Yeah fuck AI but can we stop shitting on fast food jobs like they are embarassing jobs to have that are somehow super easy.
What you should hate about AI is the way it is used as a concept to dehumanize people and the labor they do and this kind of meme/statement works against solidarity in our resistance by backhandedly insulting people working in fastfood.
Is it the most complicated job in the world? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean these jobs aren’t exhausting and worthy of respect.
The whole point of AI is to provide a narrative framework that allows the ruling class to further dehumanize labor and treat workers worse (because replacement with automation is just around the corner).
Realize that agreeing to this framework of low paid jobs as easy and worthless plays right into the actual reasons the ruling class are pushing AI so hard. The true power is in the story not the tech.
I have to had so many conversations with people still thinking fast food is only for high school kids. It’s odd. If I say how will they be open during school hours, they make up some bullshit ‘get a better job.’ It doesn’t make snese. Most of these people don’t have good jobs and are lucky to be supported in their current lifestyle. They don’t see that though.
I try to push the point of ‘they are paying for your time and for you to be on standby.’ you don’t need to be actively moving all 8 hours. Your bosses don’t. I’ve seen so many waste of time meetings to justify their welfare jobs. It’s comical. They don’t produce value. They are leeches. Not all, but too many.
I hate that talking point so much (and hear it all the time from people complaining about immigrants turkin ur jerbs). The Fast-Food-Jobs-Are-Brutal-And-Pay-Shit-Wages-Because-They’re-Building-Teen-Character narrative is anti-worker bullshit that denies folk job security and a living wage.
Someone’s widowed nan needs this job. The single dad living next door needs this job. A diverse workforce - that includes young people looking for a summer gig - need this job.
Can we also talk about how much everyone, everywhere relies on service industry workers and how much everyone would absolutely lose their goddamn minds if they had to make their own burgers and fries twice a week, AND how these staple institutions, jobs we deemed so important that we made people work at them during a pandemic, how much the prices of these sandwiches and snacks has gone up in the last few years, how even bringing up the possibility of increasing minimum wage for these difficult and demanding jobs leads to an entire social “discourse” and fierce debates about if people should be able to afford things.
Also centrists who think of themselves as tech savy will smugly tell you the only way technology can improve fastfood workers lives is by eliminating jobs and thus all the ruling class has to do is push inflation up and these types of people will shout down anyone who argues we need to pay fastfood workers more to compensate because that must be pushing against the “natural” path of technological progress.
The AI cult/singularity bros is absolutely a bootlicking cult, if not licking the boots of the giant tech companies that have no intention of making the world better, then they’re licking the imaginary boots of some kind of AI-mommy that they predict will just “be invented” any day now, aaaannnny day, and that AI will make everyone wealthy.
Literally, they think an artificial super intelligence will help them pick stocks and invest and everyone will be rich. Don’t dare ask how, just believe it. Don’t ask what the several billion people are going to do who live subsistence lifestyles working land and manual labor to support our entire infrastructure. I guess they’ll also pick the right stocks and get rich and all the presidents and corporate leaders will just throw their hands in the air as their accumulated wealth becomes worthless overnight.
I am so tired of human ignorance and escapism. We gotta live in the now, and solve the problems we have right now, and stop finding creating ways to blame others so we don’t have to do the hard shit.
I agree and to sharpen the edge to this point even more, this is also about centrists looking to AI for hope because they have utterly and completely ceded control over narratives about what kind of futures are possible or desirable to conservatives and the ultrawealthy.
People think the best way towards a more humane society is by beating around the bush and never drawing a line in the sand for when abuse and exploitation have gone far enough and while it is understandable to a degree as an individual coping strategy, it is precisely this kind of societal mindset that fascism catches on and grows like wildfire in.
This kind of escapism can only lead one place in the end.
I don’t think it’s shitting on fast food jobs at all. The point of this is that taking orders at a fast food is, in the micro, an extremely easy task. What makes the job as a whole exhausting is the fact that you have to do that for a full shift and the human brain gets stressed from doing that. But AI doesn’t, and yet it’s messing up the simplest part of the job.
I don’t agree we can just authoritatively state in broad terms that working fastfood is extremely easy in any framing, especially for shit pay and lack of quality recuperation time associated with getting treated like you aren’t really a human being (more like an approximation of a robot).
I never said “working fast food” is extremely easy. What I said is, listening to a customer speaking and just relying that to a machine is extremely easy.
Doing that for a full shift is NOT easy. Doing that while being stressed because the pay is shit and you might even have another job on top of that is NOT easy. Being treated as a robot for half of your non-sleeping life is NOT easy. But all of those things are not easy for a human. None of these are issues for a software, whose hardest task is simply “listening to a customer speaking and just relying that to a machine”, which is, taking out of the equation human matters like stress, emotions and whatnot, extremely easy.
You are subscribing to an abstraction of the inherently human labor of preparing a to-go meal for someone that assumes one can or should utterly remove the human aspect of that interaction.
…and before someone comes at me with some form of an argument that I am arguing against a future with automation that will be better for everyone I want to emphasize that is again accepting a number of framings implicitly without first critically examining them.
For one, why is the profession of feeding people hot food in a speedy manner in remote places or late hours considered so unworthy of a basic respect that people constantly shit on it as a job?
If it is truly as demeaning and inhuman as we all casually assume when we use fast food labor as the butt of our points, as an insult in the form of association, than why can we only ever ask of technology in the context of the food service industry “how do we remove the humanity from this thing?” and never “how do we restore or embue humanity to this thing?”.
In otherwords, why does fastfood work have to be seen as unworthy of being considered a respectable job? If there is an existential crisis here to be solved it is clearly not with helping massive corporations further slash operating costs and investments in stable decent employment, but with examining and addressing what horrifically went wrong that we have slept walk (by and large) into thinking this is an ok or healthy way to think about other human beings.
