A firm providing AI drive-thru tech to fast food chains actually relies on human workers to take orders 70% of the time::Presto Automations recently admitted that most of the orders taken by its AI drive-thru chatbot are actually assisted by off-site human workers.

  • spudwart@spudwart.com
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    11 months ago

    I know the article is seemingly hopeful. But that’s 30% of the time they don’t need an employee.

    In its most recent cost-cutting measures in November, the company laid off roughly 17% of its global full-time employees as well as reducing its monthly expenditures.

    AI is not a revolution for the working class, and it never will be. I’m tired of having this argument that ‘I don’t understand AI’ or that ‘It’s good for humanity.’

    It’s good for capitalists and that’s fucking it. Cheap and compliant labor is all they fucking want. If they can replace you with a bot that will do the work basically for free, they will.

    This isn’t rocket science, nor is it unprecedented. This idea that “AI will save us” is about as true as “Arbeit Macht Frei”.

    AI will be used to undervalue your labor, and push you to beg to deregulate just to be able to survive.

    • Blue@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      In response to that people are going to have less children, you can check the low birthrates around the world.

      I’m sure electricity was terrible for lamplighters, the telephone for telegraphists, machinery for manual laborores, fusion energy is going to be terrible for the coal industry etc

      Every technology is going to make someone irrelevant, until everyone is irrelevant, the problem is not technology it’s the system that needs to change.

    • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      You’re suffering a condition caused by capitalist propaganda where even though you recognise it’s terrible you can’t imagine anything except capitalism.

      You throw in some emotive nazi imagery and firebrand anticap talking points but your argument is nothing more than ‘capitalism is inevitable and our only option is to fight to be the beast consumer’

      Technological developments have continually changed the world for the better, you have access to s standard of living which would blow the mind of a Victorian aristocrat, luxuries they could barely imagine. Access to information is better and far far cheaper than any time in history and by huge margins - go read Jude the obscure and try to find a single thing in that book which would be a problem today – the boy would be a Latin scholar for a start.

      Ai has already benefited humanity in a myriad of ways and it’s going to continue getting more useful and making people’s lives better - especially those in currently deprived or underdeveloped communities.

    • AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      That’s the exact reason why “Luddite” is an insult. They were people who wanted technology to benefit everyone and they were labeled as backwards thinking for it.

      • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        That’s not a very accurate representation of history, the luddites smashed looms that when established lowered the cost of woven and lace products so significantly that even the poorest person could afford to be clothed in garments which only the upper class could afford before.

        The luddites wanted to keep genuine and brutal privation in the world because they had what they felt was a privileged position and didn’t want to lose it.

        Automated food production and service is going to reduce the cost of having a healthy diet and improved the quality of food for everyone which will have many knock on positive effects to the world - being against that because you want to maintain a system where an underpaid underclass toils to try and make ends meet is absurd and kinda disgusting.

        As a member of that underclass who can’t afford to live more than the basest life I can tell you very clearly that this current system where the affluent mighte classes enjoy luxuries made possible by the suffering and privation of the lower working classes is not a system which anyone should protect.

    • wishthane@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      It’s true in a capitalist system for sure. Automation causes fewer people to be responsible for more profit, so fewer people see the benefit of it. Capitalists argue it will just cause prices to fall, but a) to what, if many people can’t find a stable job, and b) prices are quick to rise but slow to fall, nobody wants to take a loss on what they paid for/forecast, and businesses implementing this tech certainly aren’t expecting to have to lower prices. Less money getting you more value increases the value of money - also known as deflation, and something economists avoid as it’s quite painful.

      Automation itself can be good for humans though. I don’t think people should be stuck doing a bullshit job nobody really needs just because we don’t want to eliminate a job. Our goal as human society should be for people to have more and more choice over how they spend their own time. Even if we eliminate basically all necessary work from human existence, creative works have intrinsic value to the people who create them at the very least, and often value to many other people as well - AI will never eliminate that even if AI becomes very creative itself.

      Mandatory work should be something we try to eliminate, and replaced by people generally being able to choose to do whatever they want within reason. This is not something that makes any sense in a capitalist system, so rather than attacking automation and keeping capitalism just because that creates a more equal income distribution, we should be working toward replacing capitalism with something better, and automation is a part of getting there.