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Comment by Zanni | Hacker News Reader

What I never see mentioned in these types of articles is the rise of the service economy. There are some jobs that will never be automated because we prefer to deal with humans. Take food service for instance. No one wants to go to a high end steak house and have their wine poured and meal served by robots. Human interaction is part of the experience and part of the value. (At McDonald's, by contrast, the humans don't add value and could easily be replaced.) The "human touch" is going to become more important, not less, as automation increases.

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> No one wants to go to a high end steak house and have their wine poured and meal served by robots.

I’m sorry, but that actually sounds like a wonderfully peaceful way to dine.

Don't take this the wrong way but you need to think about some therapy and being able to take a random piece of steak and correctly prepare it 99% of the time is a hard problem.

What an odd argument. Preparing food correctly will almost certainly be more reliable with machines.

Regarding the human element of dining: I think you lack foresight. We will look back at human waiters as we now look at horses, vs modern cars. People still ride horses, and that’s fine, but to suggest they’re the only way or even the best way to go is just archaic and indiciative of an unhealthy level of denial, or a calcified brain unable to change. Open your mind.

> What I never see mentioned in these types of articles is the rise of the service economy. There are some jobs that will never be automated because we prefer to deal with humans

Mainly because percentage-wise there are so few of them, and they don't make up a significant enough portion of the economy to keep it afloat.

Customer-facing service jobs employ a huge number of people. In any case, there once was a time when white collar jobs were a tiny occupation category. There was even a time when manufacturing jobs were rare. The economy and composition of jobs changes with the abundance of resources.

> Customer-facing service jobs employ a huge number of people

But irreplaceable ones aren't. Bank tellers, cashiers, bus drivers, firemen, card dealers, bar tenders... all can and will be replaced by automation and consumers won't care.

Bartenders are totally irreplaceable. The non-social aspect of the job is easily automatable and has been for a long time, and the social aspect is contingent on human interaction.

I don't see bartenders being replaced en masse. It's as much about social interaction as it is about pouring a drink, particularly for your local hangout.

and the average bar /pub is such a chaotic and disorderly place a robot that could replace a human is probably not going to happen.

E.g. design me a robot that can work in say 90% or bars and pubs including climbing down the ladder to the cellar and putting on a new barrel and that's not to count the dealing with unruly customers.

I worked as a barman. A skilled barman can pour two pints simultaneously and take a new order from the next customer, but I believe with machine assistance this could be greatly increased. I could easily imagine replacing a staff of say 5, with 1 or 2 workers. Large order for 10 pints, 3 cocktails and 7 shots? A staff member presses a button, and the correctly sized, just cleaned glass pop out of a slot coming from the automated dishwasher, and the pints and other drinks are poured to perfection, every time. The barman checks the order is correct, accepts payment, gives change if its in cash, cleans the tables and changes the barrels when it's quiet. You could get a hell of a lot more work done with a small number of low paid staff and machines that can pour endless drinks at once. So while you don't eliminate all the staff, you can drastically reduce the headcount and greatly increase productivity, at least in theory.

>There are some jobs that will never be automated because we prefer to deal with humans.

This is cultural. People used to say they would never buy X online. Today there is almost nothing left in the set of X.

And I disagree about dining out. In the US I really dread dining out, even though the food tastes so good and is so cheap. Why? Servers constantly coming over, interupting conversation to ask me if I need anything (no doubt hoping to get a bigger tip). I'd rather press a button or something on my phone. I never go to a resturant for the staff, I go for the food/drink and the people I went with. Everyone else is somewhere between necassary evil and active annoyance.

I lived in some place in africa where you are required to have way more interactions for basic days to days activity. No phonebook. No map. No price or list of ingredients. When you want an info you have to ask.

Well, we got rid of those.

With a lot of modern services (social networks, online administration, food delivery) we are doing the same.

Robots will allow people to avoid people. And they will do it.

Why ? Because we created a society that requires to play a lot of games and people just want to be themselves without having to pay for it. They also don't want to pay for the unhappiness or inadequateness of others.

There will be a reverse tendency once people realize they need humans to be happy. But it won't start by that.

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