The tech necessary to replace front line service workers is not there. If it was we'd all be buying one to use as a domestic servant/slave. The robots in the article are more assembly line types, what happens when someone spills a coffee in some place 'unexpected', customer wants a custom frappadappalappachino instead of the regular drink, or something needs to be moved out of reach some customer needs help in a million other unexpected ways. The tech will get there eventually I'm sure but not by 2019. They will need to hire more locals, and probably increase their wages because they (rightfully so) won't accept such nonsense wages like £8 an hour in London.
I agree that things won't change enough in service jobs to matter by 2019. But as to this:
> The tech necessary to replace front line service workers is not there. If it was we'd all be buying one ... what happens when ... some customer needs help in unexpected ways
History does tell us that sometimes the market will throw away jobs that are becoming inconvenient to society, even if that means doing without the services that class of worker provides, or receiving worse and lessconvenient services.
Consider household servants.
They used to be seen as necessary for middle and upper-class households, because professional households required staggering amounts of manual labor just to keep everyone fed and clothed.
Those jobs vanished, right around the time that clothes and dish-washing machines were invented. But it's interesting to look at why.
Clothes and dish-washing machines are, frankly, not as great as servants (my feeling 'icky' about having someone else wash my clothes aside). You have to do the work yourself, and accept more cognitive load. But they win on cost -- the costs of employing a servant went up, and eventually worse service was worth it for a simpler and cheaper self-serve solution.
Could something similar happen in service work?
Well, look at the Amazon store, and compare it to a current grocery store.
Now imagine a Starbucks with touchscreen-and-voice enabled ordering, no visible employees (maybe one employee, nominally a store manager, working the fleet of coffee machines behind the screens, and doing some light sweeping in the restaurant, etc) and a communal co-working space that more or less preserves the current experience, just minus the baristas.
The tech doesn't have to replace the workers entirely, just improve their efficiency to the point that less humans are needed.
Take supermarkets. What used to be 10 checkout assistants serving 30 customers per hour each for a total throughput of 300 customers per hour, can now become 20 self checkout machines serving 15 customers per hour each, with 2 retrained checkout assistants to oversee 10 machines each and handle the edge cases. Same overall throughput. Each individual customers experience gets slightly worse (perhaps, although maybe the longer checkout time is offset by shorter queues?), but throughput stays the same, and staffing is reduced significantly. I'm seeing this right now in every large supermarket, and even a lot of smaller corner shop type ones.
There's a whole range of service jobs that are vulnerable to this kind of 80% efficiency improvement that will drastically reduce the levels of staff needed. Restaurant wait staff can be 80% replaced by self ordering via app or tablet. Bar staff, coffee shop staff (you can already preorder Starbucks and pay via the app, the human just makes the drinks), fast food staff (ever seen an express lane), all the same, a machine could make each staff member able to handle many times more customers but automating only the most repetitive parts leaving the human to just handle the edge cases.
They aren't talking about replacing all workers, just some of them. "The $35,000 robot can boost the number of items picked by a worker by 200 percent to 500 percent, Welty said, and six employees can handle work normally done by 20 to 25."
> customer wants a custom frappadappalappachino instead of the regular drink
Actually, I think that's something that would be relatively easily to automate. I've seen computerized ordering kiosks in European fast food restaurants. If you already have the robot, all you'd need to do is add a custom-item builder to the ordering interface. If the customer has a loyalty card or account, they could built it offline and save the item to their account for later retrieval.
Assembling a liquid product seems like it'd be much easier to automate than cooking or general cleaning tasks. Overall, though, your point still stands.
To be honest, a lot more robots could be used if locations were designed for them in the first place. I'm not exactly expecting to see my bartender get replaced by a humanoid robot, as seen in Passengers, anytime soon. Instead I expect more to follow the McDonalds route; changing the entire food ordering flow by having touch screen displays dotted around the restaurant, where you can quickly tap in an order.
One of the key points in some AI/robotics piece that I read recently was that expecting robots to navigate in and interact with humans in a world designed by humans for other humans can be a very difficult problem.
