A firm providing AI drive-thru tech to fast food chains actually relies on human workers to take orders 70% of the time

Not using a LLM is clearly a mistake.

I bet if you provided ChatGPT the menu along with the spoken text it would figure it out no problem.

I guess the STT is a bigger issue.

You realize that Millennials are over 30, and spent their entire lives speed running through the most significant changes, year over year, of the digital age, right?

I'm generally pro-automation if it can increase efficiency, but McDonalds' ordering AI is terrible. It had issues understanding their buy one get one for $1 deal and then one time I ordered a "bacon McCrispy" which was an item right there on the menu but what I got was a plain McCrispy and a side order of bacon in a breakfast container. They need to send their AI back to training. I'd really just prefer kiosks at the drive thru like they have inside. Voice is the worst way to interact with a computer IMO, but maybe that's just because most implementations suck. Voice is too open ended though, a kiosk can provide exactly what options are available and as long as it has full set of customization options I don't think that open endedness benefits anyone.

Also, over 30? Millenials grew up on the Internet for the most part. I'm 34 and grew up with computers and Internet. It was our parents' generation that fails to understand tech.

it takes me about 3 times as long to use an AI bot because I have to ask it a bunch of silly questions first to try and fuck with it.

"Yeah, let me get uhhhh the McTrangle with a side of blubblub, and do you guys do the Krango geep still?"

If it doesn't meet the user's needs or expectations, then the system is wrong, not the user.

In response to that people are going to have less children, you can check the low birthrates around the world.

I'm sure electricity was terrible for lamplighters, the telephone for telegraphists, machinery for manual laborores, fusion energy is going to be terrible for the coal industry etc

Every technology is going to make someone irrelevant, until everyone is irrelevant, the problem is not technology it's the system that needs to change.

That's the exact reason why "Luddite" is an insult. They were people who wanted technology to benefit everyone and they were labeled as backwards thinking for it.

It's true in a capitalist system for sure. Automation causes fewer people to be responsible for more profit, so fewer people see the benefit of it. Capitalists argue it will just cause prices to fall, but a) to what, if many people can't find a stable job, and b) prices are quick to rise but slow to fall, nobody wants to take a loss on what they paid for/forecast, and businesses implementing this tech certainly aren't expecting to have to lower prices. Less money getting you more value increases the value of money - also known as deflation, and something economists avoid as it's quite painful.

Automation itself can be good for humans though. I don't think people should be stuck doing a bullshit job nobody really needs just because we don't want to eliminate a job. Our goal as human society should be for people to have more and more choice over how they spend their own time. Even if we eliminate basically all necessary work from human existence, creative works have intrinsic value to the people who create them at the very least, and often value to many other people as well - AI will never eliminate that even if AI becomes very creative itself.

Mandatory work should be something we try to eliminate, and replaced by people generally being able to choose to do whatever they want within reason. This is not something that makes any sense in a capitalist system, so rather than attacking automation and keeping capitalism just because that creates a more equal income distribution, we should be working toward replacing capitalism with something better, and automation is a part of getting there.

You're suffering a condition caused by capitalist propaganda where even though you recognise it's terrible you can't imagine anything except capitalism.

You throw in some emotive nazi imagery and firebrand anticap talking points but your argument is nothing more than 'capitalism is inevitable and our only option is to fight to be the beast consumer'

Technological developments have continually changed the world for the better, you have access to s standard of living which would blow the mind of a Victorian aristocrat, luxuries they could barely imagine. Access to information is better and far far cheaper than any time in history and by huge margins - go read Jude the obscure and try to find a single thing in that book which would be a problem today -- the boy would be a Latin scholar for a start.

Ai has already benefited humanity in a myriad of ways and it's going to continue getting more useful and making people's lives better - especially those in currently deprived or underdeveloped communities.

That's the exact reason why "Luddite" is an insult. They were people who wanted technology to benefit everyone and they were labeled as backwards thinking for it.

I can't tell if it's AI or just text to speech. Could be someone pressing a button.

There is one at a nearby Rallyes. It worked fine for me.

What problems did you have? To me it just felt like an automated voicemail process.

Remember when they promised us advances in technology would mean we would work less while enjoying a life of leisure?

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The article states 30% of those jobs are lost. And the 70% that are working are training the models. It is very normal that they start with a lot of oversight, manual intervention and hypercare, they are likely training the models to little my little reduce the amount of people. I don't work in this company, but in a similar one and I don't want to think how many people lost their job because of what we did.

AI has already replaced ton of jobs, after all it can be used as a form of automation. Media is over hyping it's current capabilities, but this is moving forward.

No? Maybe I just ignored them because that's such a dumb take. Anything that allows someone to do more work than they could before will lead to job losses, and that includes the vast majority of technological innovation.

The main exception I can think of is domestic appliances, but even that is questionable. Few "jobs" were lost because housekeeping is mostly unpaid labor. Even then, the idea that married women should be able to afford to stay home and take care of chores is gone. I think the automation of domestic work has a lot to do with why it's now the norm for both partners in a marriage to work outside the home.

No? Everyone has known ai will do things like this since way before anyone can remember - it's a staple of golden era science fiction for example, referenced in cartoons like the original Jetsons, and part of every single tired doomists anti technology speel since the Victorian era.

I guess there were and still are people who lack the ability to understand progress and seem to live continually in the delusional belief that we're at the end of history and nothing else will ever change - there's always people who'll take any position that lets them avoid thinking too deeply.