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Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
The kitchen assistant, known as 'Flippy', was designed by a startup called Miso Robotics which specializes in "technology that assists and empowers chefs to make food consistently and perfectly, at prices everyone can afford."
[...] Flippy uses feedback-loops that reinforce its good behavior so it gets better with each flip of the burger. Unlike an assembly line robot that needs to have everything positioned in an exact ordered pattern, Flippy's machine learning algorithms allow it to pick uncooked burgers from a stack or flip those already on the grill. Hardware like cameras helps Flippy see and navigate its surroundings while sensors inform the robot when a burger is ready or still raw. Meanwhile, an integrated system that sends orders from the counter back to the kitchen informs Flippy just how many raw burgers it should be prepping.
Source: http://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/burger-robot-flipping-meat-0432432/
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 15 2017, @12:31AM (6 children)
What they'll be doing now and in the future for jobs. The US is near [bls.gov] an all time high in employment (62.5% labor participation versus 67.5% all time high), for example and most of those people work in the private sector which is notorious for not employing useless people. The question has already been answered.
You were just complaining that people are getting paid to do busy work. So what's your solution? Pay people to do busy work.
I'm not interested in wasting peoples' time with this. This is just a recipe for creating a country of incompetent people, which I'll note that several [soylentnews.org] people [soylentnews.org] have [soylentnews.org] complained [soylentnews.org] about this incompetence (in its many flavors) in this discussion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @03:29AM (5 children)
Oh please, Khallow, have you ever had an actual job? I don't think I've ever worked anywhere that didn't employ useless people. The larger the company, the more there are. Managers are loathe to get rid of them as the number of people under them is a huge part of the influence they have in an organization. It also makes it harder for them to argue for additional budget money.
My solution is to stop paying people for busy work completely. If the amount of work needed is only 10 hours per person, we just pay them to do the 5 hours worth of work, but we pay as if they were working the entire 40 hours. It's not like, we don't have the money to do it. And it would probably be a net gain as there'd be actual incentive to figure out how to get all the work done as efficiently as possible. Most workers aren't able to do much more than a couple hours of focused work a day anyways, might as well not force them to be physically present and mentally checked out in order to make a living anyways.
The downside to that is that it would be harder for the parasites in the system to steal other people's production, but it would make everybody else a lot happier.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 15 2017, @05:45AM (4 children)
They're also subject to a variety of cost restraints which would create incentives counter to the above. There's no point to considering one incentive in a vacuum. Why doesn't one of those middle managers just employ the entire world down to the level of bacteria? That would make their department pretty big.
You can't magically separate the inefficient part of the work from the efficient part. And what business is going to pay their employees for 5 (or was it 10?) hours of the most productive work when 40 hours of work, including those most productive hours, costs the same amount? Even if the other 35 hours of work aren't very productive, that's still marginal profit. It's pointless to even propose this. And I see we've gone from jobs being "useless" to being useful, but a fraction of the time being more useful than the rest.
Then go do it yourself with your money. I don't want my money involved. I bet you'll have to dig hard behind that sofa to find the funding to support your scheme.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @07:51AM (1 child)
First off, cost restraints have very little to do with hiring practices. Businesses fluctuated in size and when there's a cut back in the amount of work being done, that doesn't mean that there's necessarily a cut back in the number of employees. It also doesn't guarantee that when there are cutbacks that those cutbacks come from deadwood. Cut backs tend to come in response to budget and there isn't necessarily the correct number of jobs cut. A large business can carry a surprising number of employees that are technically doing something, but not necessarily something that's useful.
Secondly, of course you can do that. It just requires that you actually provide some incentives to people to go looking. Under the current system where we pay employees by the hour, of course they're not going to be looking for ways of saving time. Saving time either renders themselves redundant or it results in being asked to do more work. But, if we let employees actually go home early if they've finished the work for the day, you'd be shocked at how much less time was spent at the office. And the results would probably be as good as what we're getting. In some cases, the amount of hours the employees work is counterproductive, as in they get less work done than if they had gone home hours earlier.
Thirdly, that's an ad hominem. Collectively, we have more than enough money to make that happen. But, it would require actually taking away the incentives to rack up obscene levels of wealth. Considering that the richest 10% of Americans holds more wealth than the bottom 75% of the households, we could drastically reduce the numbers of hours worked without having any particular issues.
And lastly, that's just right now, there is a massive jobs shortage coming as more and more robotics are brought online. If we insist on this asinine pay by the hour system, we're going to have to invent pointless bullshit jobs in order to justify having people sitting at their desks all week. Or, we could just change the system so that people make a fulltime wage for halftime or less work as things go forward.
If you can't see the train coming, then you're probably the dumbest person on the planet. Paying people to do busy work only works out when there's a small portion of the work. You can't expect people to spend 20 or more hours a week on pointless bullshit without there being consequences. Better to just pay for the remaining time and let them have time off and possibly hobbies.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 15 2017, @07:03PM
I see how we've gone from claiming that every business has useless people to "it doesn't guarantee". I never made the argument that businesses are perfectly efficient at allocating work.
I don't buy this feelgood. Let us keep in mind that businesses already have huge incentives to employ their employees as efficiently as possible. If they're not doing it now, they're not going to do it under your scenario.
Those incentives to rack up obscene levels of wealth also are incentives to rack up obscene numbers of good jobs.
Smart and dumb looks the same to the ignorant. We'll see what actually happens, right?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday September 15 2017, @02:57PM (1 child)
It depends a lot of the state of the business.
- On the one hand, Joe's Auto Repair is likely surviving on relatively low margins, and Joe has to make sure that he's running an efficient operation and providing good service if he's going to make it.
- On the other hand, Apple doesn't have the same situation at all: They're making money hand-over-fist in a way that isn't really limited by their efficiency. They could be paying 2,000 completely useless employees, costing them an extra $500 million (estimating $250K per employee), and put up with it because that's really not all that big a dent in their bottom line.
Once a business is stable enough that it's closer to Apple's situation than Joe's Auto Repair's situation, the managers and especially middle managers no longer need to be all that concerned about what's good for the business. At that point, the goal becomes climbing the corporate ladder, and that has much more to do with making yourself look important and valuable to your superiors than it does with being efficient or providing quality products and services to the customers. And one way of doing that is to take on essentially useless employees whose real job (regardless of job title) is to back whatever plan you have and talk up your accomplishments in meetings, email discussions, etc.
One of the big mistakes a lot of libertarians make is thinking that Apple is playing remotely the same game as Joe's Auto Repair.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 15 2017, @07:07PM
Then they aren't essentially useless.
I think of this as more of a straw man. I'm pretty sure most libertarians get that there's a difference. It's not necessarily a relevant difference though.