Recently, in my city, the garbage trucks started to come equipped with a device I call "The Claw" (think Toy Story). The truck drives to your curb where your bin is waiting, and then The Claw extends, grasps the bin, lifts it into the air and empties the contents into the truck before setting it down again.

The Claw allows a garbage truck to be crewed by one man where it would have needed two or three before, and to collect garbage much faster than when the bins were emptied by hand. We don't know what the economics of such automation of (physical) garbage collection portend in the long term, but what we do know is that sanitation workers are being put out of work. "Just upskill," you might say, but until Claw-equipped trucks started appearing on the streets there was no need to upskill, and now that they're here the displaced sanitation workers may be in jeopardy of being unable to afford to feed their families, let alone find and train in some new marketable skill.

So no, we're in the The Claw era of AI, when business finds a new way to funge labor with capital, devaluing certain kinds of labor to zero with no way out for those who traded in such labor. The long-term implications of this development are unclear, but the short-term ones are: more money for the owner class, and some people are out on their ass without a safety net because this is Goddamn America and we don't brook that sort of commie nonsense here.

FYI, this kind of garbage truck has been around for >50 years [0], so any wide-scale impact on employment from this technology has likely already settled out.

The waste collection companies in my area don't use them because it's rural and the bins aren't standardized. The side loaders don't work for all use cases of garbage trucks.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_truck

>In 1969, the city of Scottsdale, Arizona introduced the world's first automated side loader. The new truck could collect 300 gallon containers in 30 second cycles, without the driver exiting the cab