Flippy the Burger bot

[Tribble]

My store actually has several self-check outs like that - conveyors and bagging carousel - in addition to the small-station self-checkouts. We also have a lot of the traditional lanes with a human being. Altogether, 10 small self-checkouts, 4 large ones, 18 traditional lanes with human beings.

Ah, we don't seem to have those anywhere. We just have the small checkouts at Walmart, but they start to become a problem when you have more than a few items.

[Broomstick]

That might just be a Wal-Mart thing, unless those cameras are really well-hidden.

>AHEM< I do NOT work for Wal-Mart!

Wal-Mart might not bother. My company does. My company does a lot of things that Wal-Mart deems too expensive, which is why at my store you can actually find staff on the floor to help you, and the aisles are wide enough for two people to pass each other, and most of my co-workers do NOT require government subsidies merely to eat.

True, not every theft is worth pursuing, although if you make a habit of petty theft you may still be told to get out and not come back.

[Gandalf]

NZ self-checkouts check if the weight of the item you scanned matches the expected weight of items with that barcode. The entire bagging area is on scales.

The other trick thieves have used is for fresh food, simply tell the machine its something cheap, like carrots. There is no barcode to scan, and relies on an honour system for you to tell the machine what you're weighing.

I'd be fascinated to know the figures of how much is lost like this through the self check outs, versus the costs of actually paying for an employee and whatever that employee might pinch.

[Raw Shark]

>AHEM< I do NOT work for Wal-Mart!

Wal-Mart might not bother. My company does. My company does a lot of things that Wal-Mart deems too expensive, which is why at my store you can actually find staff on the floor to help you

They're quite easy to spot. They wear bright primary red.

[His Divine Shadow]

Here's a robot that takes blood samples faster and better than a human. So there's one skilled job gone*.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a7mgmbhcJQ

* = Yes nurses do a lot of things, but replacing this part of their jobs, or just making it much easier and able to get by with less people, means overall the amount of nurses needed todo the same job will go down, hence nurses will be in less demand, some will probably be fired or just allowed to retire etc etc. In any case it's a real life slippery slope.

[Napoleon the Clown]

Here's a robot that takes blood samples faster and better than a human. So there's one skilled job gone*.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a7mgmbhcJQ

* = Yes nurses do a lot of things, but replacing this part of their jobs, or just making it much easier and able to get by with less people, means overall the amount of nurses needed todo the same job will go down, hence nurses will be in less demand, some will probably be fired or just allowed to retire etc etc. In any case it's a real life slippery slope.

In the US, at least, this wouldn't even dent our need for more nurses. I don't know how much time nurses generally need to devote to taking blood, but they've got a shitton to do as it is. You don't even need to be a registered nurse to draw blood, actually. I think it only takes around six months to be legally qualified to do it, in fact.

Whatever percent of a nurse's job is getting blood samples, it's miniscule compared to everything else. Honestly, a lot of nurses would embrace something like this.

[His Divine Shadow]

Based on my experiences (loads with two kids who have needed multiple surgeries), an absolutely huge amount of time and personell is spent in the labs drawing blood from patients, a lot of times we've had up to three people working together to get that bloody sample for up to half an hour. This would save so much work hours, so much time.

And this might seem like nothing still, but it's just the start. That is not to say we should stop it, but we need to figure out how to tax or kill the rich effectively.

[mr friendly guy]

It takes much longer time to take blood from children than an adult. Smaller veins, more likely to squirm and cry etc.

Generally unless its an emergency or they have various lines which we can take blood out off, nurses in the hospitals I worked at don't usually need to take blood. Phlebotomists can be trained to do that. Heck, med students can be trained to do it and you pay them money to be the phlebotomist.

[His Divine Shadow]

Yes it does, but taking samples from children is probably not uncommon.

In the end, if they are nurses or "Phlebotomists" or something else doesn't change the actual point that here's one more thing getting automated and in a small, but steady, slow and unstoppable way, contriuting to reducing the amount of jobs for people in the future. This trend more likely to accelerate than stagnate.

[Raw Shark]

I used to go out with a child phlebotomist. She was kinky. This does not surprise any of you. Or me. Ah, blood. Spilling it. Drinking it. Loving it for what it is.

