this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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I work in the casino industry (IT) and my organization has already purchased and deployed a bevy of products to replace people. We’ve been trying nearly everything we can since 2020 as calls for higher wages have gotten louder and the company has no interest in meeting that demand. We have machines that read incoming orders and make cocktails, machines making some of the food or at least helping, machines that deliver food to tables, automated floor cleaners, towel/supply delivering machines at the hotels, hybrid tables that are more of a zoom call than a table game, card printing machines, etc. We’ve cut hundreds of jobs at each location in the past few years.
The automation tools shown at CES and other conferences get bought, get tested, and get improved upon. Dont read these stories and articles and think it isn’t really happening, I’ve deployed a lot of it already and have projects in motion for more later this year as capital projects start up.
A lot of these jobs were extremely simple and not worth a human mind to use on anyway but… under our current system people need jobs. I’d like to see an introduction of better social support systems as we replace these jobs en masse.
*cough* UBI *cough*
Ideally yes, along with programs to teach people to take care of the machines that replace them. Currently my IT team is tasked with taking care of all these job replacers but without any addition to the IT team to make up for the extra work. Its unsustainable
I've seen it as well in my IT department, which is ironic since the whole argument for automation and jobs from capitalists is that "the economy will shift and there will be more jobs in repair and maintenance of robotics!" Etc.
Yeah, unless you're unwilling to actually expand those jobs at all, in which case we will just end up with a bunch of malfunctioning systems piled on top of technical debt.
I work in government and we have systems that are planning on going live that will automate entire departments away coming in 2024-2025. It's not perfect but it is being iterated like you said. It's all about reducing headcount over the long run.
Entire departments? I’m skeptical.
The key is to set up that support system, not to try and stall the march of technology. If we did that we'd still have milk men and dozens of farm hands per square acre.
I recently reread "Beyond this Horizon" by Heinlein, after reading "Progress and Poverty" by Henry George. I had no idea at the time how much RAH was pulling from Georgian political economy while simultaneously writing about a future where 95%+ is fully automated and has only high level human oversight. That's the kind of forward thinking we desperately needed during the early 1900's, and are now in a state of emergency over. He refers to our current model as "Pseudo-capitalism" and illustrates in the first conversation of the novel how automated capitalism and collectivism are functionally only "culturally relevant" since the automated capitalist model of the novel includes a UBI and most of the basic needs of society are met for free. He then explains that even purely socialist societies still require some system of finance externally and therefore a requirement of internal financial tracking and accounting. Thus both societies are fundamentally the same in practice despite their ideological differences.
He's most famous for ideas like "TANSTAAFL" but he also ideated much more progressive societies that people don't talk much about if they've even heard of them.