If people don’t have jobs, government doesn’t have taxes to employ other people. If CEOs are salivating at the thought of replacing white collar workers, there is no reason to think next step of AI augmented with robotics won’t replace blue collar workers as well.
Robotics seems harder, though, and has been around for longer than LLMs. Robotic automation can replace blue collar factory workers, but I struggle to imagine it replacing a plumber who comes to your house and fixes your pipes, or a waiter serving food at a restaurant, or someone who restocks shelves at grocery stores, that kind of thing. Plus, in the case of service work like being a waiter, I imagine some customers will always be willing to pay for a human face.
Over the last few years, I've seen a few in use here in Berlin: https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/robot-waiter-for-sale.html
> or someone who restocks shelves at grocery stores
For physical retail, or home delivery?
People are working on this for traditional stores, but I can't tell which news stories are real and which are hype — after around a decade of Musk promising FSD within a year or so, I know not to simply trust press releases even when they have a video of the thing apparently working.
For home delivery, this is mostly kinda solved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
> Plus, in the case of service work like being a waiter, I imagine some customers will always be willing to pay for a human face.
Sure… if they have the money.
But can we make an economy where all the stuff is free, and we're "working" n-hours a day smiling at bad jokes and manners of people we don't like, so we can earn money to spend to convince someone else who doesn't like us to spend m-hours a day smiling at our bad jokes and manners?
Wow. I genuinely didn't think robotic waiters would ever exist anytime soon.
> For physical retail, or home delivery?
I was thinking for physical retail. Thanks for the video link.
Tech-wise this could have existed 30 years ago (maybe going around the restaurant would have been more challenging than today but it’s a fixed path and the robots don’t leave the restaurant).
Wouldn't you have struggled to imagine most of what LLMs can now do 5 years ago?
These are three totally different jobs requiring different kinds of skills, but they will all be replaced with automation.
1. Plumber is a skilled trade, but the "skilled" parts will eventually be replaced with 'smart' tools. You'll still need to hire a minimum wage person to actually go into each unique home and find the plumbing, but the tools will do all the work and will not require an expensive tradesman's skills to work.
2. Waiter serving food, already being replaced with kiosks, and quite a bit of the "back of the house" cooking areas are already automated. It will only take a slow cultural shift towards ordering food through technology-at-the-table, and robots wheeling your food out to you. We've already accepted kiosks in fast food and self-checkout in grocery stores. Waiters are going bye-bye.
3. Shelf restocking, very easy to imagine automating this with robotics. Picking a product and packing it into a destination will be solved very soon, and there are probably hundreds of companies working on the problem.
But if you have to be trained in the use of a variety of 'smart' tools - that sounds like engineering to know what tool to deploy and how.
It's also incredibly optimistic about future tools - what smart tool fixes leaky faucets, hauls and installs water heaters, unclogs or replaces sewer mains, runs new pipes, does all this work and more to code, etc? There are cool tools and power tools and cool power tools out there, but vibe plumbing by the unskilled just fills someone's house with water or worse...
> 2. Waiter serving food, already being replaced with kiosks, and quite a bit of the "back of the house" cooking areas are already automated. It will only take a slow cultural shift towards ordering food through technology-at-the-table, and robots wheeling your food out to you. We've already accepted kiosks in fast food and self-checkout in grocery stores. Waiters are going bye-bye.
Takeout culture is popular among GenZ, and we're more likely to see walk-up orders with online order ahead than a facsimile of table service.
Why would cheap restaurants buy robots and allow a dining room to go unmanned and risk walkoffs instead of just skipping the whole make-believe service aspect and run it like a pay-at-counter cafeteria? You're probably right that waiters will disappear outside of high-margin fine dining as labor costs squeeze margins until restaurants crack and reorganize.
>3. Shelf restocking, very easy to imagine automating this with robotics. Picking a product and packing it into a destination will be solved very soon, and there are probably hundreds of companies working on the problem.
Do-anything-like-a-human robots might crack that, but today it's still sci-fi. Humans are going to haul things from A to B for a bit longer, I think. I bet we see drive-up and delivery groceries win via lights-out warehouses well before "I, Robot" shelf stockers.
I'm not a plumber, but my background knowledge was that pipes can be really diverse and it could take different tools and strategies to fix the same problem for different pipes, right? My thought was that "robotic plumber" would be impossible for the same reasons it's hard to make a robot that can make a sandwich in any type of house. But even with a human worker that uses advanced robotic tools, I would think some amount of baseline knowledge of pipes would always be necessary for the reasons I outlined.
> 2. Waiter serving food, already being replaced with kiosks, and quite a bit of the "back of the house" cooking areas are already automated. It will only take a slow cultural shift towards ordering food through technology-at-the-table, and robots wheeling your food out to you. We've already accepted kiosks in fast food and self-checkout in grocery stores. Waiters are going bye-bye.
That's true. I forgot about fast-food kiosks. And the other person showed me a link to some robotic waiters, which I didn't know about. Seems kind of depressing, but you're right.
> 3. Shelf restocking, very easy to imagine automating this with robotics. Picking a product and packing it into a destination will be solved very soon, and there are probably hundreds of companies working on the problem.
The way I imagine it, to automate it, you'd have to have some sort of 3D design software to choose where all the items would go, and customize it in the case of those special display stands for certain products, and then choose where in the backroom or something for it to move the products to, and all that doesn't seem to save much labor over just doing it yourself, except the physical labor component. Maybe I just lack imagination.
They've already replaced part of that job at one of the grocery stores that I go to, there's a robot that checks the level of stock on the shelves, https://www.simberobotics.com/store-intelligence/tally.
I have already eaten at three restaurants that have replaced the vast majority of their service staff with robots, and they're fine at that. Do I think they're better than a human? No, personally, but they're "good enough".
I've seen this already at a pizza place. Order from a QR code menu and a robot shows up 20-25 minutes later at your table with your pizza. Wait staff still watched the thing go around.
Hey, is there a good board game in there somewhere? Serfs and Nobles™
Surely the modern history of decision making has been to move as much of it as possible away from humans and to algorithms, even "dumb" ones?
End of conversation.
