I honestly believe fast food and frozen food provided a lot of value to the society. Much more than the harm they did.
So I'll take this as an optimistic view to AI.
So I'll take this as an optimistic view to AI.
However, we have adjusted. My parents talked about having fast food/restaurant food as a treat. It was too expensive to have more than once a month/birthdays. Heck, even school lunches were too expensive and they had to make food at home.
Today, we have more disposable income than my parents, so its easy to afford restaurant food AND get it delivered. The people buying this arent upper-middle class either, this is your general population that lives paycheck to paycheck. There are even people so confused about food prices that they make claims that fast food is cheaper than groceries.
Instead of using fast food as a tool, its become expected.
I live in an expensive part of NYC and have to go decently far out (by subway, I don't have a car) to find groceries that are cheaper than local fast food unless I want to eat mostly rice and beans.
Add in the costs of my time to shop, transport groceries, cook, and clean, it's significantly cheaper to eat out most of the time. Even subtracting the one task I actually enjoy (cooking), it's still not worth it most of the time.
The result is that cooking in becomes our "treat" that we do a few times a week and we end up buying the more expensive ingredients within walking distance.
You can get overtime whenever you want? Because if you are salary, your after-work time pays 0$/hr.
>unless I want to eat mostly rice and beans.
Seems like you don't want to cook, and have justified it with time costs. Prepared food is not going to be cheaper than unprepared food.
In general cooking is the fun part and that's what makes it a treat, not the rest of it.
Some prepared food within walking distance most definitely is cheaper than all unprepared food within walking distance. It works out just because the places I can walk to for groceries are incredibly overpriced and the restaurants obviously don't source their food there.
I typically don't buy my groceries from the gas station despite them having a half gallon of milk for $4 and it being 3 minutes walking away.
I also don't use gas station numbers to determine if something is cheaper or more expensive.
I can probably walk to a dozen different big grocery stores in 15m and they're ALL more expensive than the cheap fast food in the same area. Not including the smaller expensive bodegas where you can pick up stuff 24/7 every block (kinda like the equivalent of a gas station). A half gallon of milk is $4 at any of the big stores and even more at a smaller place.
Anything cheaper requires a subway ride, which adds more walking and is annoying to do with multiple grocery bags, not to mention adding a flat ~$5 additional cost.
For comparison: I'm trying to beat the numerous dollar pizza and food carts nearby, not normal "fast food" like the more expensive Five Guys on that intersection.
I'm sure no economist would agree with the kind of perspective. I mean, yeah, it pays 0$/hr... but it doesn't mean it's worth just 0$/hr.
> Prepared food is not going to be cheaper than unprepared food
Only if you believe after-work time worths 0$. (I don't think anyone seriously believes this)
If five fast food workers can prepare 100 meals in the time I can prepare 1, there should be some monetary savings shared with me (the customer) unless my time is truly worth close to 0. That's how economies of scale work.
Labor is typically 15-70% of the business's cost. (The 70% is in fields like medicine where regulatory capture has limited the number of licenses)
Its also not perfectly efficient. The worker may only be making 5 meals due to a slow day or slow hours. You may find processed foods in a grocery store more similar to '100 meals in the time I can prepare 1'.
Fast food ? I'd argue drawbacks heavily overshadow benefits of saving few minutes
Is Ekiben (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekiben) is fast food? It's ready-cooked, it's mass-produced, and you can get one very quickly. Is sushi take-out fast food?
They are still not as good as a meal that is carefully prepared by a housewife/househusband. But I do think the mass-produced substitution can be good enough, and that's why I don't think we should make the conclusion that AI therapists/companions must be so bad too early.
Our bodies digest it too quickly as it's been designed to make money and make us want more.