Comment by joshdavham

5 months ago

So AI will replace software engineers but not fast food workers because that work is too complex for AI?

13 comments

joshdavham

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hackable_sand  5 months ago

Knowledge processes are more amenable to automation than physical processes, especially in food service.

Cleaning and automated meal assembly are hard problems, not to mention accountability for food safety.

But this issue is larger. I've had several customers come through who refuse to interface with NLP/AI. A select few refuse to use the touch-pad kiosks because they want to interface with a person (who is ultimately reading off a script with light banter).

Take it anecdotally, but adoption is not cut and dry for local economic engines. At the very least, my coworkers and I will be able to pay for our higher education while serving the community.

What is that worth?

  • toofy  5 months ago

    i definitely prefer to order from a person. for a few different reasons:

    1) i kinda like people.

    2) being in this industry, i know more than a few people who struggle with basic human social interaction shit. most of the people i know who are fine with other people worked these kinds of jobs when they were younger. dealing with customers face to face as a job teaches us stuff about interaction many of the struggle bus people unfortunately never learned.

    3) once i’m past the novelty factor of ordering from an app or from a kiosk, i still find it to be smoother when just simply ordering from a person.

    3) these are fantastic jobs for people’s first job. learning about work at a young age is soooo fucking important.

    4) if it’s an adult working one of these, applaud them. it’s a shitty work environment with shitty pay, shitty bosses and too often shitty customers. most engineers i know couldnt sustain it for years. they would break (including myself, i just can’t imagine ever doing that again) if an adult is doing it, they really need that job.

    5) im just done with the unaccountability once people are abstracted away. when something goes wrong, a human will generally fix it or point you in the right direction. we’ve all seen what happens when someone is locked out of their gmail or needs help with some other faceless org, its a dystopian nightmare (and yes, for certain people who need this explained to them, ‘dystopian’ is bad) we’re abstracting away people while knowing full well about the very real downsides. it’s wild.

    we’ve hired a number of people who worked their way through school with these kinds of jobs and they’re almost universally a better hire than someone who has no real world human experience.

    anyone who has ever used the “by their bootstraps” nonsense should absolutely be supportive of front line customer service people yet ironically those same ‘bootstraps’ people are the first to be like “less people is better!”

    people are alright and i’m still confused by how many in our industry want to remove them.

    • autoexec  5 months ago

      I don't really like people or interacting with them, but I know that the wage slave taking my order doesn't give a shit about me and will forget about me the moment I leave. A company using AI will be far more likely to be collecting my voice print, analyzing my speech to build a psychological profile on me, A/B testing everything from their word choices, inflection, and sales pitches to get me to spend more, etc.

      The human behind the counter is exhausted, underpaid, and uncaring. They aren't trying to screw me over. The AI on the other hand might be outright adversarial

      2 replies →

    • hackable_sand  5 months ago

      Makes sense to me.

      The first few months were rough. Mostly because I am neurodivergent, but also because the work does suck.

      It worked though. I kept my head down, got promoted, made friends.

      I went into software engineering out of high school, so this was definitely a new experience, but I agree. I think everyone should give this kind of work a shot. You learn a lot about people.

      1 reply →

smnplk  5 months ago

They were smart and didn't upload their process to github, didn't write any books or tutorials on fast food ordering process. So AI could't learn the craft. ;)