It worked for dock workers when containers were invented... but... these days there's quite a bit of nuance and a lot of money in it.
Much like the legislation around not letting commercials be louder than the main content was subverted, I'd expect companies to weasel around any attempt to keep automatable jobs in human hands.
"It worked for dock workers when containers were invented." There's a long description of that in "The Box", by Marc Levinson. It sort of worked for workers. But, in some major cases, the entire port moved. In San Francisco, the Port of San Francisco essentially shut down as a freight operation and the container traffic went to a new container port in Oakland. In London, the container traffic went to a new non-union port on the east coast, and the huge London dock complex was abandoned. (Now it's housing and the finance industry.)
The Longshoreman's Union in San Francisco negotiated a "guaranteed annual income" deal, but only for two years ending in 1977.[1] They still have a good pay rate for full "class A" longshoremen: $36.68 plus various bonuses and shift differentials. It's possible to make $150K a year as a longshoreman. And you probably don't have to do heavy lifting. But there aren't that many of them left.
Consumers would otherwise have had to pay some other amount for their unemployment, poverty, and reliance on handouts.
Laying all of them off also has costs, both financial and human.
If every human being was replaced by a robot, the cost savings to consumers would be enormous. There would also not be any consumers, as nobody would have money to spend.
That's possible, but look at Japan where their automotive robots have been paying union dues for decades. It can happen, although it's probably a really bad idea for it to happen.
It's already happening... Several restaurant chains have already released fully automated restaurants in Asia ("where it's more socially acceptable"), but apparently it's coming here too. Wendy's is said to be rolling out self-service kiosks that're supposed to help offset costs.
Basically... it appears that humans are going to be too expensive to hire very soon. That's just self-service kiosks, but imagine if you were able to get your food for half-price (aka the same price before the $15/hr wage hike)? Which restaurant would you go to, really?
Do you think Wendy's is going to pass the savings along to consumers? That aside, I think the answer is still going to be, "I'd go to somewhere that isn't Wendy's or McDonald's, or some other fast food franchise."
The whole "robots cooking" thing is a lot easier to manage when "cooking" is essentially rote assembly of identical, pre-made products. That's also why the food is disgusting.
You think? That assumes that consumers of fast food only look at the lowest price point, which conflicts with why Wendy's exists in the first place. It is however why every one of that type of chain has a "dollar menu".
Their usual MO though isn't to pass savings alone, and they've never lacked for competition.
>That assumes that consumers of fast food only look at the lowest price point
No, it assumes that price is one of the things consumers look at. It's always in the seller's interest to try to move the focus to something else, but... If Wendy's has a dollar menu on their burger vending machine, and McDonald has a dime menu, Wendy's will lose the more price conscious customers.
They already have lost the more price conscious consumer, and that's fine for them. You're not seeing the spread of more expensive places like Five Guys, In 'N Out, etc because price is king anymore. McDonald's can try an (realistically) $.89 menu I guess, but people seem willing to shell out a few more cents for the marketed illusion of quality.
Back in 2002, Star Trek Nemesis was released in New Zealand. It had already been out in the rest of the world, the "see it again" campaign had been run, and DVD releases had hit the shelves everywhere else.
But not in New Zealand. My friend there told me that he had been waiting to see it for months, then waited two weeks after its release ("to avoid the crowds") before going in to see it. His words:
"I went in there on the second Thursday after opening day, clutching my twenty dollar note, and stopped to look at the billboard to find out what time it was next going to run. It wasn't. It had been whisked off the screens before two weeks were up."
This particular film was apparently the catalyst of a massive lobbying campaign for their government to ban commercial imports of international DVDs within six months of the release date of a film, because that (and piracy) were the reasons people hadn't flocked to the cinema to see it and other films.
> Do you think Wendy's is going to pass the savings along to consumers?
I picked up a watermelon from my local farmer's market this weekend. It was about the size of a bowling ball and was $6. I went to Kroger and found watermelons 3x the size, shipped from across the planet, for $5. "Normal" operations are quickly becoming luxuries. Seriously, there's no reason for me to ever buy from a local farmer except to make myself feel wealthy.
Likewise...
It's going to be more like a survival mechanism or a "staying relevant" rather than a "hey suddenly I can sell you a burger for $0.82."
I can't wait. Fast food restaurants with the order terminal flipped around so I can put my order in correctly, the first time around, without waiting for ten minutes for somebody else to get around to serving me, sounds like nirvana.
I'm in these places to get some food and get out in a hurry. Streamlining that process is all good.
So far, nobody has done a successful automated restaurant. There have been many attempts. The first was AMFare, built in 1964 by American Machine and Foundry, and it was better than most of its successors.[1] McDonalds tried and failed about a decade ago. Eatsa, the SF chain, is just an automat where you can't see the kitchen. Momentum Machines in SF has a prototype hamburger-customization machine, but hasn't shipped. There's a functioning pizza-making robot from Zume. So far, though, the hardware has a narrow functional range.
There's lots of automated food preparation in the plants that make frozen dinners and airline meals. But those,too, have a narrow product range.
A good place to start would be at the back end. Build a robotic system which can take a tub of random dishes, tableware, and trash, separate them, apply blasts of hot soapy water to anything that needs pre-cleaning for the dishwasher, load the dishwasher trays, and start them down the conveyor to the dishwasher. Everybody hates that job.
I do wished they didn't get rid of Toll Takers on the Golden Gate Bridge.
It was nice to cross that bridge with cash, and not have another bill to look forward to. I don't go to San Francisco like I used to either. Now, I only go if I have to.
I really wonder if certain "useless jobs" are as useless as they claim.
Toll booths are always bad, unless the human population takes a nosedive. The relative merits of getting a bill later are utterly obviated by not having to wait in traffic.