Driving is a case in point. Essentially everything about the current road system, signals, etc. are built around normal human levels of visual acuity, reflexes, and ability to reason about a typical traffic environment. Especially in places like cities, that's a very tall order for an AI. (But, unlike a factory, you can't just assume away the people who live and work there. i.e. the whole reason for the city's existence in the first place.)
Or extra BIG ASS FRIES... (Carl's Jr from Idiocracy)
ObOnTopic: Cashiers are doing a very automatable job.. Like, it's done already to good effect. And if you do like our Krogers does at night, you dont have a choice to not use automation.
The harder thing is mechanics and QC for food production. But with cheaper motors and actuators, makes more complicated food automation cheaper, easier, and higher quality than human workers. And robots don't complain, or whine about bad working conditions... And they show up to work without fail.
Probably more likely that the government will create very, very accessible and liberal visas for europeans and they will continue to work in the same jobs that they do now.
When it starts affecting people who vote, they'll start to push back and you'll get either Keynesian economic stimulus (we'll pay you to dig a hole and fill it back in again), or regulation that makes automation more difficult (e.g. French-style job protections).
Put in a policy saying that anyone whose job gets eliminated or reduced as the result of automation is eligible for half-pay and full pension benefits until they have a new job at an equivalent salary and suddenly the business case for robots wouldn't be nearly so strong. And people will be pushing for stuff like that if they feel that their jobs, rather than some Polish guy's, is at risk.
Migrants, by and large, don't vote, so you can automate their jobs away without incurring regulatory risk to yourself, if you are a large organization. It's the safe place to start.
Part of the justification for current anti-immigrant sentiment, and Brexit, boils down to "they took our jobs!"
More accurately: Immigrants did jobs that citizens were unwilling to do for market rates. The market hasn't changed. Low-cost labor is still required, and robots will fill those roles.
If anything, I'd be worried about a net reduction in jobs as a result of removing immigrants... smaller businesses that lack the capital for automated labor may themselves priced out of business trying to employee citizens.
At this point good creative work is probably the closest thing to automation immunity, as well as patient-facing healthcare (ie nurses)... for the rest of us education and experience is the only job security we have.
> qualifier " for low skilled jobs in the manufacturing sector"
For most of the people whose main reason for voting for Brexit was immigration's effects on jobs, these are the jobs that they seem the immigrants as competition for.
The theory is that the immigrants were willing to work for less so "stole" the menial, mind-numbing, often physical, & sometimes seasonal jobs. Having a number of such complainers in my family and otherwise in ear-shot I'd say the issue for many employers is not "being willing to work for less" but more "being willing to work to much of a standard at any price", but I digress... If the robots work out cheaper over a short enough amount of time (allowing for the large up-front investment in both the robots directly and any changes needed to make the environment one that can be efficient in) then it is logical that businesses will let them "steal" the jobs instead of accepting that they'll have to pay local workers more.
> keyed to feed our current robot fears
This isn't the first article to cover the possibility. I've been reading the headlines, particularly those in the UK press, as more a poke at the people who voted for leaving mainly due to the jobs issue - a message of "not what you wanted, eh?, don't say we didn't tell you...".
It could, but this could happen to anybody anywhere in the world where low skilled work that matches the current crop of industrial robots skills is being done. It's mostly a matter of a one time capital expense or a lease agreement versus an extra employee on the books. And most of those jobs have already been automated, we're on the tail end of that until the next generation automation based on the present avalanche of developments comes on stream.
And that will have impact on a totally different level than the previous one which took many decades to complete.
Fear of immigrants taking jobs is one thing driving these nationalist movements. A lot of people supported Brexit on the belief that it would open more jobs for natives, the same way people here in the US think building a wall and kicking all the brown people out will bring jobs back.
But it's silly. What hasn't been automated will be once they have to choose between paying legal citizens and stepping up plans to automate.
So not only is there worry over how automation will impact domestic income inequality, but also how it'll increase inequality between countries. In the future desperate citizens of poor nations can't even hope to immigrate to richer areas, if the rich countries just realize they can solve the immigration "problem" by using robots. Combined with a spike in protectionist governments in the west, does this mean we're likely to see more bloody economic wars?
