A taste of things to come, the “first mostly non-human-run” McDonald’s has opened in the Fort Worth area.
Via The Guardian:
Customers can drive to the golden arches and expect to be served a Big Mac or a Happy Meal by a food and beverage conveyor instead of an actual, real-life human being.
A spokesperson for McDonald’s told the Guardian that the test concept “is not fully automated”, emphasizing that the restaurant does employ a team comparable to that of a traditional store.
Smaller than a typical McDonald’s, the location is geared towards customers on the go rather than those who plan to dine inside. It limits interactions between team members and customers and uses “enhanced technology that allows the restaurant team to begin preparing customers’ orders when they’re near the restaurant”.
You asked for $25 minimum wage
You get: First fully automated McDonalds in Texas pic.twitter.com/hd5AsBTOwX
— ELIJAH (@ElijahSchaffer) December 22, 2022
Let’s be honest here: McDonald’s customer service was never anything to write home about. It’s no great loss for patrons that they won’t be greeted with the barely intelligible grunts of minimum-wage McDonald’s employees who are probably high and who hate their jobs.
The noteworthiness is that this development is a bellwether of current trends and things to come. Other fast food giants like White Castle are flirting similarly with fully replacing outdated human resources with tech.
Factory jobs are increasingly automated. Soon customer service will be as well. Even the arts, once thought off-limits to machines, will eventually succumb to the AI takeover.
The essential question for a technocratic overlord becomes: what good are all of these eaters once they truly become useless?
What leverage will the working class, and, increasingly, even the managerial middle class have in labor negotiations when their labor is totally irrelevant?
The working poor have always been a nuisance — and a latent threat — to the power structure. Why keep them around when they literally serve no further purpose?
Related: McDonald’s Does Exactly What Anyone Who Understands Economics Said Would Happen
Hence Bill Gates’ irresistible passion, the death panel discussion that “you’re not supposed to have” (in public).
Is spending a million dollars, on that last 3 months of life, for that patient, would it be better not to layoff those 10 teachers and to make that trade off in medical costs but that’s called the death panel, ah, and you’re not supposed to have that discussion.
-Bill Gates
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