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Comment by worker767424 | Hacker News Reader

If it helps, a robot will be doing their job in 5 years.

No it won't. A human will be flipping those burgers and serving them to customer.

They're already replacing cashiers with kiosks. No reason to think some of the relatively more mundane kitchen jobs aren't next.

But robots don't actually replace these workers.

In the case of McDonald's the kiosks only generated more throughput, actually adding work, so all the staff assigned to taking orders was put into other work.

Meanwhile self-checkout, while actually reducing throughput somewhat, made it possible for the workers to take on other tasks in the store - of which there are many.

There isnt that many jobs in a grocery store that need many people. Stocking shelves and cleaning mostly. Once those are automated there will be a lot less jobs.

If the jobs were that easy to automate they would have been automated at the current rate. Min wage going from $18-20 doesn't suddenly make that all-in-one supermarket bot doable. Automating real world jobs is hard and often not viable especially for dynamic work. Even the no-brainier automation like self-checkouts are actually not saving much apparently. (could be false, heard it on a anti-min wage channel).

Each year the cost of the technology goes down. At some point it'll be cheaper than labor and that point will just come earlier if wages are higher.

There is this robot called Marty whose reason for existence I still have to discover. I thought it was a roomba style robot but with a camera for navigation. Turns out it does nothing except make the messes it reports to staff even worse.

According to a Twitter post I can no longer track down, those robots exist primarily to shield stores from lawsuits over spillage.

So it's basically a high-tech equivalent of "CAUTION WET FLOOR"?

Amazing.

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