypical liberals which made the movement easy to slander from the right.

 

While you refer to what you call 'my' overall ideology, you havn't made it clear what you think it is.

The SYSCO case you mentioned, is NOT a rule or regulation which I have a differing opinion than your own. Some regulations are necessary and good, and some are not.

 

I'm not sure of what it is you are attempting to imply above.

 

Good article in today's Salon.com about how robots and technology are taking jobs from the middle class

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/17/robots_are_stealing_your_job_how_technology_threatens_to_wipe_out_the_middle_class/

 

Haven't you claimed to be Libertarian? What is your definition of "government regulation"?

I thought regulation, meant any, law, rule, or micromanagement the government (at any level of government: local, state, federal/national) pushes upon the private sector (businesses and individuals).

Contrastly, "deregulation", is any action taken by any level of government to lessen, or retract/repeal, any law, rule, or micromanagement of the private sector, (businesses or individual).

 

On a particular issue I may support a Libertarian view. Your definitions below are adequately acceptable.

 

Okay, so for us to understand each other perhaps we should talk on an issue by single issue basis.

Because up until now I thought you held the Libertarian view as a whole, as that is the tone most people take when they say they are Libertarian.

I also remain confused, you share my agreement with the regulation requiring SYSCO and other food companies like them, mandating food be kept in refrigerated containers. I thought for a second, you meant that you didn't consider that a regulation.

But then I re-read your post, and realized what you might've about my post that mentioned SYSCO, could've meant that:

In that instance, that's regulation both you and I agree with, and do not have a differing opinion.

 

And I did say "Some regulations are necessary and good, and some are not."

 

Okay so back on topic.

Ultimately yes. I think that fast food workers jobs will be significantly reduced and replaced by machines but won't entirely go away. Businesses always need at least one or two human employees to deal with customers with special orders or to troubleshoot with the automated machines.

But yeah it will have a negative impact on jobs, of labor market, in the economy has a whole.

Especially since those types of jobs are what college students depend on for their books, tuition, rent, food, gas, and paying back student loans.

They aren't career jobs hopefully, but they are the type of job for intermediary transitions in life. Certainly jobs created by the invention of machines will not be replacing this tier of the labor market.

 

I will say what I believe, and this does not mean I don't think the current situation sucks any less, because it does. For thousands of years our species has relied on human labor to accomplish a task, however insignificant it had to be done, and someone had to do this. So you were paid for your time.

Everyone has needs, and in this society everything requires money. Hungry? You're gonna have to pay for that. Need clean clothes, gonna have to pay for that too. And the detergent, you're gonna have to buy that. This is an example of a machine taking jobs once only done manually by humans. You put the quarters in the machine and it washes your clothes. I could do this myself for free, but it seems most people don't have time for that these day. I could pay someone else to wash my clothes (by hand...if there was no machine) if I didn't have the time. I don't have time to wash clothes cuz I'm so busy making money so I can pay them to wash my clothes (which is their job) so they make some money doing it. We have a machine today at the Laundromat that washes clothes all day but you still have to pay the machine! No, i'm not paying the machine I'm paying a person who owns the Laundromat.

Trying not to lose track of what I was saying...for millennia humans have had needs. Other humans had other needs, we all have the same basic needs but some of us had needs that could be filled by someone elses labor, whilst our labor could fill someone elses. Nothing operated autonomously. It was all about peoples needs, and how someone could fill someone elses needs. Therefore money was created as something to have a universal value, and you would be paid according to your useful labor so you could spend it on something else, which someone else would be paid for.

I believe the human race is coming close to some sort of threshold, where human labor is no longer so valuable as it used to be. We have much more efficient ways of doing things, and one of the only things that makes human labor "valuable" is the fact that without a need for it, many would not have any reason to get paid. Our technological advancements since the industrial revolution have been incredible, and in the last century things have been changing fast. We're entering a new time where we're going to have to rethink things. If 1 person with enough startup capital invested in a bunch of machines to replace 100 workers they would cut costs tremendously and increase revenue through increased productivity since the machines will outperform any human worker. All of the wages that would be paid to these workers will go to that one person. And that person will leave those people high and dry too, cuz people are greedy like that, and selfish..did I mention that one? It's less about what you can do and what it's worth, than who had the right amount of money at the right time.

Fact is, we don't really need people anymore, for many things that we used to. That doesn't mean the elite few should leave everyone else out in the rain tho. When you take all the jobs away that could be performed by computers or machines, you are still left with certain things but the fact is we got 7 billion people on the planet and we don't fuckin need all those people. Everyday, we advance a little more and need less people to get more done. WE DON"T NEED YOU ANYMORE! Some think population control is the answer, that's nonsense...there is a way to make this work.

We have way more people than we "really need" but that doesn't mean that the other people should be forced into poverty to starve. Just because the world doesn't "need" them doesn't mean these people don't still have needs of their own. Things are just changing and we have to evolve, and adapt to this. One day, if we don't all kill ourselves first we will come to a time where no human labor is really needed at all, all we need to do is live. It will take far fewer people to do something, and will be done much faster, much less human time involved.

What is the purpose of money once we pass this threshold? What is the purpose of it now? I can see where the idea of it came from and why it was needed but in a highly advanced society? I can't really capture it in words but I know how I feel.

 

I agree.

I agree that it will have a negative impact on the jobs which machines replace, and perhaps even temporarily have impact on a portion of the economy as a whole as those who are replaced by machines find employment elsewhere.

If the college education was worth pursuing, then the employment it leads to should be the basis of repaying the student loans.

I agree, and the higher the minimum wage is raised, the fewer these types of jobs will become, especially if the cost of replacing them with machinery is less than the cost of employing a human.

 

Employers might be able to deal with a higher Min wage, it is the payroll tax contributions and potential punitive health care regulation that puts fear over the top.

 

Sunfighter: good read from Salon.

We should not have a tax code that rewards robotics with advanced depreciation on tax schedules.

The Wall Street Journal notes that there is billions of dollars just "sitting on the sidelines" and "Capitol is on strike" So Corps can make these investments without favorable tax considerations.

The fast food sector is overbuilt anyway

We need to find a solution to un-lock all that capitol.