There’s the issue of the job itself being more demanding, but also the managers in “low skilled” jobs being ultra-demanding petty dictators.

As a white collar computer guy, I can waste some time on Reddit. Or go for a walk and grab coffee. Or let people know that I’m heading out for a couple of hours to go to the doctor. There are a LOT of little freedoms tha you take for granted if you haven’t worked a shitty minimum wage job. Getting on trouble for punching in one minute late, not being allowed to sit down, socializing too much when you’re not on a break.

I’m pretty sure that most tech employees would just quit when encountering a manager like that

> Forget becoming manager at McDonald's or be even good at flipping burgers at the age of 40: you are competing with 20yr olds doing sports with amazing coordination etc

I have no idea what in the world you are talking about. Most 20 year olds working at McDonald’s are stoned and move at half a mile an hour whether it’s a lunch rush or it’s 2am. I worked retail for years before I finally switched full time to programming. It’s certainly not full of amazing motivated athletes with excellent coordination. You’re lucky if most of them can show up to work on time more than half the time.

Ugh.. sorry to hear :( I am myself unemployed right now. Its really hard to land a job in tech.. Luicky, I dont need to flip burgers for now...

I have worked in the restaurant industry within the last 5 years and I'm probably older than you.

> Robotics is obviously a whole different field from AI

I agree, but people are conflating the two. We have seen a lot of advancements in robotics, but as of current that only makes the economics worse. We're not seeing the complexity of robots going down and we're seeing the R&D costs going up, etc.

If it didn't make sense a few years ago to buy a crappy robot that can barely do the task because your business will never make money doing it, it probably doesn't make sense this year to buy a robot that still can't accomplish the tasks and is more expensive.

Yeah, although in the "Something big is happening" Shumer did say at the end "Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They're not quite there yet. But "not quite there yet" in AI terms has a way of becoming "here" faster than anyone expects."

Being the hype-man that he is I assume he meant humanoid robots - I think he's being silly here, and the sentence made me roll my eyes.

> So the people flipping the burgers and serving the customers will be safe, but the accountants and marketing folks won't be.

And that's probably something most people are okay with. Work that can be automated should be and humans should be spending their time on novel things instead of labor if possible.

A customer service agent that can be automated should be, but it's not working right now. Most support systems are designed to offload as much work as possible to the automated funnel, which almost always has gaps, loops, etc. The result is customers who want to pay for something or use something that get "stuck" being unable to throw money at a company. Right now the cost of fraud is much greater than the cost of these uncaptured sales or lost customers.

Eventually that will change and the role of a customer service agent will be redefined.

> and the on-premise employees do little else than heat it up

This is correct. This also is a lot more complex than it sounds and creates a lot of work. Cooking those products creates byproducts that must be handled.

> and the cashiers have largely been replaced by self-order terminals so that employees no longer even need to speak rudimentary English

Yet most of the customers still have to interact with an employee because "the kiosk won't let me". Want to add Mac sauce? Get the wrong order in the bag? Machine took payment but is out of receipt paper? Add up all these "edge cases" and a significant amount of these "contactless" transactions involved plenty of contact!

> It will happen to you.

Any labor that can be automated should be. Humans are not supposed to spend their time doing meaningless tasks without a purpose beyond making an imaginary number go up or down.

> McDonald’s global CEO has famously stated that while they invest in "advanced kitchen equipment," full robotic kitchens aren't a broad reality yet because "the economics don't pencil out" for their massive scale.

> While a highly automated McDonald’s in South Korea (or the experimental "small format" store in Texas) might look empty, the total headcount remains surprisingly similar to a standard restaurant