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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| The campaign for $15 minimum wage is gaining in strength with several U.S. | |
| cities moving to double the pay rate for low-income workers. | |
| Unfortunately, the very people fighting for $15 are at the most risk of losing their jobs to automation. | |
| The Washington Post made a startling front-page admission raising the minimum wage to $15 could speed the arrival of robot-powered restaurants, killing millions of jobs in the industry. | |
| That includes 5.4 million servers and cooks, and many of the nation's 3.3 million cashiers, especially at fast food restaurants. | |
| About 30% of the restaurant industry's costs come from salaries, so burger-flipping robots become that much more cost-competitive if the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is doubled. | |
| And many chains are already at work looking for ingenious ways to take humans out of the picture. | |
| Today's robotic workforce is much smaller, much cheaper, and capable of doing a variety of jobs. | |
| Compared to the cost of an average annual salary for just about any worker, including minimum wage employees, The robotic worker's one-time cost and near perfection in their job execution is a very appealing option to many employers. | |
| A 2014 Robotics Business Review article, How Robots Will Shape Future Employment and Law, estimates that by 2025, half of the jobs in the United States will be performed by brilliant machines and intelligent systems. | |
| Here are just some of the jobs that'll be lost to automation. | |
| Pharmacists, lawyers and paralegals, astronauts, store clerks, cashiers, drivers, soldiers, babysitters, rescuers, sports writers and other reporters, marketers, customer service, and factory workers. | |
| So the question is, if these jobs are taken over by robots, what will we do? | |
| It's a difficult problem and I was at a meeting where there were five Nobel Prize winning economists and all they wanted to talk about was this question. | |
| What's the future of employment and the structure of the economy when most of what we call work now is being done by robots? | |
| And unfortunately, even though that was what they really cared about, they had no suggestions. | |
| You know, you go to Japan and there's no one taking your order, you go to a vending machine and you order it. | |
| And obviously the Japanese economy has dealt with that. | |
| Automation poses a threat to millions of workers, but it could create opportunities for a few. | |
| And if the future looks more Star Trek than Blade Runner, robots taking over our jobs and producing more than enough of everything that everyone needs might mean the whole paradigm of exchanging labor for pay starts to break down. |
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