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Comment by greglindahl | Hacker News Reader

My local coffee place has humans who operate an espresso machine, while Starbucks has baristas who push a button, and there are vending machines that produces espresso without having an operator. None of this excites a moral panic. Kitchen labor-saving devices have been being invented for hundreds of thousands of years. What's new?

Think about wheat. Wheat used to be ground in stone mills operated by oxen or wind or water, which is much more labor-intensive than today's mills. Before that, the grinding process was even more labor-intensive.

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> None of this excites a moral panic.

It has done, in the past, and these concerns have not been without merit.

The Ur-Case is that of the Luddites. When weaving machines came onto the fore in 19th century Britain, groups of saboteurs fearing for their jobs wrecked the machines with rocks and hammers. The Crown response was swift and unflinching. Machine-breaking was made a capital offence and the Luddites were put down with the violence typical of 19th century law enforcement.

Nowadays we look on and shake our heads. In the long run the Luddites' fears were unfounded. Mechanisation improved productivity, which meant more cloth could be made cheaply, which increased the size of the market, boosted purchasing power and opened up new markets for new kinds of work.

In the short run, however, things were not so comfortable for the workers of Northern England. The 'compensatory effects' of technological improvement took many years to land. In the meanwhile an entire generation of men were reduced to penury.

Perhaps these technologies will open new markets after all. But how quickly? And will the jobs compare? What happens when the work human beings like and are good at disappears? What happens when only trivial jobs remain? What does that do to people and their relation to society?

"The Luddites were a group of English textile workers and weavers in the 19th century who destroyed weaving machinery as a form of protest. The group was protesting the use of machinery in a "fraudulent and deceitful manner" to get around standard labour practices.[1] Luddites feared that the time spent learning the skills of their craft would go to waste as machines would replace their role in the industry.[2]"

"It is a misconception that the Luddites protested against the machinery itself in an attempt to halt progress of technology."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

The modern day equivalent would be the French anti-Uber strike:

https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/26/10832204/french-taxi-uber...

CATO's agenda, of course, requires depicting the French taxi drivers as "luddites protesting technology" which neatly illustrates exactly why the misconception has persisted for so long:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewfeeney2/2015/06/30/uber-...

This is an incorrect history of the Luddites. They didn't fear for their jobs. Most of them were machine operators and most of the machines they destroyed was over 200 years old at the time.

It was a protest about shit working conditions caused.

What's new? Well, if we keep replacing low-skill jobs by high-skills ones, we may have a little problem: are humans going to keep up with the training? Is the workforce going to adapt fast enough?

When job replacement happens over several generations, it's a pretty easy problem to solve. When it gets faster, turns out some human abilities are not scaling very well.

Horses used to be used for practically everything. The first commercial steam engine pumped water from mines and was measured in "horsepower", the the rate at which a horse could continuously pump water. Then steam engines replaced freight hauling. Then personal transport. Don't see many working horses now.

Don't see many horses at all. That is, the offspring of those working horses certainly doesn't roam about in pastures, to pursue happiness because there are no jobs that require them.

I've read here that the obsolete horses helped bootstrap the pet food industry...

That was not something I needed to know.

In Pursuit of Honor (1995)

> The movie follows the plight of the officers as they attempt to save the animals that the Army no longer needs as it modernizes toward a mechanized military.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113399/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Pursuit_of_Honor

Are you implying that human population could ultimately decline, because of AI and automation ? If so, why is that undesirable.

Some believe that a human life has intrinsic value, even outside the value of the species as a whole and even outside the value of that human's labour.

True, but some believe that population growth has to stabilise at some point.

It is stabilizing already, natality in developing countries dropped much faster than what was expected.

A solution is providing the option of mid-life education.

Of course this comes more easily to places with free education.

What about if there are a group of people who cannot do mid-to-high skilled jobs (whilst potentially controversial, I think this is accurate)?

If we replace all of those jobs what do they do?

I have always thought there is a far-future dystopian story in that somewhere; society has evolved IT and automation to the extent that only the top 25% of individuals actually "work" and everyone else has leisure. The 25% decide they want a leisurely life also, causing the collapse of society...

Even if there is such a group of people, unable to learn a new trade, surely they're not the majority. So there is lots of room for improving the situation.

There are lots of stories of American coal miners going into tech when the mining jobs dried up. But their process of getting there is through charitable organizations, not a proper educational program.

There are vested interests in promoting those sorts of stories, as a counterpoint to the depressing reality that far more drop out of the economy onto the disability rolls and slowly or quickly drink and drug themselves to death.

Coal mining was (and is) tech, so it shouldn't be a surprise that some workers can move into another area of engineering.