If I understand UK visa rules correctly, getting a work permit as someone who designs or develops tech for robots is as easy as getting a job offer from a company that wants you to design or develop tech for robots for them.
The article names several non UK companies as suppliers of the technology. They shouldn't have much trouble getting visas for their installation teams.
I think the really interesting point was that UK firms lag behind other countries in automation precisely because low skilled human labour is fairly cheap here.
Funny that people didn't want the migrants because they took up job positions otherwise the pure English could've taken. Maybe they'll have to do a TechXit too?
The problem with having robots do this kind of work is that the majority don't integrate well: they don't learn English, they don't drink in pubs and they have their own schools.
Most of them even come into the country hidden in the back of lorrys and don't have passports. They don't even live in private accommodation, instead occupying the commercial property in which they work. How come we don't read about this in the Daily Mail?
Yep, I just had some automatons moving into my building they didn't bothered learning English they just squiggle ones and zeros and speak in two tones with modulated pitch.
They also suck benefits I hear they pay commercial utility bill rates and like pay no taxes.
I am sure if we try enough we can integrate robot society into our society. Little William can go to school with little Robby and they can be best friends, until one day when Robby tries to give William a hug inadvertently killing him. Then I believe there will be a real backlash against robot society.
[+] [-] ajeet_dhaliwal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_luc|9 years ago|reply
> The tech necessary to replace front line service workers is not there. If it was we'd all be buying one ... what happens when ... some customer needs help in unexpected ways
History does tell us that sometimes the market will throw away jobs that are becoming inconvenient to society, even if that means doing without the services that class of worker provides, or receiving worse and less convenient services.
Consider household servants.
They used to be seen as necessary for middle and upper-class households, because professional households required staggering amounts of manual labor just to keep everyone fed and clothed.
Those jobs vanished, right around the time that clothes and dish-washing machines were invented. But it's interesting to look at why.
Clothes and dish-washing machines are, frankly, not as great as servants (my feeling 'icky' about having someone else wash my clothes aside). You have to do the work yourself, and accept more cognitive load. But they win on cost -- the costs of employing a servant went up, and eventually worse service was worth it for a simpler and cheaper self-serve solution.
Could something similar happen in service work?
Well, look at the Amazon store, and compare it to a current grocery store.
Now imagine a Starbucks with touchscreen-and-voice enabled ordering, no visible employees (maybe one employee, nominally a store manager, working the fleet of coffee machines behind the screens, and doing some light sweeping in the restaurant, etc) and a communal co-working space that more or less preserves the current experience, just minus the baristas.
[+] [-] SimonPStevens|9 years ago|reply
Take supermarkets. What used to be 10 checkout assistants serving 30 customers per hour each for a total throughput of 300 customers per hour, can now become 20 self checkout machines serving 15 customers per hour each, with 2 retrained checkout assistants to oversee 10 machines each and handle the edge cases. Same overall throughput. Each individual customers experience gets slightly worse (perhaps, although maybe the longer checkout time is offset by shorter queues?), but throughput stays the same, and staffing is reduced significantly. I'm seeing this right now in every large supermarket, and even a lot of smaller corner shop type ones.
There's a whole range of service jobs that are vulnerable to this kind of 80% efficiency improvement that will drastically reduce the levels of staff needed. Restaurant wait staff can be 80% replaced by self ordering via app or tablet. Bar staff, coffee shop staff (you can already preorder Starbucks and pay via the app, the human just makes the drinks), fast food staff (ever seen an express lane), all the same, a machine could make each staff member able to handle many times more customers but automating only the most repetitive parts leaving the human to just handle the edge cases.
They aren't talking about replacing all workers, just some of them. "The $35,000 robot can boost the number of items picked by a worker by 200 percent to 500 percent, Welty said, and six employees can handle work normally done by 20 to 25."
