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I just read a short article in an email newsletter that threw out this statistic with regards to automation in the food industry:
The article goes on to argue the point that due to all of the ‘quiet quitting’ and generally unsatisfied workers after the pandemic or over the last couple of years, automation will not be as big of a deal as we thought. I’ve seen this sentiment echoed a number of times recently where news outlets will talk about how all of the people worried about economic disruption from robotics and Artificial Intelligence don’t realize that it’ll actually be great because people hate working anyway.
I used to believe these claims when I was a disillusion young adult who hated working, but overtime I’ve gotten more and more skeptical. Many people I know take serious pride and work, and in fact for a lot of people their work is the most important thing in their life. I’m talking people who don’t even really need the money, or who claim that even if they had enough money to retire they would continue working just as much as they do now.
Is this recent trend of less engagement with work robust enough to offset the rise in automation of jobs? Is this just a cope from those who know their jobs will disappear soon? (Ie email newsletter writers)
Personally I’m surprised that artificial intelligence hasn’t gotten more flack than it has so far. I expected the lights to come out in full force and at least get some sort of ban on image generation (I know Getty or some other site has done this) but so far it seems that artificial intelligence is generally unopposed.
Any major salient examples of automation technology or artificial intelligence being banned to protect jobs?
We've been here before with automats. Vending machines have not replaced restaurants or even fast food joints. At the moment, you still need people to cook the food and wash the dishes. Until automation succeeds to the point of replacing human cooks and kitchen staff, 'automation in the food industry' is not going to take that many jobs away.
The main reason people quit the hospitality industry is poor pay and bad conditions. During the pandemic, here in Ireland as well as elsewhere, a lot of places were compulsorily shut for the duration, which meant pubs and restaurants. A lot of staff were laid off while the business was shut down, and many of them found jobs elsewhere that they didn't quit and go back to their old job. Because better pay, established hours, and reliability meant that the new job was more attractive. A lot of employers complained "people don't want to work" (and so the government should stop paying social welfare payments to people who had been laid off, to force them to work) but the answer most people gave to that was "people don't want to work for cut-to-the-bone wages and abusive bosses".
Is automation in work coming? Sure, because if it is perceived as cutting costs, then employers will avail of it. Is automating away jobs like waiters and cleaners on the horizon? Not quite yet, and it might - ironically - be the white collar middle class jobs that are now at risk and not the pink and blue collar 'you need a human pair of hands to do this' jobs.
EDIT: I have seen some online protesting about AI art, and that's an example of what I said above; the jobs at risk here are either fandom-type artists who charge commissions for art from the public, or people who work in freelance jobs doing stock illustrations for magazine articles (or that awful Green Party poster mentioned below, which quite easily could be churned out by AI). Nobody is complaining that DALL-E etc. are taking the bread out of the mouths of hotel cleaning staff or landscapers trimming the hedges.
At the same time, why can't burger-flipping be done by robots? The entire industry of fast-food grew out of the premise that every store sells the exact same food items, prepared in the exact same manner. Most fast food comes in completely-disposable packaging that would be trivial for machines to close. I think it's more just that nobody's built a really good robot for it yet.
A robot that can replicate fine motor control of a burger flipper would be too expensive.
You don’t really need the fine motor control of a burger flipper, though. You’d just design the automated grill to not need to flip the patty(probably by cooking via a heated press, and yes, that is expensive and prone to breakdowns which requires very highly skilled labor to fix). I expect reliability, and the shortage of technicians who can fix such kinds of equipment, are bigger factors slowing adoption.
And to be clear, a lot of fast food kitchens are substantially automated already. This process will likely continue, but the loss of fast food worker jobs will be slow because if your automated soda fountain system goes down, you’ll need employees to fill cups manually until you can get a technician who can work on automated soda fountains(and to be clear, this is a tall order; skilled labor is already in shortage and the problem is getting worse. To make matter even worse, most of the equipment we’re talking about uses brand specific designs, so a technician needs to be trained on both the brand and type of appliance that’s broken).
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