The 75% should only be provided with little more than bare essentials. An apartment, food, and health care, with a small allowance for niceties.

The 25% that actually work should be rewarded with luxuries. Financial means to travel, own their own house, drive a nice car, etc.

Who do the 25% sell all their custom salads to? Automation is great at producing consumer goods not so much at producing luxury goods. One would think that the problem of not enough consumers to buy the stuff automation produces would be a self limiting mechanism. A UBI doesnt really address the problem either because it is essentially just taking money from those that own the automation equipment and giving it to those that don't so they can turn around and buy stuff from the automation equipment :/

But human life is dynamic. The most productive and innovative contributors start out as drooling infants and up as feeble elders. Society has to support more than high earners and their favorites.

Certainly. And we'll support the drooling infants and feeble elders.

And we'd also provide the opportunities for people to learn what is necessary to move from the 75% to the 25%.

and available careers, not just jobs.

Another question: How will they pay for that retraining; will the high skill jobs really pay enough to cover 2-4 years of schooling debt?

And that's another one - will that high skill job exist after 2-4 years of retraining?

>labor-saving devices have been being invented for hundreds of thousands of years. What's new?

An extremely larger population that any other period in time (more than double what was merely 100 years ago), combined with the most extreme productivity improvements and new technologies like AI and robotics that can make most of them redundant in a few large fell swoops.

Plus, the fact that for most of humanity's existence, the masses mattered mostly if they were useful to some end, not for their intristic value as human beings.

Mattered to whom?

People always matter at least to themselves.

>Mattered to whom?

To those that run society and determine policy.

>People always matter at least to themselves.

Which is neither here nor there as to whether anyone will lend them a helping hand or let them perish e.g. in slums and poverty.

Though even at that one would be surprised. People left without a job/role in society often don't matter even to themselves -- low self esteem, turning to drugs, alcohol, etc.

>People left without a job/role in society often don't matter even to themselves -- low self esteem, turning to drugs, alcohol, etc.

I see this argument all the time here, but no one accounts for the fact that we live in a society in which people's worth is largely determined by their ability to secure financial stability. Who's to say that people without jobs, allowed to live without societal derision in a (best case) post work future would be inevitably reduced in spirit?

I covered that in the first part of my comment: the masses are rarely nurtured when they are not useful.

So, it's more likely that they'll be left to rot, than that they'll be provided for and allowed to be included is a "post work future".

Oh, I'm not optimistic at all that the kind of societal shift I'm talking about will/can happen, at least in any peaceful/gentle way- that's why I said in a best case.

I'm just objecting to the idea that working for a living is necessary for self esteem or self actualization.

Grinding wheat left byproducts of the stone burrs in the wheat product. This ground the enamel off peoples teeth leaving them nearly toothless by their mid-thirties. It wasn't till recently that "milling" became the norm in flour production. The wheat berry is not crushed in the milling process but is first burst and torn successively into every finer pieces. Some people have never tasted freshly milled flour made into bread. Total pity that...,

Could you cite a source for grinding wheat leaving sufficient stone burr particles resulting in enamel damage? I could not find a source via Google.

Dental health and disease in ancient Egypt

http://www.nature.com/bdj/journal/v206/n8/full/sj.bdj.2009.3...

I got there by googling [wheat enamel damage -gluten stone], there's lots more than just this one article

Getting the vast majority of your food from a single starchy source is also not great for dental (or general) health, even without the sand chewing part.

What's different is that the button was being pushed by a human.

That human gets paid a salary and earns a living.

And that human could presumably choose not to push the button if the expresso machine tries to become sentient (in theory).

The vending machine still has many humans involved: building it involved humans, maintaining it involves humans. The difference is that the button is pushed by the customer. That's the same amount of human labor, actually, it's just that the customer isn't paying someone else for the button press.

Lets say the vending machine costs $2,000 a year including maintenance and everything. That means there can't be more than $2,000 worth of human labor involved in it, neither in production or maintenance. That's an order of magnitude less labor involved than hiring a person. If it didn't save labor, there'd be no economic advantage to it after all.

On top of that, the jobs it does require are skilled. Engineers to design it, mechanics to repair it. They aren't jobs like a barista that you can get without any experience or education. Even the work of assembling it can be outsourced to some third world country, or automated itself.

That means there can't be more than $2,000 worth of human labor involved in it, neither in production or maintenance.

That is not necessarily true, as the company could be subsidizing its labor costs in order to gain salad-vending marketshare.

