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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

This can't be overstated. Eliminating the minimum wage food worker is going to be have a huge impact on society. Both for the company and for the people who work there.

I'm not sure what it means for the people. In one way, fast food is the only obvious work available for them. That's the only reason they do it, nobody likes it otherwise. But on the other hand, perhaps it's only the most obvious choice available. Perhaps more drastic choices, perhaps involving moving to new cities, would become more attractive and hopefully get them out of wage slavery.

I'm grasping at straws. This is probably going to be bad for them.

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I think in the long term we're going to need a major demographic shift. High-capability people to rich countries and low-capability people to poor countries. If someone lives in the United States and isn't capable of any job beyond manual labour, they should probably look at moving to a country where manual labour is still in demand.

There are others, including myself, that believe low skill work is too cheap to be replaced in the near term. The exact opposite can be said for many currently "High-capability" people. That's why it's "software is eating the world" not "robots are eating the world". Mental process replacement is much, much more scalable than physical process replacement do to the raw material costs.

We're much more likely to see things like doctors, lawyers and plumbers replaced with low skill workers that simply act out the last physical mile dictated by either fully automated decision making or software provided decision efficiency that allows for example, only one doctor to diagnose every patient at a hospital. The last physical mile is much more expensive than high level decision making to replace at scale.

>There are others, including myself, that believe low skill work is too cheap to be replaced in the near term

Well, the vast majority of low-skill work has already been replaced by relatively simple machines -- harvesting wheat, digging holes, moving big heavy objects around. Now we're in a situation where the remaining low-skill jobs are things which are easy for a human but hard for a machine, like harvesting oranges, or (for that matter) making hamburgers.

Plenty of construction workers still dig holes. Plenty of movers still move big heavy objects around. I wouldn't be so sure as much has been replaced as you might think. And it's not hard vs. easy but cheap vs. expensive.

Think of the job of digging a swimming pool sized hole. With bare hands it would take a ludicrous amount of work. With shovels and wheelbarrows it still takes lots of labor. With heavy equipment it takes (I'm guessing) a few people a few days. The shovel removed 90% of those jobs and heavy machinery removed 90% again. That does not however mean there are fewer jobs. It could mean instead that we dig more holes.

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