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Comment by AndrewDucker | Hacker News Reader

My local McDonalds now has giant screens for you to place your order. Most of the time I'm in there they now have counter staff with very little to do.

If they can work out a way to automate the making of the burger, or even the transport from the chef to the customer, they'll be able to cut their staff even more.

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This will be huge. Imagine a cinder block building half-buried in the ground with a loading dock and a drive-up. You wave your chipped credit card, the screen shows your last 5 orders or a Menu button. Make your selection and drive up to the pneumatic delivery chute. Plop! your bagged meal arrives seconds later.

Economically, it means we'll finally have to face the fact that, to run our country, we don't actually need everybody to work any more. Have to figure that one out (or at least, come to the consensus that a basic income is a good thing).

If we could somehow gather up the taxes to pay for basic income, maybe we could hire people to work on all of the things in "the commons" that obviously need fixing or enhancing, instead.

I consider myself to the left of today's Democratic party (then again, I think Richard Nixon was more liberal than 21st century Democrats), but basic income sounds like a real moral hazard to me, and traditional Keynesian economics would likely deal with most of the unemployment problem, perhaps in conjunction with rolling back some "free trade" back-stabbing (alas, that crap was bi-partisan). Easy access to "welfare" in the 60s and 70s is what got us the back-lash of Reagan and friends.

Welfare is not the problem its made out to be. But to work on the 'moral hazard': perhaps the basic income can be earned simply by social activity like elder visits, park monitoring, mentoring, public health seminars. Encourage improvements in quality of life.

Making it 'earned' is missing a major point of basic income: that just giving the money away can ultimately be much cheaper and more efficient than verifying if people 'deserve' it.

I guess I'm still just enough of a jerk that I would like to see the recipient's contribute positively to society, such as the examples mentioned above (child / elder care, park ranger, etc). There is plenty to be done - why don't we set people on that (roads, utilities, parks, forests, care, fire, police,... ), then see where we stand?

The reason to 'deserve it' is twofold. First, to avoid folks stagnating - a public health issue. 2nd, to have some way of knowing the person actually exists! E.g. automate it with an app, that verifies simply that you spend time at places associated with socializing. Not much is cheaper than that.

The moral hazard is that it contributes to stagnation, something like the spaceship in "Wall-E". Social activity isn't much of a substitute for knowledge progress. I'd argue that improvements in the quality of life would be more significant by giving purpose and drive to the population as a whole (young and elder), something more akin to the spaceships in Star Trek, where menial tasks are handled auto-magically and problem solving is handled by the crew.

I wouldn't dismiss social tasks. It gets people involved in community, including knowledge progress. And who are we to decide what purpose and drive to give a population? The minimum for health and growth is socializing.

More generally, I really wouldn't trust centrally planned "knowledge progress" or socialization or whatever tasks any more than I'd trust most other centrally planned control of a society's lives. Whether it's a good idea or not, there's nobody I'd trust with that power.

Hey, the market economy is already 'planning control of lives'. We're talking about loosening those controls. By removing the threat of starvation and homelessness.

> the market economy is already 'planning control of lives'

Not (entirely) centrally (yet). If you piss off the wrong individual, or stand out to whatever degree, you still have a shot at a somewhat decent life. There's nobody outside of work you have to obey for threat of losing your livelihood.

I was agreeing with you - basic income only works if everyone gets it, if there isn't a test for getting it, so that there's very little way it can be denied.

I don't see an issue with requiring folks to ask for it - by participating in society to some small degree, easily measured.

The issue is that someone has to decide what "participating in society" actually means. Today, it's often seeking work or working for pay - but we already agree that there's ways of participating in and contributing to society that don't involve that. I'm sure that whatever you or anyone else can come up with that's "easily measured", there's people who contribute to society in other ways, and people who can't participate in the way that you want.

>> ... we don't actually need everybody to work any more.

We don't actually need everybody any more. FTFY

Should not have been downvoted. It takes little creativity to imagine artificial intelligences serving the consuming masses coming to the conclusion that they can handle things on their own and humans are a net resource drain.

http://momentummachines.com/

This company has been marketing one of its products as an automated burger maker. Not sure if they have McD's as a customer. They claim 360 burgers/hr[0]

[0]http://www.businessinsider.com/momentum-machines-burger-robo...

Knew those were imminent; a recruiter contacted me a year and a half ago for a job working on those systems for McDonalds, so I knew it was only a matter of time before they started showing up.

You in the Chicago area, by any chance? That's where their R&D building is located. Although I believe she said they were going to do some testing on the west coast, also.

I hate them. They are unresponsive and slower. I walk past them, go up to the counter, and get a nice greeting and a smile from a human being. Ditto for supermarkets: those machines are even more annoying. I always try to go to a lane with a real person (granted, they're not always smiling and sometimes acknowledge you less than a computer)

Self checkout is wildly faster for me, even with computers that feel like they're running on hardware from 15 years ago. I can have my basket organized in the same order I'm going to bag it, scan it in, bag it efficiently, pay and leave. The worst part about self checkout are the other people who don't know how to use it, have huge carts(especially at a tiny checkout kiosk that should really have a max item limit) or are just slow. In the case of lines at self checkout, I'll go to an empty lane if the whole store isn't just packed.

self checkout lanes need a "beginner" side and "express" side. :/

Depends. If I have one item, in a sealed package w/ legible barcode in my hand, the self serve lane is fine.

If I have produce, or a large basket of stuff likely to contain a "processing error" in it somewhere, no way. Go for a real clerk.

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