Workers are right to be upset, but most of the foodservice robots that get big media attention are not the things they should be worried about. Tipsy Robot is actually a pretty good example of...
Workers are right to be upset, but most of the foodservice robots that get big media attention are not the things they should be worried about. Tipsy Robot is actually a pretty good example of why. It's temperamental and needs regular human intervention. And if we're really being honest, the bartender robot itself is not designed to be a good bartender, it's designed to be a novel thing to look at. When it stops being novel people will stop going there and there will be no more Tipsy Robot.
If you want to see what a practical drinks machine looks like, peer into the window you get your food from in the McDonald's drive through. All of them are at least partially automated by this point, and some of them are fully automated; it gets the drink order, puts a cup under the spout, and fills it with the appropriate amount of ice and beverage. The only human intervention it needs outside of maintenance and supplies are putting the lids on them and giving them to customers. I would imagine that most workers there would be happy to have them as it takes away one of the more monotonous parts of their jobs.
"Progress" really marches on, and cannot reliably be directed by individual actions. Collectively we accept change or reject it. I think in the future we're going to come to a point where people...
"Progress" really marches on, and cannot reliably be directed by individual actions. Collectively we accept change or reject it.
I think in the future we're going to come to a point where people prefer things that have a human touch. I think this especially applies to things that are more art than science. Drink making, music making, and art making are all things AI and robots can do, and do "well" however the loss of humanity in these things is noticeable to many people.
In this instance, robot bartenders have been tried in the past and failed. Why? Because regular customers realize that they are getting ripped off in the end.
You like your vodka martini with a splash more olive juice and a bit less vermouth? RoboTender can't do that without you giving some overly complicated order. Susie Bartender can, and easily will.
You a regular that spends hundreds of dollars a week and want a double for free? Susie Bartender will happily give you a free one every now and then. RoboTender will not.
You go every Friday for happy hour and notice your pours are maybe a bit over 1oz? Not with RoboTender! 1oz on the nose every time!
You don't like the way your drink tastes? Too bad! You already paid. You gotta pay RoboTender for a new one!
Granted, Vegas is the type of place where people will come for the novelty of a robot bartender and the customer base is (mostly) going to be tourists or people just passing through so a lot of these problems won't really materialize there, but I don't really think robot bartenders are going to become the norm in most places.
Part of me can't help but see unions striking in order to get protections against replacing their jobs with A.I. as analogous to the horse-and-buggy industry protesting when mass-produced...
Part of me can't help but see unions striking in order to get protections against replacing their jobs with A.I. as analogous to the horse-and-buggy industry protesting when mass-produced automobiles like the Ford Model T hit the market. Or the music industry going bonkers when people started sharing music digitally.
I know it's easier said than done for someone who's spent their whole life in an industry that's getting upturned, but I think the coming changes are inevitable, so it's probably better to figure out how to embrace those changes now and get a leg up instead of wasting time and energy fighting a hopeless battle.
The obsolescence of jobs is an inevitability. History has clearly shown that. The question is how we deal people who lose their jobs to automation. Even from a purely utilitarian perspective, we...
The obsolescence of jobs is an inevitability. History has clearly shown that.
The question is how we deal people who lose their jobs to automation. Even from a purely utilitarian perspective, we should provide them a path forward. This could be free education to learn modern skills to switch careers, some social safety net, or protection against losing their career.
I'd say we need to completely rethink our labor based economy. If AI and automation can finally replace most of our daily work, then great, but we also then need to address what will come of us...
I'd say we need to completely rethink our labor based economy. If AI and automation can finally replace most of our daily work, then great, but we also then need to address what will come of us when there isn't the existential threat of "work or die".
Right? In a way they are fighting not only the inevitable, but they're fighting to keep their chains. The power of AI to improve our lives is in the freedom it can grant us. We can't keep clinging...
Right? In a way they are fighting not only the inevitable, but they're fighting to keep their chains. The power of AI to improve our lives is in the freedom it can grant us. We can't keep clinging to the metric of labor to determine human value in age of mature AI. The article mentions people seeking higher level jobs that AI can't perform well at yet. Operative word is "yet". What we need to fight for now, is to have our basic needs met regardless of employment, either through UBI or some other means.
I will believe in ubi or similar when I see it. The guarantee communist countries provided of a livelihood and sustenance generated loathing and visceral hatred among the ownership class. There...
I will believe in ubi or similar when I see it. The guarantee communist countries provided of a livelihood and sustenance generated loathing and visceral hatred among the ownership class.
There were other serious problems with communism as it played out in the 20th century. Writers, artists and other creative types suffered. Small business owners lost their freedom to be entrepreneurial. Surveilance was perfected and used in cruel ways. Tyrants and psychopaths rose to the top.
