In the end, the robot is already higher on the ladder than the humans.
In situations designed for robots, like Amazon warehouses, they don't have a problem stocking shelves as long as the range of required behavior is much more restricted so the instrumentation can be more rugged and less articulate.
I always thought it was amusing when people said it would replace burger flippers and the like. Why? They're cheap, and that's relatively expensive/difficult to automate. The slightly higher paid manager though? Ripe for automation.
Interesting story. I'll be sure to read it.
Cashiers don't simple run the register, they do other stuff. Janitors fix stuff and carry heavy boxes, etc.
Managers and supervisors? Overpaid if they're doing the above or doing something can be automated.
that's a weird thing to say, because burger flippers ARE automated -- 99% of the work of making a McDonald's burger is already automated, only the remaining hard-to-automate 1% is left for the humans.
Yep. There's a name for that observation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
edit: was too fast, sorry. Traffic lights are called robots in SA.
That is very hard to replace.
Resource allocation and unequivocal decisions are for the machines to help us with.
If, as a manager, you do more of the latter: be afraid
As a gardener, I have never feared a robot that could pull weeds. As a home-maker I have never feared a robot that could wash dishes. As an inventor, I have never feared a robot that could draft diagrams. And yet those people who are at the mercy of the market fear, and this is why, I believe that capitalism is headed for either disaster or elimination. Capitalism has created a problem which does not exist.
Post-scarcity is only a problem in capitalism.
The monastic system was the main scientific institution for over a milenia, both in Europe and China. Only an ignorant person argue that this system developed no new technologies.
You say "only capitalism", but what are you comparing capitalism to? In the past 200 years, capitalism has been the only economic institution in the world, how do you know that other institutions would have been incapable of technological advancement?
If your point is to compare capitalism to state socialism, then you would be far off the mark. The USSR was extremely technologically advanced. The hunger was due to other problems, mostly having to do with Stalin intentionally creating famines in order to weaken insurgency.
"Is has been proposed that the Soviet leadership used the man-made famine to attack Ukrainian nationalism, and thus the man-made famine may fall under the legal definition of genocide.[57][58][54][59][28][60] " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#Causes
I am not promoting state socialism though. I would like a future in which each person/family unit/group of friends owned a small amount of land, and robots that would help them. Quite the opposite of state socialism. In state socialism, wealth is concentrated in the hands of the government. State socialism is basically monopolistic capitalism, and I believe that the two systems share many problems.
I want the distribution of wealth, not its concentration.
Its such a good system it needs to be implemented and maintained by force.
As a side note: post-scarcity is really only possible in virtual worlds like MineCraft. There's a limited amount of land, people's time is limited, people's attention is limited, and what other people will participate in is constrained by their desires and their ambitions. Unless somehow compelled, there's nobody who will set me up with a nice automated farm where I can live out my days playing mandolin and reading mathematics as I would like when they could set themselves up and not have to hear my racket across the fence. Though it's counter to our desires, we are forced to compete for resources ... even if most of us aren't struggling for survival.
This is not true.
(1) Just so long as the answer isn't "make them die because we don't need them anymore".