Carl's Jr. CEO Readies Robot Workforce to Counter Rising Wages

[shintakie10]

On topic: Ultimately I really do feel that eventually society as a whole is going to have to get over the very idea of work being the be-all-and-end-all of life in general. And that to give people money to live without having to work for it is somehow taboo.

I'm totally lost as to how this would even function. If everyone is just given money to live without having to actually work, why would anyone ever work? Hell, to take it a step further: if everyone decides they're not going to work, who is going to produce the goods and services necessary to actually keep people alive?

You've obviously never seen the effects of a guaranteed wage if you seem to think that it just leads to people sitting around doing nothing.

A guaranteed wage gives people stability to actually do things. They can go to college without worrying about being able to make rent. If they have a genuinely shitty job that is bad for their physical and mental health they can leave that job and find a new one without worrying about whether food will be on the table tomorrow.

Despite what people like you think, most people will continue to work if they have a guaranteed wage. What a guaranteed wage does is remove uncertainty from life. Worked fewer hours this week because of cutbacks? No worries, you'll not starve and be cold the rest of the month, nor will your car be repoed. The stability actually encourages people to try more. To go to school, to get vocational training, to aim for jobs higher than the lowest of the low because they can afford to aim for jobs like that.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

On topic: Ultimately I really do feel that eventually society as a whole is going to have to get over the very idea of work being the be-all-and-end-all of life in general. And that to give people money to live without having to work for it is somehow taboo.

I'm totally lost as to how this would even function. If everyone is just given money to live without having to actually work, why would anyone ever work? Hell, to take it a step further: if everyone decides they're not going to work, who is going to produce the goods and services necessary to actually keep people alive?

You've obviously never seen the effects of a guaranteed wage if you seem to think that it just leads to people sitting around doing nothing.

Neither have you. Thus far no country has approved the unconditional basic income, so we don't actually know what the effect would be (there have been city and state wide experiments, but thus far no country has embraced it totally).

For what it's worth, I'm not opposed to the idea, as long as it is, in fact, unconditional.

 

[9tailedflame]

I really can't blame anyone who's running a company for trying to cut expenses. While minimum wages going up might contribute to it, i think it's largely a scapegoat, and the company would employ robots if they thought it was cheaper under any conditions.

It's an interesting place we're reaching as a species. One where we could potentially see a drastic reduction in the need for people to world and toil all the time if we play our cards right. With automated labor, maintainance will be all that's needed. There's a few problems though. If the fruits of robot labor all go into the hands of CEOs, then nobody (not even the CEOs really) will be any better off, if we just reproduce fast enough to negate the benefit we've created ourselves, than we're back at square one, if we can't mentally wrap our heads around the idea that robots doing all the jobs is a good thing in the long run, we'll never get there.

Still, i hope we can one day live in a world where people can do what they love once technology has freed us from our burden of labor.

 

[mad825]

Yeah, This CEO is going to shit himself when he realises that he's gonna need people to watch and maintain these machines. Automation of a factory or wherever does not mean you can press the button and leave it alone. The machines fuck-up often and gets very dirty especially in food based production.

All that Automation means is that you'll only need a fraction of the workforce however you're going to need a team of engineers who will most likely have 35% more pay than the average worker. You'll never get an engineer on minimum wage.

Machines we already have robots repairing other robots in remote locations as its just the easiest way to go about things. I'm not sure why you'd think we'd need people for something like that.

source, me want sauce. Because apparently the rest of the world are doing it wrong.

 

[BoogieManFL]

This guy seems very short sighted to me.



-Machines would have to be precise and have a negligible failure rate, expensive.

-Renovate all the existing buildings to house the systems

-Pay highly skilled people to design the physical components

-Pay highly skilled people to design the software

-Pay highly skilled people to maintain the software and server infrastructure

-Pay highly skilled people to install them

-Pay people to load up the food and stock the locations. Machines can't do everything.

-Pay people to clean and maintain the machines and the locations

-Pay factories to construct the machines and new replacement parts

-Pay higher electrical bills (possibly)

-Pay people to oversee all these different jobs and the people who maintain them, essentially the same thing you are doing now, just with fewer employees but you'll be paying them much more.