[The Grim Squeaker]

Here's a robot that takes blood samples faster and better than a human. So there's one skilled job gone*.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a7mgmbhcJQ

* = Yes nurses do a lot of things, but replacing this part of their jobs, or just making it much easier and able to get by with less people, means overall the amount of nurses needed todo the same job will go down, hence nurses will be in less demand, some will probably be fired or just allowed to retire etc etc. In any case it's a real life slippery slope.

In the US, at least, this wouldn't even dent our need for more nurses. I don't know how much time nurses generally need to devote to taking blood, but they've got a shitton to do as it is. You don't even need to be a registered nurse to draw blood, actually. I think it only takes around six months to be legally qualified to do it, in fact.

Whatever percent of a nurse's job is getting blood samples, it's miniscule compared to everything else. Honestly, a lot of nurses would embrace something like this.

As someone who'se worked with a bunch of medical doctors/researchers and automation/MAchine learning:
Yeah - getting a prediction automatically just from the data that someone has cancer/osteoporesis/high risk of complications|readmission from hospital care is useful, works better (With our algorithms) than a doctor with 10+ years experience, and does it in milliseconds vs hours of work for different expert MD-PHDs. That said, it's just a small part of the overall pipeline.
(And the biggest issue is culture. Doctor's are the worst. Nurses are bad, but doctor's are worse. And few people like the tradeoff of "it's 1,000X faster than you but only 98.5% as accurate as you on average" ; in organizational terms, humans are bad at tradeoffs)

[The Grim Squeaker]

I used to go out with a child phlebotomist. She was kinky. This does not surprise any of you. Or me. Ah, blood. Spilling it. Drinking it. Loving it for what it is.

Hot.
I have a longstanding hidden fetish to date a neurosurgeon. But that's mainly due to my permanent fetish for brains. Slicing them, dicing them, getting the cool hidden white pearls you can find inside eyeballs....

Ah, Neuroscience: A degree well lived


EDIT: Just to be clear, i'm talking about (dead) animal brains. I didn't ever work with live human brains. Since that would be immoral or something I guess?

[Alferd Packer]

As we are veering wildly off course, I'll just add a thought I had from much earlier in the thread:

The news made mention of something a few days ago, related to this, that I'd been meaning to bring up. Apparently, Bill Gates (among othres) have suggested the idea of robots being required to pay income taxes. I haven't even the foggiest how such a scheme would work, but it introduces the idea that jobs lost to robots don't also remove money from the system to pay for social services.

It's actually probably easier than we'd think. Corporations pay taxes separate from their employees and enjoy legal protections. Extending that to robots of a certain level of sophistication should be doable. Each robot could, oh, I don't know, be spun off as a subsidiary company of its manufacturer or employer and treated as just another corporation for tax purposes. Or if that's too complicated, make it so that every robot employed by a company is part of a subsidiary company which collectively pays each robot's income taxes. Or maybe you just say "fuck it," give each robot a SSN, and require their owners both pay them a wage on the books and do their taxes every year.

A bit trickier is how much to tax robots, since they can't spend any of their income, as it were. You could probably come up with a pretty punitive tax rate which, as long as it comes in slightly lower than the cost of hiring humans, companies will still go for.

[FireNexus]

As we are veering wildly off course, I'll just add a thought I had from much earlier in the thread:

The news made mention of something a few days ago, related to this, that I'd been meaning to bring up. Apparently, Bill Gates (among othres) have suggested the idea of robots being required to pay income taxes. I haven't even the foggiest how such a scheme would work, but it introduces the idea that jobs lost to robots don't also remove money from the system to pay for social services.

It's actually probably easier than we'd think. Corporations pay taxes separate from their employees and enjoy legal protections. Extending that to robots of a certain level of sophistication should be doable. Each robot could, oh, I don't know, be spun off as a subsidiary company of its manufacturer or employer and treated as just another corporation for tax purposes. Or if that's too complicated, make it so that every robot employed by a company is part of a subsidiary company which collectively pays each robot's income taxes. Or maybe you just say "fuck it," give each robot a SSN, and require their owners both pay them a wage on the books and do their taxes every year.

A bit trickier is how much to tax robots, since they can't spend any of their income, as it were. You could probably come up with a pretty punitive tax rate which, as long as it comes in slightly lower than the cost of hiring humans, companies will still go for.

