The problem is minimum wage is the break even equivalent of like 2-10k human hours without even factoring in expensive maintenance costs.
Comment on Why don't we have cool vending machines in the US?
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 4 days agoExcept robots don’t need to take as many breaks nor do you have to pay them minimum wage.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 4 days ago
A return on investment of 0.5 to 2.5 years is pretty good for companies. You also have to factor the costs of maintaining a space for a human equivalent. Paying a wage doesn’t cover all labor costs.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
I mean, maintenance is going to be a bitch. Your going to have to pay thousands in travel fees and probably thousands of dollars an hour labor, plus whatever robit parts cost everytime it breaks down. And while it’s broken down, you can’t earn revenue, like you could just replacing an employee.
ultrahamster64@lemmy.world 4 days ago
You have to pay them minimum wage, It’s just called “monthly maintenance expenses” and it’s quite a bit more than minimum pay for humans
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 4 days ago
and it’s quite a bit more than minimum pay for humans
Is it? I can buy a vending machine for less than $8000. Converting that cost to minimum wage, that is ~28 full time weeks worth of labor to act as a mechanism to sell items. There are probably a lot of times when the cost in capital is less than the cost in labor.
HK65@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
You do actually have to pay them more than minimum wage, if you think about it.
Minimum wage in many countries is so low it’s not enough to sustain a human. You can’t do it to a robot, since it will just not do its job, no matter how many regulators you capture or how many middle management manipulations you pull. You have to pay a living wage to a robot.
This is why “people are still cheaper than robots”. What happens if there’s a 20% wave of inflation? With workers, it’s “we don’t give out 20% pay raises, grow up”, with robots, it’s “here is your power bill, it’s 30% higher to cover for any further fluctuations in inflations, pay it or shut your factory down”.
Robots need breaks too, if they are not regularly maintained they will start to make mistakes, costly mistakes, and they might break, and when one breaks, you don’t just recruit one more wage slave from the fucked up job market, you shell out a lot of money for a new robot.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 4 days ago
There may be cases where the price of labor is lower than the price of a specific machine, but the Industrial Revolution was built on replacing labor with capital.
It isn’t evenly spread out, but it is something increasingly happening to more and more jobs.
HK65@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
Obviously, automation is changing work, and you can make cheaper robots that will be cheaper than working someone to do the same thing. All I’m saying is there is a significant component next to the direct “pay vs. machine maintenance costs” question.
My point is that companies and employers have got used to a ton of leeway with workers, where they can offload a ton of risk to people just because they are employees.
See for example that one case when that US airline wanted to weasel out of honouring a deal offered by their chatbot. That’s them realizing they can no longer just say it’s been a mistake made by an employee, as there is no separate legal entity to push responsibility on.
The same with paying a wage lower than living wage. If they pay sub-living wages, then the onus to make up the rest needed to lead a life that enables you to work long term, thus the risk is on you instead of the employer. If they replace you with a robot, and skimp on its requirements, it will break, and there is nowhere to push the responsibility.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 4 days ago
I don’t see how the use or nonuse AI affects the adoption of a vending machine or self checkout.