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Comment by erichocean | Hacker News Reader

> Burger automation is the fantasy of automating all the way to the bottom of the skill pile.

Automatic dishwashers, laundry machines, vacuums, automatic car washes are all widely known examples of replacing low-skill labor with machines. There's also the enormous amount of low-skill labor that's been removed in agriculture and the building trade (think: digging ditches by hand, which they still do in 3rd world countries).

Even food preparation labor has been dramatically reduced already at home thanks to the microwave and the logistic possibility of shipping and storing frozen foods (not to mention the proliferation of restaurants).

Low-skill activities are almost always the easiest things to automate (that's why we call them "low skill"). Things that require fuzzy human judgement, like managing people, are hard—if not impossible—to automate.

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Managing people is absolutely, 100% for at least the last 10 years, being aggressively and successfully being reduced to low skill labor. For example, things like ordering inventory, scheduling staff, pricing products are all done at significantly lower pay rates than were done in the past. The only thing that has slowed some of the automation is simply a shorter route to developing nation outsourcing.

The reason developing countries still dig ditches by hand is because it is still cheaper. The reason for that is not access to automation but the massive wage differential that makes that labor so cheap. Its the low cost of the labor that actually protects it from automation. So therefore it follows that expensive(high and mid skill labor which is even more scalable due to lower material costs since it can typically be automated without machines) will be the most profitable segment to either automate away or reduce to low skill labor.

> Managing people is absolutely, 100% for at least the last 10 years, being aggressively and successfully being reduced to low skill labor.

I absolutely agree. One of the startups I'm CTO at builds software that enables exactly that; however, it also results in new jobs being created at a higher-level (similar to the situation with robots I suppose).

By "higher level" do you mean people who can convince others to do things? That seems to me to be the last higher paid/skill position that will remain for some time. Which causes me to fear that all we will be left with is aggressive sales people and business owners.

I'd say cooking requires human judgement. Mainly in the "nope, that's going to kill someone" category.

Even with the invention of automatic dishwashers over 100 years ago, restaurants still employ dishwashers…

Yeah, but think about how many extra human dishwashers we'd need without automatic dishwashers. Most automation doesn't completely replace humans, it just allows them to be more efficient so less people can do the same amount of work.

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