I believe the vending machine has greater work overhead and uses more materials than an actual human. Thnik about it: precut veggies stored in refrigerated (probably plastic) containers. Somebody has to supply and prepare the veggies. Some other human has to resupply the machine when it runs out of veggies. Some other human has to fix the vending machine when it stops working. Some other humans have to design the machine and assemble it, at least in part. With an actual human you'd only have to supply the raw veggies and the human worker would do all the preparation (using food processors), serving and processing payments. One could automate some tasks like payment processing or have two humans operate the salad bar: one that prepares and serves the salads and one that processes payments. This would avoid cooks switching between working with (dirty) cash and preparing salads.

I disagree and think the machine has less overhead. Yes there is a large cost upfront to develop and manufacture it. But once the machine has been designed and tested, it will never have to be designed again. Design is a one time cost.

Once manufacturing is underway, the process is typically made as efficient as possible and made to scale. The work that went into design and testing can now be scaled to thousands or millions of units which is a great return on investment. Each unit has a one time cost for materials used for parts, with some long term maintenence costs.

Operation requires only an electric energy draw. If that energy is from a clean source such as solar, this unit isn't having much of any further negative impact. Operation could last years or decades depending on design and whether or not the product is superceded, at which time its parts can be recycled. Even then, the time spent on design will be used to create the next version.

Supplying the machines with goods is already a task handled when goods are delivered to the location and stocked, so there isn't going to be much or any overhead added there. Plus, we can automate that too (self-driving vehicles for transportation, robots for the last leg of delivery and stocking).

Human workers do not scale in the same way that machines do, and aren't typically as efficient at this type of task.

Finding suitable human workers is difficult and can take considerable time and resources every time one is hired.

Human workers are expensive, and this is an ongoing neverending cost. This cost will not scale down as you hire more workers or work them for a longer time (unlike machines).

Human reliability is hit and miss. Also, you cannot work them 24/7. There is lots of downtime and you would require at least 3 or 4 humans to replace 1 machine if the task requires 24/7 uptime.

The enegry that humans consume and their waste is typically not effecient. Three meals a day, often including animal products which are costly in terms of resources and environmental impact. Then there's waste treatment for them. And the energy costs to deliver the food from a farm to their location, and even farm growing and harvesting.

None of this is as effecient or "green" as a renewable energy draw such as solar, wind, or hydroelectric delivered over a power line.

On many levels, humans are a poor replacement for machines in predictable tasks such as making a coffee or a sandwich for a chain restaurant. Humans are good for social work, and making coffee is not social.

In terms of someone needing a job, even if that job is meaningless and unnecessary, basic income should be provided instead. But that's a whole other conversation and we aren't there yet.

Point is: Machines are efficient. Social impact is a different conversation.

That human can, if properly trained and motivated, recognize when the coffee being served isn't coming out right. They can interface with customers and resolve complicated human problems, de-escalating when necessary to find a good outcome.

A robot has no way of knowing if the coffee will taste good or contains rat poison. It's just going through the motions. If it serves you a dud drink you can't argue with it, you just got scammed. Post an angry Yelp review if it makes you feel better.

That's an argument for having a higher-value problem-solving employee around, not an argument for having several lower-value button-pushing employees around.

Fewer, higher value employees has been the trend in many industries for the past few hundred thousand years.

Or for better sensors on the robot. There's no fundamental reason it can't tell if the drink is correct.

The fundamental reason it can't tell if the drink is correct is that "correct" is in the eye of the beholder. You cannot trivially formalize expectations any random human would have of a drink made by human.

You can, however, force people to lower their expectations until they can be trivially formalized. That's what happens with tea/coffee vending machines. The dispensed drink is really bad, but it's uniformly bad, and since people don't expect quality coffee from a vending machine, they don't complain.

You can get better espresso out of the lavazza coffee machine on palatine hill in Rome than is served in many cafes in this world. So technologically it sure is possible to do better.

Why do we need an extra person? There's already a human present, the customer. Let them submit the feedback and fix their coffee at the same time.

I don't want to get through the hurdle of contacting Big Co. through an automated form when the vending machine has scammed me. It's way easier with a human operator. Ever tried to dial into a call center and waited like 30 minutes after navigating through voice menus in order to talk to an actual human to fix your problem?

The way this is going to work, to use McDonald's as an example, is that instead of having 40-50 total people operating a normal franchise location across 2 or 3 shifts, you're going to have 15-20.

The cashiers are gone. The fry cook is gone. The drive-thru order taker is gone. The cooks are gone.

You'll still have a preparer that will probably also do running (they'll bag the multiple, separate items up and take them to the front). You'll have a shift manager that will help with a bit of everything (eg if a customer has a problem with the order kiosk or payment). You'll still have a human cleaning the building and parking lot, taking out trash. There will also obviously be people routinely involved in machine maintenance, installation, etc.

There will be some complication with condiments and food layering. There will probably be a position for food ammo reloader, that keeps the machines loaded with whatever that machine cooks / prepares.