But the powers that be right now want us to be precarious and dependent for our livelihood on fitting into their structure of society and pleasing them directly or indirectly.
You do realize this is happening under capitalism and non communist countries as well, correct?
Writers, artists and other creative types suffered. Small business owners lost their freedom to be entrepreneurial. Surveilance was perfected and used in cruel ways. Tyrants and psychopaths rose to the top.
You do realize this is happening under capitalism and non communist countries as well, correct?
Two things can be true at once, and the mechanisms are different. There are tragic stories today, there were tragic stories then. People frequently suck. I just hope people seeking a more...
Two things can be true at once, and the mechanisms are different. There are tragic stories today, there were tragic stories then. People frequently suck. I just hope people seeking a more egalitarian system take some lessons from the past.
I agree. I think we (as a species that is) need some evolution in mainstream thought to move past the ideas of "have and have nots", or as you said above "the ownership class" and hierarchical...
I agree. I think we (as a species that is) need some evolution in mainstream thought to move past the ideas of "have and have nots", or as you said above "the ownership class" and hierarchical concepts in general. Once growing/gathering, service, and manufacturing can all been managed and accomplished without human intervention and humans are all well feed and house'd there really isn't a point to "ownership" and accumulation of wealth for the sake of it.
The question is what percentage of jobs are going to be replaced and how many new jobs will be created? In the past, the replacement of old jobs with new industries has taken decades while people...
The question is what percentage of jobs are going to be replaced and how many new jobs will be created? In the past, the replacement of old jobs with new industries has taken decades while people suffer. Also new jobs don't necesarily exist in the same locations, and may well require more mental skill than a lot of people have.
You are right that an individual faced with this situation needs to figure out how best to pivot. But lots of people won't be able to..
I don’t yet see this as the huge threat they claim. While the service industry is Vegas resorts has been replaced with the same corporate corner cutting as everywhere else, I do think this opens...
I don’t yet see this as the huge threat they claim. While the service industry is Vegas resorts has been replaced with the same corporate corner cutting as everywhere else, I do think this opens up that niche even more got questionable costs.
The simple point of Vegas is you keep customers happy and they give you money. Anything interrupting that is a problem and I’m skeptical at how well a robot (because this is so not AI) is going to meaningfully replace a bartender, especially in the higher traffic trendy areas.
You also have to remember that “place with drunk people losing money” is also the kind of environment heavy with vandalism, and I’m not sure how many places are going to feel great throwing in some expensive robot for a customer to smash on a bender.
I think you’re right that it probably wouldn’t work that well if it became routine, like a coffee vending machine. As a novelty, it’s a fun spectacle, so it’s pleasing customers in a rather Vegas...
I think you’re right that it probably wouldn’t work that well if it became routine, like a coffee vending machine. As a novelty, it’s a fun spectacle, so it’s pleasing customers in a rather Vegas way. I expect there will be a regular bar available too, for people who aren’t there for the spectacle.
Maybe they could add a risky maneuver that spills your drink half the time, to add an element of chance :)
Reminds me of a pizza making robot (think articulated robot arms) restaurant they opened in my city a couple of years ago. Probably didn't last a year. The prices were fine and the pizza was ok,...
Reminds me of a pizza making robot (think articulated robot arms) restaurant they opened in my city a couple of years ago. Probably didn't last a year. The prices were fine and the pizza was ok, but once the novelty wore off, people weren't that interested in continuing their patronage. Probably because a robot can't really deal with very specific requests the way a human can. Want your crust extra toasted? Does not compute. Want the sauce on the side? Does not compute. And then the thing was broken half the time.
Unless you're undercutting everyone else's prices by a LOT for a given level of quality, human servers and cooks aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Yeah, I think that using robots like that is more of a tourist attraction. They would need a steady supply of new customers in a touristy area, along with good maintenance. Or it could be a...
Yeah, I think that using robots like that is more of a tourist attraction. They would need a steady supply of new customers in a touristy area, along with good maintenance. Or it could be a sideshow for a large restaurant, where the steady customers keep visiting the restaurant for other reasons once the novelty wears off.
Even in places where the food is being cooked by people, ordering kiosks tend to just suck. They always bothered me because of how slow and unresponsive they are, which is made worse by the...
Even in places where the food is being cooked by people, ordering kiosks tend to just suck. They always bothered me because of how slow and unresponsive they are, which is made worse by the inclusions of animations after just about every interaction.
But yes, novelty is what I think the main problem with these foodservice robots. I've been to quite a few restaurants with robot servers, and pretty much every time they were followed by a human waiter/waitress who would take the food off of it and onto the table. What was the purpose of the robot, then? They're basically flashy annoying versions of a cart with the exception that a human can't control it if it moves the wrong way.
