On the Automation of Labours

On the automation of labours.

I was talking to a friend about business today. People who talk to me about my work seem to find restaurants inherently interesting. It takes them a while to brain that I have no long-term interest in restaurants as a human activity. And while I believe restaurants and retail are always going to get more and more mashed up until we all live in resorthotelmalls, I have no long term interest in retail as a human activity, either. *

Retail is dying - we have all known this for a decade, but some of us choose to procrastinate about the impending fate of these jobs. As alien as it may seem to most civilians, the rudimentary interaction between human beings in casual settings, the gist of personalised service, is ridiculously easily automated. The oldest profession, the encultured gestures, the flirty melodies of speech, the diversity of human personalities - these will all be automated at fractions of the cost of human labour in the present. To cut a long argument short, skipping moreover the demonstration of robots that break the Turing test, consider this: interactions with service staff are often such that the service receiver classifies the service provider as the least complex of human interactors, having the lowest value of all their daily human interactions. The expectations for humans in the service sector are the lowest that we place upon humans in any business. This is why their jobs will quickly be eradicated. **

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(* Why I would bother to run an operation that I have no inherent interest in, is simply because (i) I view it as a means to the end of building a long-term interest in being a service provider to restaurants or the neologismic (and neologistical!) resorthotelmall, (ii) as a business owner, I would not want to outsource my supply chain to someone who hadn't demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of my value chain and operations.

** Don't ask me what what we're going to use the humans for unless you want to discuss other business models. Lol. Maybe we should leave it to the politicians - but probably not.)

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Follow up comments:

In case it's not clear, I'm not saying that customer service is bad. I'm saying that customer service is expensive. One day a robot will do better than a human at a fraction of the cost.

We're probably not on the same page as to how likely this is to happen. On my end, it's not even the best example of how redundant human talents will become.

I expect extremely cheap creative services, art, mentorship, counselling, teaching, and even parentage at some point from robots which will be delivered cheaper than most humans can do it.

This basically upends a lot of economic limitations because the earth is currently oversupplied with meat, and undersupplied with the ability too upgrade the meat to intelligence.

The robots will take care of the last problem. What happens after that? :P