You can thank your local Marxist voters. The $15 minimum wage is in effect, in many parts of the country, and the $15 minimum wage earner is out- replaced by automatic ATM-like machines.
One only hopes this doesn’t mean the fry-cooks in the back won’t have to come up to the counter and handle your change every time something goes wrong. The robots are here, and they’re gunning for your job- although, no more so than ever before.
For those minding the cash registers in fast food restaurants, it may be time to graze elsewhere- like say- a trade school.
Late in May of this year, Pizza Hut and a number of other fast food establishments announced that a new robotic order taker called “Pepper” would begin taking orders by the end of the year. The company says it will provide customers with a “fun and frictionless experience.”
The Truth about Robo-Workers
A great deal of research exists, going back decades, that indicates restaurant workers are not the only people whose jobs may be under threat by the robot invasion.
One popular example, written by Michael Osborne and Carl Frey of Oxford, reports that 47 percent of Americans may be in danger of being made obsolete in their workplace capacities within the next 20 years.
A newer paper written by Terry Gregory, Melanie Arntz, and Ulrich Zierahn of the Centre for European Economic Research portrays the situation in a somewhat rosier color.
The report from Oxford relied on expert input on the likelihood that certain occupations can be automated- not whether they would be. The CEER study takes a more nuanced look at the chances that jobs will be dehumanized sooner than later.
Getting into a more complex collection of data, the CEER researchers consider that most jobs involve collections of tasks- of which most machines could only handle some. Consider clerks in accounting and auditing: the first study from Oxford would have them out of work by 2036 at a 98 percent rate.
But the CEER study claims, more realistically, that the job of an accountant is much more complicated than simply doing math- and while machines obviously excel at math- there are lots of in between things that are still best done by humans, such as interacting with other humans.
Accountants, don’t just crunch numbers- they also have to make the humans they work for understand what those numbers mean- and if they can’t then all that accounting goes for naught.
In order to get a machine to do the work of an accountant, the designers of the machine would have to make it so that the work best left to the human- is, while the machine simply does the accounting.
Looking at the question this way, we begin to see that the machine invasion has already happened- via the computers that we all use to handle data organization and number crunching. These machines haven’t replaced humans at all- they’ve only made their jobs better, easier, more accurate, and more valuable.
The dreaded rise of the job-taking machines would be very much like this. Slow, monotonous work would be increasingly handed over to automated tools, as many already have.
Proponents of automation argue this; that it is the dehumanizing, repetitive tasks that bring workers no joy- these are the jobs that the machines will take away from us in the short term.
Viva the Revolution
At first, the change would be difficult for low-wage workers to cope with. They would have to learn new skills. There’s a very high chance that more jobs would be created to service the machines used to replace low level jobs.
As long as labor is cheap, (and despite the new $15 minimum, there are plenty of places companies can go to find cheap labor), there will be little incentive for anyone to invest in the development of machines to perform that cheap labor.
Even if a sudden insurgence of robotic laborers flooded the labor market, the total number of jobs may not fall- it may even rise. With greater complexity, comes more maintenance. That means more jobs, jobs that would likely be of a higher quality than the ones workplaces offer now.
To change that would take a massive influx of intelligent machines that are self-sustaining, and while most experts agree that truly intelligent machines are inevitable- no one takes seriously the idea that they can be totally self-sufficient within the next 50 years.
Until that distant future arrives, machines will only improve the quality of the job market by removing laborers from the filth and humiliation of the world’s most demeaning jobs.
Regards,
Ethan Warrick
Editor
Wealth Authority