The scheme you describe reminds me of the drone who worked on Vavatch Orbital in Consider Phlebas. Culture Drones are usually represented as being full citizens with Culture Human level rights and protections, but this guy was more or less an indentured servant until the paid off the cost of his creation.

[Alferd Packer]

The scheme you describe reminds me of the drone who worked on Vavatch Orbital in Consider Phlebas. Culture Drones are usually represented as being full citizens with Culture Human level rights and protections, but this guy was more or less an indentured servant until the paid off the cost of his creation.

I think that, if implemented, a tradition of robots paying taxes would be a good argument for robots to obtain civil rights, when (if) they attain sentience. A sentient robot can say, "Look, my ancestors paid taxes, and they couldn't even think! I'll pay taxes too, I just want personhood." Of course, that's a long ways off, probably, and we don't know if it's even possible. But if you were to grant some rights and duties to robots now, before they even know what rights are, you'd have a better shot of expanding those rights when it made sense to do so.

[FireNexus]

The scheme you describe reminds me of the drone who worked on Vavatch Orbital in Consider Phlebas. Culture Drones are usually represented as being full citizens with Culture Human level rights and protections, but this guy was more or less an indentured servant until the paid off the cost of his creation.

I think that, if implemented, a tradition of robots paying taxes would be a good argument for robots to obtain civil rights, when (if) they attain sentience. A sentient robot can say, "Look, my ancestors paid taxes, and they couldn't even think! I'll pay taxes too, I just want personhood." Of course, that's a long ways off, probably, and we don't know if it's even possible. But if you were to grant some rights and duties to robots now, before they even know what rights are, you'd have a better shot of expanding those rights when it made sense to do so.

By the time robots become sentient, I'm be surprised if they say at relatively equal ability to human for long enough to have a civil rights battle.

[TithonusSyndrome]

The simplest way to deal with the problem of dishonest scanning at self-checkouts is to simply not have a grocery store in the first place. At a certain point internet-based grocery delivery services like Amazon Fresh are probably going to become the norm, and eliminating the overhead associated with buying and paying for upkeep on physical store locations is fine by me.

[Broomstick]

There's more to the whole store thing than simply obtaining goods - many people feel a need to get out of the house. Many people like to look at and even touch items prior to buying, particularly produce. The geek fantasy of us all spending all our time in tiny room hunched over a keyboard and having everything we need delivered to our doors is appealing to only a small fraction of the human race.

On top of which - internet delivery does NOT mean eliminating brick-and-mortar overhead. You still need warehouses, distribution centers, and so forth which costs money and requires overhead, and believe me, plenty of theft and diversion occurs in the back room of a store as well as in the front. Seriously, did you think the material items of someplace like Amazon exist in a some mysterious alternate realm until ordered?

[General Zod]

The simplest way to deal with the problem of dishonest scanning at self-checkouts is to simply not have a grocery store in the first place. At a certain point internet-based grocery delivery services like Amazon Fresh are probably going to become the norm, and eliminating the overhead associated with buying and paying for upkeep on physical store locations is fine by me.

I don't like buying produce or meat unless I can inspect it for myself first. So count me as someone that would never use a delivery service for this sort of thing.

[His Divine Shadow]

I don't like that either, in fact one of the things I hate is how the meat counters basically disappeared from most shops there around the 90s for us, back then the common way to buy cold cuts, sausages, ham etc was to select one from the counter and they'd cut the desired length or slices for you. Then came the plastic packages and now everything is in plastic packages. Ugh... Still now it's the norm. Things centralize and become bigger and more industrial, more effective, capitalism demands it. The decentralized, the small scale way of life is going out the door.

[Starglider]

Things centralize and become bigger and more industrial, more effective, capitalism demands it. The decentralized, the small scale way of life is going out the door.

No, consumers demand it. Butchers are still available, branded as organo-artisinal-ograsmo-sustanainbly-locally-bespoke premium hipster food. It's just that the majority of shoppers prefer the cheaper, more convenient options.

[K. A. Pital]

Things centralize and become bigger and more industrial, more effective, capitalism demands it. The decentralized, the small scale way of life is going out the door.

No, consumers demand it. Butchers are still available, branded as organo-artisinal-ograsmo-sustanainbly-locally-bespoke premium hipster food. It's just that the majority of shoppers prefer the cheaper, more convenient options.

