Full automation certainly is. But replacing a customer service member with a touch screen and a pay terminal is also a form of automation and I can't imagine maintaining it is more expensive than the salary of the persons it replaces 24/7.
Automation can also be every minor improvement that allows the employees to suddenly going from focusing on one thing to juggling multiple responsibilities.
In a world where more profit for shareholders is the most important value, everything will be sacrificed on its altar — including quality, humanity and environment. That is why automation will replace more and more jobs and the fruits of automation will land in few, big baskets. And the owners of those will not share even if everybody around them is starving.
We are entering the phase in monopoly where hotels are on every field.
The main reason why it's expensive is that it's almost always outsourced, which drive the cost up a lot. For instance IIRC a self cash-out machine costs around $50k, for something that should cost less than $3k to manufacture with a trivial software stack. And many things are like that.
I got paywalled pretty early in, but I think I agree with the thesis as from what I've seen of the back of the house in a McDo: the humans are universal effectors who can read screens, while the scheduling (and associated decision-taking) is automated.
[+] [-] neonate|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Jsebast24|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] atoav|1 year ago|reply
Automation can also be every minor improvement that allows the employees to suddenly going from focusing on one thing to juggling multiple responsibilities.
In a world where more profit for shareholders is the most important value, everything will be sacrificed on its altar — including quality, humanity and environment. That is why automation will replace more and more jobs and the fruits of automation will land in few, big baskets. And the owners of those will not share even if everybody around them is starving.
We are entering the phase in monopoly where hotels are on every field.
[+] [-] littlestymaar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] drewcoo|1 year ago|reply
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/112814/whats-differ...
[+] [-] aebtebeten|1 year ago|reply
I got paywalled pretty early in, but I think I agree with the thesis as from what I've seen of the back of the house in a McDo: the humans are universal effectors who can read screens, while the scheduling (and associated decision-taking) is automated.
[+] [-] Freak_NL|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ginko|1 year ago|reply