I think a better way to think about foodservice robots, at least the ones that make food, is to realize that they're already here to an extent; we just don't think of them as robots, we think of them as machines. Ice cream, for instance, can be made with no special tools by humans by putting a bag of the mixture into a bag filled with salt and ice and continually agitating it. That's really labor intensive, so we invented a machine that gets cold and agitates the mixture for us. Commerical ice cream machines are also smart, with electronics in there to tell people what to do when things go wrong. The difference between machine and robot is blurry and largely subjective.
We accept those foodservice machines/robots because they offer something that humans can't. An ice cream machine dramatically reduces the costs of producing the product and turned it from an indulgent treat for rich people into something that everyone can afford, and it made it so small shops could sell the product. To use modern tech parlance, they disrupted the ice cream market. Until someone develops another machine that is dramatically better than what a human being can do at lower prices, those kinds of machines are going to either have a lukewarm reception or a warm recession that tapers off quickly along side the novelty factor.
About loneliness in the US, it is now decades since the sociology study Bowling Alone was published and things have only gotten worse. It is a huge problem.
About loneliness in the US, it is now decades since the sociology study Bowling Alone was published and things have only gotten worse. It is a huge problem.
Workers are right to be upset, but most of the foodservice robots that get big media attention are not the things they should be worried about. Tipsy Robot is actually a pretty good example of why. It's temperamental and needs regular human intervention. And if we're really being honest, the bartender robot itself is not designed to be a good bartender, it's designed to be a novel thing to look at. When it stops being novel people will stop going there and there will be no more Tipsy Robot.
If you want to see what a practical drinks machine looks like, peer into the window you get your food from in the McDonald's drive through. All of them are at least partially automated by this point, and some of them are fully automated; it gets the drink order, puts a cup under the spout, and fills it with the appropriate amount of ice and beverage. The only human intervention it needs outside of maintenance and supplies are putting the lids on them and giving them to customers. I would imagine that most workers there would be happy to have them as it takes away one of the more monotonous parts of their jobs.
"Progress" really marches on, and cannot reliably be directed by individual actions. Collectively we accept change or reject it.
I think in the future we're going to come to a point where people prefer things that have a human touch. I think this especially applies to things that are more art than science. Drink making, music making, and art making are all things AI and robots can do, and do "well" however the loss of humanity in these things is noticeable to many people.
In this instance, robot bartenders have been tried in the past and failed. Why? Because regular customers realize that they are getting ripped off in the end.
You like your vodka martini with a splash more olive juice and a bit less vermouth? RoboTender can't do that without you giving some overly complicated order. Susie Bartender can, and easily will.
You a regular that spends hundreds of dollars a week and want a double for free? Susie Bartender will happily give you a free one every now and then. RoboTender will not.
You go every Friday for happy hour and notice your pours are maybe a bit over 1oz? Not with RoboTender! 1oz on the nose every time!
You don't like the way your drink tastes? Too bad! You already paid. You gotta pay RoboTender for a new one!
Granted, Vegas is the type of place where people will come for the novelty of a robot bartender and the customer base is (mostly) going to be tourists or people just passing through so a lot of these problems won't really materialize there, but I don't really think robot bartenders are going to become the norm in most places.
Part of me can't help but see unions striking in order to get protections against replacing their jobs with A.I. as analogous to the horse-and-buggy industry protesting when mass-produced automobiles like the Ford Model T hit the market. Or the music industry going bonkers when people started sharing music digitally.
I know it's easier said than done for someone who's spent their whole life in an industry that's getting upturned, but I think the coming changes are inevitable, so it's probably better to figure out how to embrace those changes now and get a leg up instead of wasting time and energy fighting a hopeless battle.
The obsolescence of jobs is an inevitability. History has clearly shown that.
The question is how we deal people who lose their jobs to automation. Even from a purely utilitarian perspective, we should provide them a path forward. This could be free education to learn modern skills to switch careers, some social safety net, or protection against losing their career.
I'd say we need to completely rethink our labor based economy. If AI and automation can finally replace most of our daily work, then great, but we also then need to address what will come of us when there isn't the existential threat of "work or die".
Sadly there is a big difference between should and will provide a path forward.
Right? In a way they are fighting not only the inevitable, but they're fighting to keep their chains. The power of AI to improve our lives is in the freedom it can grant us. We can't keep clinging to the metric of labor to determine human value in age of mature AI. The article mentions people seeking higher level jobs that AI can't perform well at yet. Operative word is "yet". What we need to fight for now, is to have our basic needs met regardless of employment, either through UBI or some other means.
