All the McD*nalds in my area have been upgraded with order kiosks. Regardless of all the controversy around self-checkout, and minimum wage, and automation taking our jobs, I personally love them. I can take my sweet time composing my order, I can see the full selection (such as it is), I can see pictures and prices clearly without having to strain my eyes to read 12pt font on the tableau, and I don’t have to shout at the cashier to be understood or struggle to hear back. I really believe this is the right way forward.
My only complaint so far has been that the order kiosks only accept card. There is actually a way to pay by cash that the machine never lets you know about - you have to press “cancel” on the keypad when it asks to insert card, and then the screen gives you an order number to give to the human cashier (each store still has one register open) so you can pay in cash. So I still have to wait on line, but at least my order selection is locked in, I can have exact change ready, and there isn’t usually a line anyway anymore.
I know all yall Europeans are proud about your nearly total transition to cashless economy or whatever, and you like to boast how not a single euro banknote has graced the inside of your wallet in months. However I personally like cash, and I genuinely believe that a cash payment system is a necessary element of a liberal democracy and secure society. So at least understand my pleasant surprise when I saw these reverse-ATM cashboxes at this restaurant. They work and were being actively used too! (It spat out my dollar coins though, those bastards!) I hope they find their way into more places.
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Oh fuck off with that Luddite shit.
Automation is great, the issue is capitalism. Demanding the world not progress because Capitalists will fuck people over is idiotic.
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Instead of “smashing the robots”, may I interest you in “eating the rich” option? It looks like you have been thinking a lot of smashing, but not enough about eating. Remember your priorities!
Fuck jobs.
I welcome a future where everyone is unemployed from meaningless labour.
You’re using a smartphone, you are directly responsible for the typewriter business going under and thousands out of a job.
OP isn’t personally responsible for the installation of these kiosks. They would still exist regardless of OPs opinion.
To be fair, it is literally true that I am at least partially responsible, even if only by one part in a million. If there were a million people like me, and we each individually and separately decided to refuse to use the kiosk and demanded to be served by a human cashier and left the store if one was not immediately available, the owners would have no choice but to keep the humans. I just happen to like the kiosks because I am not a luddite.
Being out of a job is good, it’s the not-being-able-to-eat afterwards that’s the bad part.
And if you live in an even remotely functioning society that’s a bad part that’ll never happen unless you deliberately refuse help.
Literally starving to death is more difficult nowadays than in the past, but every society is still structured around the idea that you must be doing something wrong if you are not employed. Food, housing, healthcare, all tied to employment, and the substitutes they maybe give you are designed to only barely keep you alive until you find more employment.
Yes, every job that has become obsolete in the past due to automation has been replaced with a new kind of job, many of which could not have even been imagined before. We don’t have buggy whip manufacturers, but we do have programmers. But that doesn’t mean that will continue always. Jobs that disappear now or in the near future may never get replaced. And many jobs that exist now, I’d argue, are totally bullshit already, and we don’t need more of them. We as a society need to reassess our expectations for 100% employment and better reallocate resources according to the new norms.
As a society we should strive to having no one perform any jobs, so they can focus on life instead.
But that won’t work until people like you get rid of their “work or die” mentality.