> The tech necessary to replace front line service workers is not there. If it was we'd all be buying one ... what happens when ... some customer needs help in unexpected ways

History does tell us that sometimes the market will throw away jobs that are becoming inconvenient to society, even if that means doing without the services that class of worker provides, or receiving worse and less convenient services.

Consider household servants.

They used to be seen as necessary for middle and upper-class households, because professional households required staggering amounts of manual labor just to keep everyone fed and clothed.

Those jobs vanished, right around the time that clothes and dish-washing machines were invented. But it's interesting to look at why.

Clothes and dish-washing machines are, frankly, not as great as servants (my feeling 'icky' about having someone else wash my clothes aside). You have to do the work yourself, and accept more cognitive load. But they win on cost -- the costs of employing a servant went up, and eventually worse service was worth it for a simpler and cheaper self-serve solution.

Could something similar happen in service work?

Well, look at the Amazon store, and compare it to a current grocery store.

Now imagine a Starbucks with touchscreen-and-voice enabled ordering, no visible employees (maybe one employee, nominally a store manager, working the fleet of coffee machines behind the screens, and doing some light sweeping in the restaurant, etc) and a communal co-working space that more or less preserves the current experience, just minus the baristas.

Then imagine that the notion that your coffee is "crafted" by a "barista"[1] is part of the brand that distinguishes their coffee from my reasonably adequate free office coffee machine, and the barista costs two cups of coffee and a muffin per hour, and makes a point of asking everyone in line if they'd like anything else with that, and suddenly the savings from touchscreen and voice enabled ordering look less massive.

Now that's a fashion that could change, just like most rich people who could comfortably afford someone to polish their fireplaces and silverware every morning and doff their cap to guests nowadays would think such an idea unthinkably pretentious rather than the hallmark of a respectable house, and many of them have learned to actually enjoy cooking. After all, some people actually prefer impersonal service from a kiosk when buying tickets or packed food these days; more if it offers a better queuing system. But the economics are more complex than simple staff minimisation, otherwise the Automat would have killed the fast food industry rather than vice versa. Let's face it, 90% of these venues providing service jobs wouldn't exist if people were a little more willing to sacrifice perceived food quality/image/freshness for cheaper food and beverages

[1]Yes, of course it's a teenager pressing a button. But brand image is silly like that.

It will be a while before UX and polish of any automated (or mostly hands-off) storefront could compete favorably with our current servant-based systems.

But even in the case of ambitious examples, I think we'll get there. There are beloved brands that exist mostly as apps, which compete successfully with human-staffed storefronts. Unstaffed or mostly-automated physical storefronts haven't proven they can offer a quality experience yet when it comes to food and drink, but that could change; it's always possible that robotic attempts to date are the equivalent of hand-cranked washing machines.

We are already almost there. We have coffee vending machines. We have touch screen soda dispensers. Starbucks could wire in their mobile app to give customers a "redbox" coffee experience if they wanted to. I think it's part of their brand that a barista hand crafts your beverage rather than a machine do it, but who knows what their future direction will be.

For example, I went into an American fast food restaurant in Amsterdam once. Orders were made on a touch screen, you get a number, then someone at the counter hands you your order.

They still have kitchen staff, but instead of having 5+ humans taking orders you have 5+ kiosks and one person calling numbers.

Currently, companies that make people self-serve with touchscreens in restaurants or grocery stores are most commonly giving them a hostile (even hateful) user experience. But as voice UI starts to be more common, and you can marry visual and voice ...

Take supermarkets. What used to be 10 checkout assistants serving 30 customers per hour each for a total throughput of 300 customers per hour, can now become 20 self checkout machines serving 15 customers per hour each, with 2 retrained checkout assistants to oversee 10 machines each and handle the edge cases. Same overall throughput. Each individual customers experience gets slightly worse (perhaps, although maybe the longer checkout time is offset by shorter queues?), but throughput stays the same, and staffing is reduced significantly. I'm seeing this right now in every large supermarket, and even a lot of smaller corner shop type ones.

There's a whole range of service jobs that are vulnerable to this kind of 80% efficiency improvement that will drastically reduce the levels of staff needed. Restaurant wait staff can be 80% replaced by self ordering via app or tablet. Bar staff, coffee shop staff (you can already preorder Starbucks and pay via the app, the human just makes the drinks), fast food staff (ever seen an express lane), all the same, a machine could make each staff member able to handle many times more customers but automating only the most repetitive parts leaving the human to just handle the edge cases.

They aren't talking about replacing all workers, just some of them. "The $35,000 robot can boost the number of items picked by a worker by 200 percent to 500 percent, Welty said, and six employees can handle work normally done by 20 to 25."

Personally, I'd probably go out of my way to avoid a chain with self-service given the option.

Oddly, it's the big box home improvement stores that are the biggest self-service retail users around where I live. Even though many items you buy there are at equally bad for self-service as grocery stores.

That's kinda my point. The user experience is actually worse for many users. And it certainly doesn't handle all edge cases. It handles one specific case (of a customer with just a small number of small barcoded items) kind of acceptably, but slower than a human would.