I will believe in ubi or similar when I see it. The guarantee communist countries provided of a livelihood and sustenance generated loathing and visceral hatred among the ownership class.
There were other serious problems with communism as it played out in the 20th century. Writers, artists and other creative types suffered. Small business owners lost their freedom to be entrepreneurial. Surveilance was perfected and used in cruel ways. Tyrants and psychopaths rose to the top.
But the powers that be right now want us to be precarious and dependent for our livelihood on fitting into their structure of society and pleasing them directly or indirectly.
You do realize this is happening under capitalism and non communist countries as well, correct?
Two things can be true at once, and the mechanisms are different. There are tragic stories today, there were tragic stories then. People frequently suck. I just hope people seeking a more egalitarian system take some lessons from the past.
I agree. I think we (as a species that is) need some evolution in mainstream thought to move past the ideas of "have and have nots", or as you said above "the ownership class" and hierarchical concepts in general. Once growing/gathering, service, and manufacturing can all been managed and accomplished without human intervention and humans are all well feed and house'd there really isn't a point to "ownership" and accumulation of wealth for the sake of it.
The question is what percentage of jobs are going to be replaced and how many new jobs will be created? In the past, the replacement of old jobs with new industries has taken decades while people suffer. Also new jobs don't necesarily exist in the same locations, and may well require more mental skill than a lot of people have.
You are right that an individual faced with this situation needs to figure out how best to pivot. But lots of people won't be able to..
I don’t yet see this as the huge threat they claim. While the service industry is Vegas resorts has been replaced with the same corporate corner cutting as everywhere else, I do think this opens up that niche even more got questionable costs.
The simple point of Vegas is you keep customers happy and they give you money. Anything interrupting that is a problem and I’m skeptical at how well a robot (because this is so not AI) is going to meaningfully replace a bartender, especially in the higher traffic trendy areas.
You also have to remember that “place with drunk people losing money” is also the kind of environment heavy with vandalism, and I’m not sure how many places are going to feel great throwing in some expensive robot for a customer to smash on a bender.
I think you’re right that it probably wouldn’t work that well if it became routine, like a coffee vending machine. As a novelty, it’s a fun spectacle, so it’s pleasing customers in a rather Vegas way. I expect there will be a regular bar available too, for people who aren’t there for the spectacle.
Maybe they could add a risky maneuver that spills your drink half the time, to add an element of chance :)
Reminds me of a pizza making robot (think articulated robot arms) restaurant they opened in my city a couple of years ago. Probably didn't last a year. The prices were fine and the pizza was ok, but once the novelty wore off, people weren't that interested in continuing their patronage. Probably because a robot can't really deal with very specific requests the way a human can. Want your crust extra toasted? Does not compute. Want the sauce on the side? Does not compute. And then the thing was broken half the time.
Unless you're undercutting everyone else's prices by a LOT for a given level of quality, human servers and cooks aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Yeah, I think that using robots like that is more of a tourist attraction. They would need a steady supply of new customers in a touristy area, along with good maintenance. Or it could be a sideshow for a large restaurant, where the steady customers keep visiting the restaurant for other reasons once the novelty wears off.
Even in places where the food is being cooked by people, ordering kiosks tend to just suck. They always bothered me because of how slow and unresponsive they are, which is made worse by the inclusions of animations after just about every interaction.
But yes, novelty is what I think the main problem with these foodservice robots. I've been to quite a few restaurants with robot servers, and pretty much every time they were followed by a human waiter/waitress who would take the food off of it and onto the table. What was the purpose of the robot, then? They're basically flashy annoying versions of a cart with the exception that a human can't control it if it moves the wrong way.
I think a better way to think about foodservice robots, at least the ones that make food, is to realize that they're already here to an extent; we just don't think of them as robots, we think of them as machines. Ice cream, for instance, can be made with no special tools by humans by putting a bag of the mixture into a bag filled with salt and ice and continually agitating it. That's really labor intensive, so we invented a machine that gets cold and agitates the mixture for us. Commerical ice cream machines are also smart, with electronics in there to tell people what to do when things go wrong. The difference between machine and robot is blurry and largely subjective.
We accept those foodservice machines/robots because they offer something that humans can't. An ice cream machine dramatically reduces the costs of producing the product and turned it from an indulgent treat for rich people into something that everyone can afford, and it made it so small shops could sell the product. To use modern tech parlance, they disrupted the ice cream market. Until someone develops another machine that is dramatically better than what a human being can do at lower prices, those kinds of machines are going to either have a lukewarm reception or a warm recession that tapers off quickly along side the novelty factor.
About loneliness in the US, it is now decades since the sociology study Bowling Alone was published and things have only gotten worse. It is a huge problem.