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Comment by rwhitman | Hacker News Reader

He's right - when the bulk of common minimum wage jobs have been replaced by machines to offset the human resource cost, it's going to decimate low-wage employment.

There will eventually be a price point at which the cost of buying and maintaining machines is more expensive than human labor. The problem is those competitive wages are extremely low, measured in pennies an hour. (Mechanical Turk is a great example)

Today's minimum wage workers may eventually end up working illegally or flooding "gig economy" 1099 roles - driving their collective value in those markets down to wages less than a dollar an hour.

Without a strategy like Basic Income, our cushy Western living standards are going to be at a real crossroads soon. We're about to turn a good chunk of the Western world into Bangladesh

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The deception in his argument, though, is that this is happening because of rising minimum wages.

If the minimum wage stayed the same, but automation was cheaper regardless (it will be by its very nature, count on it), he'd still be first in line to axe those jobs.

Agreed. He clearly has a self-serving business and political agenda underlying his statements.

If his business is suffering right now, it's because the American appetite has changed - people either want decent food made with quality ingredients in a friendly higher-touch environment, or dollar value menu quick calories.

Much rather see crummy middle-ground fast food chains like Carl's/Hardees, Burger King, Wendy's go under and be replaced with better businesses that respect employee attention to quality and service than have them morph into automats. If fully automated dining becomes a category, I really doubt these lumbering grease factories will be the ones to dominate it anyhow

This is easy for you to say, you can easily make the trade-off of higher quality for more money. But is it right for you to force your values onto people with less money, who will feel the pain of that trade-off more sharply? Maybe they'd also prefer to eat in a nicer place, but their circumstances simply don't allow for it.

Keeping costs down isn't being miserly, it's helping to deliver a product that is within reach of the less fortunate.

keep people poor so poor people can afford to eat, got it

You misinterpret.. My comment had a very specific list of middle-tier fast food joints that have gone to crap.

McDonald's wasn't in that list. Neither was Taco Bell. Both very affordable, and still pretty consistent.

But if you're going to call me out on classism, it's a fairly ironic position to take that fast food is some sort of special charity to the poor. A far more charitable approach would be embracing publicly-subsidized grocery stores in food deserts rather than letting private equity slumlords peddle sugary deep fried dog food as if it's the only game in town.

Right now there is a gap between cost of human labor and cost of automation. When automation becomes cheaper than human labor, it will make more economical sense to switch to automation. Even if you stick with only automation getting cheaper, the gap is still closing. But with the cost of human labor also increasing, the gap is just closing even faster. It is not reasonable to think we can slow the decreasing cost of automation as that is just the nature of technology at scale. But we have absolute control over the cost of human labor. Every time we vote for a minimum wage increase we are choosing to increase the cost of human labor. If this is the choice we make then we can't really complain about the effect it has.

That is a good point. One of the reasons historians tend to claim as to why the industrial revolution occurred in 18th century Britain and not Ptolemeic Egypt (where there is evidence of machines like steam engines) is that ancient Egyptian labor was cheap, which meant more profits for ruling classes while the people had jobs.

It is worth noting that Egyptian prominence is directly due to the abundant resources of the Nile, and presumably, with technology displacing natural abundance, there could certainly be more for everybody. Famines are more often a result of policy, and rarely because food is so scarce that no-one can eat (ex: Ireland and India under British rule)

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