But it's still being used, and replacing staff by reducing the overall number of staff required despite not handling all situations very well at all.

And this is the same mistake people make all the time when thinking about job automation. They say things like "I'm OK, my job could never be automated because a robot couldn't handle all the complex tasks I do like handling a customer complaint" but what they forget is that customer complaints is only 2% of their job. 80% is repetitive tasks that can be automated. So yeah, OK, one robot won't replace one person. But 10 robots and 1 person can replace 5 people. So now you have to reapply for your new job of robot supervisor/edge case handler, alongside your 4 other colleagues. And only one of you is going to get that job.

Personally, I welcome this, but it has to go hand in hand with some sort of universal income. We need to give everyone the chance to pick the job they /want/ to do, rather than the job they feel, economically, they have to do.

Researcher with masters degree on 21k/year? You could easily get double that from a programming job with a few years of experience if you have the aptitude.

I'd much rather receive a universal income, while working on things that I feel make a difference, rather than what I have to do to feed my family.

- Warren Bennis

Actually, I think that's something that would be relatively easily to automate. I've seen computerized ordering kiosks in European fast food restaurants. If you already have the robot, all you'd need to do is add a custom-item builder to the ordering interface. If the customer has a loyalty card or account, they could built it offline and save the item to their account for later retrieval.

Assembling a liquid product seems like it'd be much easier to automate than cooking or general cleaning tasks. Overall, though, your point still stands.

Faced with a waiter or a person behind a counter, there's no way I'd order glass of a lime-and-raspberry half-sugar half-diet cola, for a number of reasons: I'm not going to bother looking through a menu to see what's available; it's not explicitly on the menu, and I don't know how the system behind the counter works, or how much extra might be charged for such an odd order; I don't want to be "That Guy".

If I want something half-way between a macchiato and a cappuccino, but with the coffee poured on top of the milk, then I'd rather do that by pressing buttons on a machine, than ask a server who relays it to a coffee wallah who then looks quizzically at the instructions and asks the server for clarification who then passes the question on to me...

Driving is a case in point. Essentially everything about the current road system, signals, etc. are built around normal human levels of visual acuity, reflexes, and ability to reason about a typical traffic environment. Especially in places like cities, that's a very tall order for an AI. (But, unlike a factory, you can't just assume away the people who live and work there. i.e. the whole reason for the city's existence in the first place.)

ObOnTopic: Cashiers are doing a very automatable job.. Like, it's done already to good effect. And if you do like our Krogers does at night, you dont have a choice to not use automation.

The harder thing is mechanics and QC for food production. But with cheaper motors and actuators, makes more complicated food automation cheaper, easier, and higher quality than human workers. And robots don't complain, or whine about bad working conditions... And they show up to work without fail.

People are just too stupid to see it that way, and are willing to be flesh-automation with no cost.

When you can pay a teenager 9 bucks an hour to do it much faster it's worth every penny.

These things work for walgreens but Costco and Aldes won't have them for a long while.

How Krogers uses these, is that they only keep them open after 10p. And 1 clerk deals with 6 registers. Even if someone is being slow, the whole line moves faster.

And you don't have a choice. Marsh has 1 24 hour store here. And they have 1 clerk (no self checkout) so it's on the range of 10-20 minute lines. If you want something from Krogers at night, it's self checkout or go away.

Walmart has a weird strategy: self checkout is closed at night, and the center lane with the tobacco is always open no matter what. But I don't particularly like wally world. And they're further away than kroger.

Can you cite any examples of a job that moved /from/ the EU to the UK, and which will now /move back/?

With UK out of EU, those servers need to be on EU country, unless they do some data agreement.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/6d543d2a-eddd-11e6-ba01-119a44939...

They don't take up space in housing but they don't pay tax either

Put in a policy saying that anyone whose job gets eliminated or reduced as the result of automation is eligible for half-pay and full pension benefits until they have a new job at an equivalent salary and suddenly the business case for robots wouldn't be nearly so strong. And people will be pushing for stuff like that if they feel that their jobs, rather than some Polish guy's, is at risk.

Migrants, by and large, don't vote, so you can automate their jobs away without incurring regulatory risk to yourself, if you are a large organization. It's the safe place to start.

2016: http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21693936-government-tr... 2013: http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21573129-why-britain-d...

i'm not sure it works this way...

More accurately: Immigrants did jobs that citizens were unwilling to do for market rates. The market hasn't changed. Low-cost labor is still required, and robots will fill those roles.

If anything, I'd be worried about a net reduction in jobs as a result of removing immigrants... smaller businesses that lack the capital for automated labor may themselves priced out of business trying to employee citizens.

At this point good creative work is probably the closest thing to automation immunity, as well as patient-facing healthcare (ie nurses)... for the rest of us education and experience is the only job security we have.

I mean, it's clearly not a sustainable business for the number of employees you're hiring, in the same way a cheap coffee or meal made affordable by sweatshop or slave labour isn't a sustainable deal.

Either way, if you can't afford to hire someone at a decent wage (or in some cases, even minimum wage), then you don't hire them. You find a new business to get into or do as much as you can yourself or through contractors.