It would be possible to get rid of the bagger/runner, but it'd probably be cost prohibitive and needlessly complex to assemble the various robots on a line that could also bag properly.

At its best, eventually, this system will produce more food (1.5x to 4x I'd guess), at a lower per customer cost, with superior food safety (including hygiene). Then it's a question of how much of that gain gets competed away (benefiting customers) and how much goes into the pocket of the owners.

Starbucks will be similar. They won't get rid of all their humans, they'll reduce their number significantly.

It's likely to be a decades long, piece by piece, transition. The early results won't be spectacular for either customers or franchise owners, it'll take many years of gradual improvement.

The reason I buy coffee at a coffee shop is because I want it done properly, and "properly" is largely a subjective thing. A good shop will have someone who's intimately familiar with what they're preparing and will tune the machine at multiple times per day to get the right result.

A robot just does what it's told.

Starbucks used to have manual machines and the results were...variable. Some days you'd get a substandard drink, but if you got someone who knew what they were doing, the results were fantastic.

It's like before the coffee would be anywhere beteween a 6 and 9 out of 10. Now they're consistently 7.5 out of 10 every time. Boring, predictable, never bad, but never great.

That's probably why humans start hitting vending machines when they just gobble up the cash and fail to operate properly.

> A robot has no way of knowing if the coffee will taste good or contains rat poison

Eventually automated systems ought to be able to do this better than most people can. Why couldn't there be engineered sensors that could detect such things very well?

Because there is no theory linking interaction of molecules to flavour yet, although there are some preliminary work from some labs on this (with beer)

Seeing as humans don't usually taste their coffee before serving, identifying flavour is probably not strictly necessary to the task.

And given that the act of making good-enough coffee isn't a very difficult task (given how readily available and quickly trained "baristas" are), and how mechanical the process is already, im not sure there's anything to suggest it isn't do-able. Its more likely a matter of cost and scale

Smelling is already a form of tasting, just like looking at how it behaves because we humans are really good at combining our senses to get the input we look for, that's why most people usually don't taste the coffee before serving, unless it's smelling/looking funny while brewing.

Replicating this with electrical sensors is a pretty complex task we still haven't managed to get working, after all we are not only talking about replicating the sense of taste but also the sense of smelling and how they interact with each other.

You don't actually have to replicate the interaction though, you just need to identify the particular range of smells that people accept, and have the machine capable of detecting it.

Generating a brand new style of good coffee might need the interaction though

But different people are accepting of different tastes and even those change with age, what people accept as nice smelling/tasting food can be quite subjective because the very same smell can be overpowering to some while appealing to others.

How to calibrate a sensor for something like that on a per user basis? I don't know, but apparently it's possible because "electronic noses" do exist but are mostly used in laboratory settings, probably on account of their price.

There's also a reason why we still use pigs and dogs for work that require good smelling senses, like search&rescue or truffle foraging. Training these animals is very expensive, but it still seems to be the cheaper option compared to building "smellobots", so I doubt smelling sensor are far enough along to be put into a ton of kitchen bots at small cost.

Its more likely a matter of cost and scale

This is not a trivial matter! Cost is entirely the reason a host of technologically-possible automation hasn't happened outside a lab.

I said "eventually". Are you saying it will never be possible?

Never is a long time, but it's also a theroetical.

The sun will eventually engulf the Earth rendering this argument irreelvant.

It works both ways, though. I was responding to a claim with an implicit "never" possible. Like you say, such a claim is theoretical, and I wanted to ask how that person knew it would never be possible.

Smell, taste and poison are all matters of physical molecules and how these interact with human physiology. We already understand these to some extent. We can already build devices that can detect some of these things to some extent. We have no grounds to say it's impossible for a human-level ability of it to be engineered. (Note that lack of positive evidence against X is not the same as positive evidence for X).

This would be so much easier if we just replaced the consumer with a more efficient AI.

Real-life George Jetson

>What's new?

American elites want:

* A convenient scapegoat for outsourced manufacturing jobs which they are to blame for.

* A convenient scapegoat for jobs lost to austerity which they are to blame for.

* A perennial threat to hang over uppity worker's heads to head off threats of unionization.

> What's new?

Nothing new indeed, but when something creates fear you can be sure there's always going to be someone that is going to take advantage of it to enact laws, collect taxes and the like.

I think most of that has excited moral (I would call it political) panic at one point or another. But, there isn't anything special about these salad machines, I agree.

The underlying narrative is a fear of automating lots of other things. The new wave of automation is still uncertain, we don't know how to identify nevermind personify the symbols and culprits of it. Automated kitchen robots are a nice stand-in for automation generally. Like the robots in the jetsons.

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