Science & Technology

Good luck with that $15 minimum wage

The Burning Platform
Thu, 30 Oct 2014 20:45 UTC

Have you interacted with retail store clerks?

Over the next ten years robots will replace many of them.

Good luck doubling the minimum wage while this is happening.

In partnership with Lowe's Innovation Labs, Fellow Robots and Singularity University, Orchard is the first retailer to explore how Autonomous Retail Service Robot (ARSR) technology can improve and enhance in-store service and training.

Our San Jose Midtown store will be the home to OSHbot, an associate and customer assistance device designed with a number of ground-breaking features that help customers navigate the store and associates work more effectively.

Reader Comments

OhSoCuriouSo · 2014-10-31T03:28:23Z

Have you been to a...

Cell phone retailer lately? I'd say the robots are already on the job. Likewise, any of the Apple Stores.

glardu · 2014-10-31T13:47:03Z

"Employees are the rungs on the ladder to success. Dont be afraid to step on them."

Where profits are concerned best get used to this rule.

bbrebozo · 2014-10-31T17:35:07Z

The future

Somewhere I remember reading Einstein saying that the industrial age was suppose to free us from monotonous jobs. But as it turned out, with all the advanced industrial automation available, it hasn't yet freed us from the work place to pursue art and science and leisure as much as it certainly could have. Rather, we are still chained to the work place, yet are required to speed up to an automated pace and have become more robotic and machine like as a consequence. The field of industrial engineering exists to deal with this human, machine interface and to speed up humans to our limits.

When I try to imagine the future, with the increased use of robots, I only see the elite seeing the unneeded masses as a burden; since, robots can do it, be massed produced and can be mass manipulated with a single computer. Certainly manufacture can be automated and eventually most repairs would be able to performed by robots as well.

Unless, we masses, succeed in overthrowing the sociopathic elite, one possible future I see is, after most of the needed functions of the elites are taken care of successfully by robots, the elites will use any - less than moral means - to get rid of what they see as an excess human population.

Sonrisa · 2014-10-31T21:57:53Z

"Unless we masses succeed in overthrowing the sociopathic elite, one possible future I see is, after most of the needed functions of the elites are taken care of successfully by robots, the elites will use any - less than moral means - to get rid of what they see as an excess human population."

I think we're there.

Divide By Zero · 2014-11-01T01:23:41Z

Overthrow the sociopaths? I don't think that's possible, even if we resort to their strategies. Call me a pessimist but I think technology is just a part of the cycle. Supposedly Atlantis was super advanced and crashed... Next is us.

I'm not a Luddite either, in fact I work with technology. It's just that the complexity theory explains it all:
Have a problem, lets say food shortage. Ok, technology solves the problem with mass agriculture! Ok, population increases! Problem comes back.

In this case it seems like this kind of technology was supposed to make life easier for workers. But businesses use it to make more profits on the backs of the same workers.