For most of the people whose main reason for voting for Brexit was immigration's effects on jobs, these are the jobs that they seem the immigrants as competition for.

The theory is that the immigrants were willing to work for less so "stole" the menial, mind-numbing, often physical, & sometimes seasonal jobs. Having a number of such complainers in my family and otherwise in ear-shot I'd say the issue for many employers is not "being willing to work for less" but more "being willing to work to much of a standard at any price", but I digress... If the robots work out cheaper over a short enough amount of time (allowing for the large up-front investment in both the robots directly and any changes needed to make the environment one that can be efficient in) then it is logical that businesses will let them "steal" the jobs instead of accepting that they'll have to pay local workers more.

> keyed to feed our current robot fears

This isn't the first article to cover the possibility. I've been reading the headlines, particularly those in the UK press, as more a poke at the people who voted for leaving mainly due to the jobs issue - a message of "not what you wanted, eh?, don't say we didn't tell you...".

Except recent studies show that most EU migrants go for high skilled jobs and that the migrant impact on low skilled jobs is small - see below.

> The positive impact of recent European migration to Britain is highlighted by the fact that the UK now attracts the highest number of university-educated migrants of any country in the European Union, according to new research from University College London.

- https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/05/uk-magnet-hi...

> In 2015, there were approximately 3.3 million EU immigrants living in Britain. About a third live in London. EU migrants tend to be younger and better educated than the UK-born population.

> Do low-skilled UK citizens bear the brunt of EU migration? A number of studies have found there is a small negative effect of migration on the wages of low-skilled workers — those with whom migrants compete most directly.

- https://www.ft.com/content/0deacb52-178b-11e6-9d98-00386a18e...

No studies to hand to back up my intuition, but looking at the balance of backgrounds in retail/cafes/restaurants (viewed from my position as a customer), and factory work (as someone who knows people who both work on and manage production lines) I find it hard to believe that immigration doesn't have a significant impact on those areas.

There is plenty of migration in my line of work (pretty technical, relatively well paid, significant experience needed) too of course. Healthcare is another sector that is likely to be affected by a reduction in incoming workers. But most of the people who cite immigration as a problem for their jobs are not, in my experience, generally qualified for any such technical/experienced roles.

If you like most pro-immigration people, my guesses are A) almost none (certainly no hard caps on numbers), B) almost nothing, C) rather than deport them, instead give them drivers licences and social welfare benefits.

When you take everything into account, their position is that they want virtually no limits on immigration.

I didn't asked about limits or not, I asked you proof about your claim that NOW in the UK there is "virtually unlimited immigration". You have not answered.

> What steps would take to prevent people from coming a country like the US or the UK illegally?

What has to do illegal immigration with this thread? This article talks about LEGAL workers

> If you like most pro-immigration people,

You don't know what I think because I didn't write about my opinions about immigration. I just asked one claim done by you without any proof to back it.

> When you take everything into account, their position is that they want virtually no limits on immigration.

Opinion that has nothing to do with your actual claim.

Or perhaps is that you're confused and think that "European migrants" are illegal migrants

It's kind of telling that instead of responding with "that's not what we believe," the response has been sophistry and trying to deflect.

Nobody has done that in this subthread.

And, by the way, your claim was there is "virtually unlimited immigration", still waiting an argumentation about your claim.

>It's kind of telling that instead of responding with "that's not what we believe," the response has been sophistry and trying to deflect.

Yes, it is telling because it is what you have done in this thread, I have asked about your claim that there is virtually unlimited immigration right now and your answer have talking about hypothetical arguments from other people.

You don't have any proof and you only think other people wants it. So, I won't waste more time with your no-answers

Have a nice life.

Question is, how many people would just sit on their arses watching JK?

The people who are already two decades into a Jeremy Kyle binge-watch will likely not change their behaviour even under a UBI scheme, but at least their kids would have a chance to do something with themselves rather than continue the generational unemployment.

I think it's important for us t acknowledge that UBI won't solve every existing problem, and nor should it, but it could set up the coming generations for a much more productive and happier world.

And that will have impact on a totally different level than the previous one which took many decades to complete.

So, nothing to do with brexit, nor with migrants.

1.) This doesn't help startups -- only large companies that can afford to go through the expensive and laborious visa-permit process.

2.) As a foreign worker, since your residency depends on employment, you're in a far worse bargaining position vis-a-vis salaries, so this depresses worker wages, however much the government tries to enforce the requirement that foreign workers are paid at prevailing wages.

3.) Also because your residency depends on ongoing employment, putting down roots and becoming a full-fledged member of the community is much more difficult.

Source: I'm a non-EU immigrant to the UK, brought in specifically to work on automated transport technologies. The hacks I've had to go through to start my two companies here are unbelievable. The UK's immigration policies are seriously bad at attracting talent, and post-Brexit, look like they'll get much, much worse.

It's not. However, it's not always the opposite, either.

> The rules have not given UK citizens any advantage over me; they've merely penalised me.

Advantage is always relative.

They also suck benefits I hear they pay commercial utility bill rates and like pay no taxes.