Here is a video of their latest robot. Seems like a joke. The additional seconds taken while its thinking is time that a normal worker wouldn't waste and that is time wasted. Seem like they are using off the shelf robots and bolting on their software. Finally, the mistake GM, Ford and eventually Elon Musk made with robots is that the process needs to be designed from the beginning with robots in mind. Robots follow the BOB acronym: Blind, One-armed, Builder. Make your design so that a blind person that is one armed can do it easily or else a robot will not be able to. These guys are bolting a Robot onto existing processes and this will not work long term(I suspect this was to do cost reduction but it will cost more in the end once it fails to produce effective cost reductions)
Seriously? We have an article about people working poverty wages and fighting hard to get a little more pay and better working conditions and your response is to worry about how we can automate away their jobs? Wtf.
The low pay isn’t the worst aspect of most McJobs. Automating them entirely is probably the best way to improve working conditions. You may magically enforce a mandate that managers are non-abusive, but customers will be just as entitled to always being right as before.
> The low pay isn’t the worst aspect of most McJobs.
It is, though. Being poor is incredibly nerve wracking and expensive, and having more money directly fixes that problem. It's easier to put up with other people's bullshit for $50k/yr vs $25k/yr, all other things being equal.
There's no requirement that to get someone out of poverty we must stick them in front of a McDonald's frier even if it costs us more than letting it run itself.
I think both actions should happen now, wages of the low paid workers should rise and we should still try to optimize the jobs as the market changes (via automation or other means). If somehow we end up with no jobs that make sense to pay humans for in my lifetime then we're on to a different economic model, UBI perhaps. My guess is we won't hit that in my lifetime but at least we won't be paying premium to force people to work shitty jobs instead.
https://misorobotics.com/