Technological Unemployment News & Discussions

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wjfox
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Welcome to the First Ever McDonald's Where You're Served by Robots — In Texas

By Alice Gibbs On 12/22/22 at 11:32 AM EST

McDonald's has begun testing its first-ever robot restaurant in Texas, sparking debate and intrigue in equal measure.

In Fort Worth, Texas, the branch is fully automated and requires no human contact to order and pick up your favorite meal.

The introvert's dream gained viral attention online after TikTok and Instagram user foodiemunster shared a video from inside. With 1.2 million views, the video shows how customers can use automated screens to order fast food and collect it via a machine.

https://www.newsweek.com/first-ever-mcd ... as-1769116
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For some reason, I have always loved reading about McDonalds. I am neither a full-blooded cheerleader nor am I an absolute total critic.

On the positive, there is the convenience and relatively low cost. There are also a lot of entry level jobs provided by McDonalds

On the negative, there are rampant workplace abuse allegations and generally low wages, to the point of exploitation of their work force.

Decades ago, there lived an economist named John K Galbraith. A very big name in his time, but now largely forgotten. Galbraith made an interesting point about minimum wage laws. Such laws were valid, he argued, because if the work was truly that essential, then employers should be willing to pay a living wage. He also pointed out that raising the cost of labor provided an incentive for alternative methods of production, provision of services, etc. In his time, a main result being mechanization. As I have argued in the past, robotization is simply a further extension of mechanization. AI displacing jobs is also a step further.

So, let us look at this entire process. Mechanization etc. displaces jobs. Yet, these jobs are most often at the low end of the skill scale. A corporation still retains employees at the higher end of the skill scale, still pays out dividends, and in a growing economy still owns assets that appreciate in value even as they are depreciated for accounting purposes. Such depreciation is rationalized based of the need to repair and replace aging machinery, etc. Also known as "capital." So, new jobs may actually be created for repair and replacement of capital purposes. Meanwhile, other jobs may slowly open up in what was the luxury goods and service industry. Think tourism for example, which has saved many a local economy from utter ruin.

Now, that does not mean that everything comes up rosy. Even upper-class work environments have problems with work site conditions - think sexual harassment for example. From an economics perspective, there is also a matter of big capital crowding out small capital. This results in the development of what Galbraith and other economists refer to as the monopoly sect of the economy. Often not a matter of true monopolies, but rather oligopolies in which a small number of firms crowd out a lot of businesses, and then dominate the market through what is called "price-signaling."

Of course, it gets even more complicated from there. Arguments about "the declining rate of profit" for example that occur even among and between well intentioned sorts. These arguments revolve in part around the issue of sustaining aggregate demand. Economic power also translates to political power. So, there is also the issue of a growing inequality of wealth brought on by an initial imbalance in both the economic and political sphere.

That ends my soap box presentation for the day. Any comments, criticisms, corrections, or "likes"?

Likes are greatly appreciated, especially if one is largely in agreement. I don't do this for pay-check you know.

Let me see, what was the amount of the last paycheck I received from WJ Fox. Oh yes, $0.00. Hence no actual issuance of such a thing :D
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wjfox wrote: Sat Dec 31, 2022 9:43 pm
I'm sure some humans will do so. However, many others will handle the transition badly by turning to hedonism or antisociality.
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Apple has quietly launched a catalogue of books narrated by artificial intelligence in a move that may mark the beginning of the end for human narrators. The strategy marks an attempt to upend the lucrative and fast-growing audiobook market – but it also promises to intensify scrutiny over allegations of Apple’s anti-competitive behaviour.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... audiobooks

I think there will still be jobs for human narrators for years, but the jobs will be very low-paid and probably held by people in poor countries. I think even the best voice bots will struggle for a long time to reproduce the nuances of human speech, so human input will be required to make high-quality audiobooks.

For example, say we're trying to narrate a dramatic scene from a novel. An AI wouldn't be able to detect the emotions that the different characters were supposed to be conveying, and it would just read their lines in monotones. To prevent that, human voice actors would read the lines in key scenes like that, and infuse the lines with the correct emotions and appropriate variations in speed, volume, and pitch. The AI would then keep those elements, but apply a layer of audio alteration to change the identity of the voices.

Let's say the scene in the novel has several dramatic, emotional lines delivered by a male character. Let's also say that, based on the age and other attributes of the character, the producer of the audiobook has decided that James Earl Jones' voice is the most appropriate for that character. For that scene, the producer would cheaply hire an English-speaking person who lived in India or the Philippines to record the male character's lines in a local recording studio, and to email the file to the producer. The producer would then cut and paste those emotion-laden lines into the appropriate section of the audiobook file, and would then tell the AI to change the human voice actor's voice to match James Earl Jones'.

And there you would have it. A gripping, thunderous delivery by James Earl Jones himself.

Though AI will destroy many jobs in the audiobook industry, I think it will make the industry's products better. I'm listening to a fiction audiobook right now, and it's dull having one, male voice do the third-person narration and voice all the characters' lines, including those of the females and of characters whose ages don't match that of his own voice. So much would be added if each voice were unique and appropriate to each character.
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Cameo appearances could also work. Think Lt. Commander Data. Except AI would be truly without emotions, at least in early iterations. Maybe by 2050...
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I’m a copywriter. I’m pretty sure artificial intelligence is going to take my job

My amusement quickly turned to horror: it had taken ChatGPT roughly 30 seconds to create, for free, an article that I charged £500 for. The artificial intelligence software is by no means perfect – yet. For businesses that rely on churning out reams of fresh copy, however, it’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... bs-economy

At least in the U.S., the mainstream media is so misleading, biased and dumbed-down that I'd actually trust a machine more to write news articles.
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Image
10 AI Images That You
Won't Believe Are FAKE
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To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
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