[+] [-] lallysingh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chaebixi|9 years ago|reply
Actually, I think that's something that would be relatively easily to automate. I've seen computerized ordering kiosks in European fast food restaurants. If you already have the robot, all you'd need to do is add a custom-item builder to the ordering interface. If the customer has a loyalty card or account, they could built it offline and save the item to their account for later retrieval.
Assembling a liquid product seems like it'd be much easier to automate than cooking or general cleaning tasks. Overall, though, your point still stands.
[+] [-] hacker_9|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|9 years ago|reply
Driving is a case in point. Essentially everything about the current road system, signals, etc. are built around normal human levels of visual acuity, reflexes, and ability to reason about a typical traffic environment. Especially in places like cities, that's a very tall order for an AI. (But, unlike a factory, you can't just assume away the people who live and work there. i.e. the whole reason for the city's existence in the first place.)
[+] [-] kefka|9 years ago|reply
ObOnTopic: Cashiers are doing a very automatable job.. Like, it's done already to good effect. And if you do like our Krogers does at night, you dont have a choice to not use automation.
The harder thing is mechanics and QC for food production. But with cheaper motors and actuators, makes more complicated food automation cheaper, easier, and higher quality than human workers. And robots don't complain, or whine about bad working conditions... And they show up to work without fail.
[+] [-] rwmj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maneesh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuaxo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickaljord|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lhnz|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adaml_623|9 years ago|reply
They don't take up space in housing but they don't pay tax either
[+] [-] vincnetas|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kadin|9 years ago|reply
Put in a policy saying that anyone whose job gets eliminated or reduced as the result of automation is eligible for half-pay and full pension benefits until they have a new job at an equivalent salary and suddenly the business case for robots wouldn't be nearly so strong. And people will be pushing for stuff like that if they feel that their jobs, rather than some Polish guy's, is at risk.
Migrants, by and large, don't vote, so you can automate their jobs away without incurring regulatory risk to yourself, if you are a large organization. It's the safe place to start.
[+] [-] losteric|9 years ago|reply
More accurately: Immigrants did jobs that citizens were unwilling to do for market rates. The market hasn't changed. Low-cost labor is still required, and robots will fill those roles.
If anything, I'd be worried about a net reduction in jobs as a result of removing immigrants... smaller businesses that lack the capital for automated labor may themselves priced out of business trying to employee citizens.
At this point good creative work is probably the closest thing to automation immunity, as well as patient-facing healthcare (ie nurses)... for the rest of us education and experience is the only job security we have.
[+] [-] harryf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dspillett|9 years ago|reply
For most of the people whose main reason for voting for Brexit was immigration's effects on jobs, these are the jobs that they seem the immigrants as competition for.
The theory is that the immigrants were willing to work for less so "stole" the menial, mind-numbing, often physical, & sometimes seasonal jobs. Having a number of such complainers in my family and otherwise in ear-shot I'd say the issue for many employers is not "being willing to work for less" but more "being willing to work to much of a standard at any price", but I digress... If the robots work out cheaper over a short enough amount of time (allowing for the large up-front investment in both the robots directly and any changes needed to make the environment one that can be efficient in) then it is logical that businesses will let them "steal" the jobs instead of accepting that they'll have to pay local workers more.
> keyed to feed our current robot fears
This isn't the first article to cover the possibility. I've been reading the headlines, particularly those in the UK press, as more a poke at the people who voted for leaving mainly due to the jobs issue - a message of "not what you wanted, eh?, don't say we didn't tell you...".
[+] [-] udev|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Toenex|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fasterthanjim|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lallysingh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|9 years ago|reply
And that will have impact on a totally different level than the previous one which took many decades to complete.
So, nothing to do with brexit, nor with migrants.
[+] [-] RileyKyeden|9 years ago|reply
But it's silly. What hasn't been automated will be once they have to choose between paying legal citizens and stepping up plans to automate.
[+] [-] jdavis703|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dogma1138|9 years ago|reply
They also suck benefits I hear they pay commercial utility bill rates and like pay no taxes.
[+] [-] devoply|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] antingate2|9 years ago|reply
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