-People of disability and low education can't always or as easily be trained to handle such a system. Vastly reduced work pool to choose from.

-Enjoy the accountability of such little supervision handling people's food

-Enjoy the accountability of how easy it could be to physically sabotage and contaminate such a system

-Enjoy the possibility of your work force being hacked.

-Transport all this equipment and maintain a supply chain to support them

-Enjoy power outages causing your workforce to grind to a halt.

-Hope your software and machines can resume from an unexpected shutdown and resume where they left off, assess if in progress meals are still safe to consume, how to discard and start over mid-task, handle refunds and dissatisfied customers... etc etc etc




Fine. Good luck with that. Plenty of other places to go to get a quick meal.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

I wonder what his salary and CEO bonus is. These fuckin' psychopathic businessmen piss me off. They got more money than they know what to do with but they're too greedy to give their workers a living fuckin' wage. And as if that was bad enough some of them now want to replace them completely. I will never eat at a restaurant without human fuckin' service anyway though. It's just creepy.

 

[razer17]

So? Economics is an ecosystem, not a machine. One change causes a ripple effect. OK so you replace your front end staff with machines. Suzy, Sally, and Sheila lose their jobs as cashiers at the Quickie Burg. Except you need at least one human employee to keep an eye on the machines and because customers are accustomed to and demand human interaction in some degree, so Sheila gets hired back to babysit them to do that. Because her new job is technically a supervisor posistion and involves looking over multiple stations, it includes higher pay. Suzy and Sally are still crocked of course. Except you need technicians to service the machines when they inevitably break or glitch. A new infrastructure is created for this end. Even at the bare minimum you need a technician to service the machines, and a dispatch to handle the work load. Either you create this in house or new companies form to see to this need. You likely create more jobs than you cut. The cost is not lost, you defray it.

Sally the burger flipper is probably not going to suddenly become Sally the robotics engineer.

It's called a minimum wage job for a reason people. Minimum. Wage.
If you can't make a living off of it, work hard to get a better job? I did. Everyone else I know did.

This is a bullshit argument. We don't live in a dream world where a little bit of hard work makes everything go smoothly. If all it took was effort we'd all be doctors, layers, sports stars. Except, then who would cook our food, stock our supermarkets or clean our streets? You would just have better trained, more educated minimum wage workers. There will always be people on the lower rungs of the ladder. The problem is that the lowest rungs of the ladder currently leaves workers sitting in the frigid waters of permanently being near bankruptcy.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

labor is at its cheapest point in a century.

Wait a sec. Is that true? I'd like to see a source for that if you have one.

 

[Dalisclock]

I have to wonder if CEO Andy has ever owned a Roomba, because I have one and have watched the thing repeatedly get itself trapped and fail at finding it's own charging station for 20 minutes after being placed in front of it and hitting the "DOCK" button. A robot whose sole job is to be an automated vacuum cleaner and yet it consistently fails at it.

I also work in an automated factory(Semiconductor production) and despite having extremely expensive equipment, errors and outright breakages are not uncommon.

And his robots would be tasked with food prep, making custom orders and maintaining health and cleaniness standards. Not to mention being "cheaper" then his workers he obviously doesn't give a shit about.

Sure, he might be able to get robots to do all of that, but it sure as hell won't be cheaper then paying someone he could hire off the street, even if he did have to pay them an extra couple bucks an hour.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

This is a good thing I'm not sure what the issue people are having with this. The more jobs that are automated the less we have to work and end up going towards a fully automated society.

A robot will always be superior / cheaper than you. You are not better than a machine and we should accept that and find other pursuits rather than working.

That's great in theory, but in reality I need to pay rent so I have a place to sleep, buy food so I can eat, buy clothes and toiletries so I not gross, buy Internet so I can moralize on the Internet, etc, etc, etc.

Can't do that on a haphazard lets play/podcast salary and I can't afford the fancy piece of paper that would get me into a computer repair job.