[von949]

It seems that the only jobs that will be safe is a public office position(Mayor, Governor, Senate, etc).
Unless we start voting in robots and androids.

[Merrily Gather]

Updating with a new announcement about robots coming to Walmart. They need these in the Walmart superstore on Charleston and Decatur. That store is always running out of stock on the weekends. They can't keep it stocked fast enough.

Walmart Is Putting Shelf-Scanning Robots in Over 50 U.S. Stores

[BBMW]

^
How long until the robots are actually stocking the shelves.

I noted walking by my local McDonalds that they're installing automated ordering kiosks.

[lvmensch]

Originally Posted by Merry Lee Gather

Updating with a new announcement about robots coming to Walmart. They need these in the Walmart superstore on Charleston and Decatur. That store is always running out of stock on the weekends. They can't keep it stocked fast enough.

Walmart Is Putting Shelf-Scanning Robots in Over 50 U.S. Stores

That is actually a little silly. You would think they would have almost perfect control on shelf inventory by simply using the data from the outgoing scans. Not exactly complicated. Yes it would need to be reconciled with reality at some point but not very often.

[BBMW]

That's inventory vs shelf condition. Related but different. From the article:

The approximately 2-foot (0.61-meter) robots come with a tower that is fitted with cameras that scan aisles to check stock and identify missing and misplaced items, incorrect prices and mislabeling. The robots pass that data to store employees, who then stock the shelves and fix errors.

In addition, I bet they have a pretty serious shrinkage problem. Being able to reconcile shelf inventory to what the register updated inventory says would find that faster, and let them come up with a response to the theft faster.

Originally Posted by lvmensch

That is actually a little silly. You would think they would have almost perfect control on shelf inventory by simply using the data from the outgoing scans. Not exactly complicated. Yes it would need to be reconciled with reality at some point but not very often.

[Merrily Gather]

Originally Posted by BBMW

^
How long until the robots are actually stocking the shelves.

I noted walking by my local McDonalds that they're installing automated ordering kiosks.

I just found out the McDonald's in Eugene (pop. ~167k) has them now too. They still have 16 year olds working behind the counter though. I'm guessing this is beta phase with testing it out on different markets?

[BBMW]

The $15 minimum wage hasn't kicked in here yet, but it's coming. The closer it gets, the more automation I expect to see installed.

[Merrily Gather]

I'm not certain what to expect on that but I like Bill Gates' suggestion that we tax these companies for each person that they replace with robots.

[BBMW]

^
That becomes a exercise in squeezing jello. It assumes that you're only dealing with existing companies replacing existing jobs. That puts existing companies at a disadvantage to new companies. Think about how many travel agents Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, etc. eliminated? Do you go back and try to ding them. What happen when you go after McDonald's for automating away jobs, but someone starts up a company called Autoburger, and never has those jobs in the first place? Do you try and estimate how many jobs they should have created and ding them for that?

It's a poorly thought out idea, that would open huge cans of worms that no one, including Gates, has thought about, and would likely fall apart if anyone tried to implement it.

Besides, companies are taxed on profitability. If they become more profitable by hiring less people, they'll pay taxes on that.

[Merrily Gather]

What Gates actually said was tax them on the robots they have. Not necessarily the ones replacing workers but all robots/AI in all circumstances in the companies that choose that route. He says there's no rule that says we can't and we lose tax revenue when they subtract the person.

I don't want to get into all the ancillary business details of that process. Besides there's no way to predict with certainty which way it will grow. It could be any number of things we haven't even imagined yet. Most of them do a threat analysis first and go from there and what I hear them talk about these days are worst case scenarios and less about the solutions for the best possible outcomes. I guess that would be boring.

Here's an updated article that talks briefly about how robots are going to replace doctors now. You Will Lose Your Job to a Robot

They make some predictions in it but it reminds me of when they imagined flying cars among other things we don't currently have as envisioned a hundred years ago.