Don't try to fool others by saying "the majority prefers". They have no choice - their purchasing power is too low to afford high-quality products on a daily basis.

Or, in other words, the majority is simply too poor to afford it. That is why.

[Simon_Jester]

To be fair, the majority was too poor to afford it before- people ate a lot less meat, and/or ate a lot more of the cheap, "non-butcher" alternatives like canned meat and sausages and so on, back in those days.

There's more to the whole store thing than simply obtaining goods - many people feel a need to get out of the house. Many people like to look at and even touch items prior to buying, particularly produce. The geek fantasy of us all spending all our time in tiny room hunched over a keyboard and having everything we need delivered to our doors is appealing to only a small fraction of the human race.

On top of which - internet delivery does NOT mean eliminating brick-and-mortar overhead. You still need warehouses, distribution centers, and so forth which costs money and requires overhead, and believe me, plenty of theft and diversion occurs in the back room of a store as well as in the front. Seriously, did you think the material items of someplace like Amazon exist in a some mysterious alternate realm until ordered?

This. ALSO...

If you go to a delivery model for everyone, you basically need to fill the shopping carts from a warehouse that is functionally very similar to a supermarket. Because you can't load the shopping carts directly from pallets in a warehouse; you have to 'break bulk,' put the individual items in places where they can be individually retrieved and placed into the 'basket' or cart or whatever of goods that will be heading to that particular customer.

Even assuming you have robot cars doing the delivery, you also need to somehow automate the process of breaking bulk, gathering up the goods into the individual carts, making sure that the goods loaded into the carts aren't accidentally damaged in the loading process (or already damaged when they're pulled off the shelves).

If you have that being done by human workers, you probably haven't saved much (or any) money on staff compared to the level of staffing that a normal grocery store has. After all, in a normal grocery store the customers do much of that work themselves, and as a corollary will generally not fault the store if it's done poorly. If someone picks up a leaky milk jug they find out quickly or only have themselves to blame; it doesn't get delivered to their doorstep after twenty minutes in the trunk of a robot car that causes the milk to soak the rest of the groceries. Since that aspect of the job is already "self-serve" and automation isn't quite up to doing it yet, that imposes a delay for food delivery.

[TithonusSyndrome]

There's more to the whole store thing than simply obtaining goods - many people feel a need to get out of the house. Many people like to look at and even touch items prior to buying, particularly produce.

This is a sentimentally twee narrative that nobody cares about. There are countless lost rituals in our society that were once considered vital and helpful that were abandoned as soon as some new convenience obviated them. We've proven time and time again that we are not that attached to these little ceremonies.

The geek fantasy of us all spending all our time in tiny room hunched over a keyboard and having everything we need delivered to our doors is appealing to only a small fraction of the human race.

Then do it on your phone? Maybe while you're out talking a walk in a place that is actually purpose-built for enjoyable strolls, like a park or the woods? I don't know a single person who talks about going to the grocery store with this kind of bucolic warmth. It's bizarre.

On top of which - internet delivery does NOT mean eliminating brick-and-mortar overhead. You still need warehouses, distribution centers, and so forth which costs money and requires overhead, and believe me, plenty of theft and diversion occurs in the back room of a store as well as in the front. Seriously, did you think the material items of someplace like Amazon exist in a some mysterious alternate realm until ordered?

Try not to be obtuse, if you can, and reflect on the fact that in our present arrangement, all of the brick-and-mortar exigencies you just mentioned still exist in addition to the grocery store. This is a really fucking simple dilemma; what is more expensive, relatively more physical locations and failure nodes for theft, or relatively fewer? No rush, take your time.

I don't like buying produce or meat unless I can inspect it for myself first. So count me as someone that would never use a delivery service for this sort of thing.

Install cameras, heat sensors, spectrographs, etc at the depot and inspect food items remotely. It'll only be a matter of time before these things are cheap enough to make and install up to a particular standard that the finances shake out.

[General Zod]

Install cameras, heat sensors, spectrographs, etc at the depot and inspect food items remotely. It'll only be a matter of time before these things are cheap enough to make and install up to a particular standard that the finances shake out.

I don't see myself ever becoming comfortable enough to let a robot pick my food like that. It's like buying clothes online; everything looks nice on paper but once you try it on the material feels horrible against your skin.