…I don’t think I understood your point. I’ll try giving my answers to these questions but I’m sure I misunderstood most of them.
For one, why is the profession of feeding people hot food in a speedy manner in remote places or late hours considered so unworthy of a basic respect that people constantly shit on it as a job?
In otherwords, why does fastfood work have to be seen as unworthy of being considered a respectable job?
Because it’s a terrible job that I don’t think anyone actually wants to do. We’ve already talked about how stressful and unsatisfying it is as a job, there’s pretty much no upside to it.
why can we only ever ask of technology in the context of the food service industry “how do we remove the humanity from this thing?” and never “how do we restore or embue humanity to this thing?”
Personally, because I don’t think it’s possible. It’s a very “mechanical” job (save a very small number of people like restaurant chefs), and giving it “humanity” (less stressful shifts, less pressure and higher pay) is counterproductive to both what companies want (more money) and what customers want (to eat food for cheap and quickly, even at odd times or in odd places).
I think it’s one of the best jobs to be replaced because it’s easy (for a machine) and no human actually likes doing it. The issue is, of course, that the cut costs will go straight to the pockets of the CEOs and will not be used to improve the customer experience (or at least make it cheaper), so the working class will just have less jobs while having to pay the same to eat, but that’s a widespread issue with capitalism that’s far harder to fix.
If there is an existential crisis here to be solved it is clearly not with helping massive corporations further slash operating costs and investments in stable decent employment, but with examining and addressing what horrifically went wrong that we have slept walk (by and large) into thinking this is an ok or healthy way to think about other human beings.
I feel like you’re conflating two things here: people that don’t consider “working at a fast food” worthy of respect (imo rightfully, because again, it’s a terrible job), and people that don’t consider “people who work at a fast food” worthy of respect (probably because they believe in the “hustler” mentality and are convinced that it’s their fault if they’re stuck with a shitty job).
My opinions on a job and on someone who work at said job are vastly different, and not just for the food industry. I’m guessing a lot of people also think similarly, I’ve never seen people shit on fast food workers as people, except for the aforementioned delusional types who think anyone could be a billionaire if they just put in “enough work”.
Again, sorry but I don’t think I really got the meaning of your last comment so do tell me if I completely missed your point and all my answers were gibberish based on assumptions I had.
Personally, because I don’t think it’s possible. It’s a very “mechanical” job (save a very small number of people like restaurant chefs), and giving it “humanity” (less stressful shifts, less pressure and higher pay) is counterproductive to both what companies want (more money) and what customers want (to eat food for cheap and quickly, even at odd times or in odd places).
I think it’s one of the best jobs to be replaced because it’s easy (for a machine) and no human actually likes doing it.
These two paragraph are full of the common assumptions and generalizations we assert as a society about fastfood work and frankly I am tired of having to nod my head and pretend like they are indisputable facts. Nothing you said is evidence, you have just dutifully sketched out the narrative we use to dehumanize fastfood work (and other “essential work”).
My opinions on a job and on someone who work at said job are vastly different, and not just for the food industry. I’m guessing a lot of people also think similarly, I’ve never seen people shit on fast food workers as people, except for the aforementioned delusional types who think anyone could be a billionaire if they just put in “enough work”.
You are participating in a very dangerous slight of hand here by saying that in a society that utterly defines your worth and potential from your job that it is theoretically reasonable to disparage a job because why would anyone ever conflate a person with their job??
Everything about our society conflates the identity of people with their job (especially along vectors of oppression), any attempt to divide those two except as basically an academic excersize is pointless and harmfully obscures the extremely class based rigidity of the society we live in (speaking as a USian, tho I am sure the pattern isnt tooo different elsewhere).
People have been convinced by the rich to think fastfood work is demeaning, pathetic and worthless and I think it is honestly pretty disgusting how willing people are to jump on that bandwagon and do free work for the ruling class in helping undermine worker leverage to demand a decent life.
These two paragraph are full of the common assumptions and generalizations we assert as a society about fastfood work and frankly I am tired of having to nod my head and pretend like they are indisputable facts. Nothing you said is evidence, you have just dutifully sketched out the narrative we use to dehumanize fastfood work (and other “essential work”).
…so what exactly is wrong about what I said? You’re saying they’re assumptions and generalizations but didn’t bring any counterpoint.
People have been convinced by the rich to think fastfood work is demeaning, pathetic and worthless and I think it is honestly pretty disgusting how willing people are to jump on that bandwagon and do free work for the ruling class in helping undermine worker leverage to demand a decent life.
I… really don’t think that’s what’s happening? At least barring the aforementioned delusional people. If anything, jobs that are considered horrible and demeaning like certain teachers and nurses get MORE sympathy from the public exactly because we see that’s a terrible way of living and that’s not okay.
What do you think we should do then? Act like it’s an awesome job and everyone is happy doing it? Wouldn’t that have the opposite effect of making people think all is good and nothing needs improvement?
I… really don’t think that’s what’s happening? At least barring the aforementioned delusional people. If anything, jobs that are considered horrible and demeaning like certain teachers and nurses get MORE sympathy from the public exactly because we see that’s a terrible way of living and that’s not okay
What does sympathy matter to the subjects of said sympathy? The whole “essential worker” thing is a load of feel good bullshit people tell themselves to absolve themselves of guilt for participating in a society that brutally exploits the economically vulnerable.
My point is this is precisely why people both shit on fastfood workers and then tell themselves nonsense about how society treats them as essential workers. It is about narratives around how little someone can be worth and what kind of ideologies become normalized when you decide it is ok to decide for a massive workface that the only way to make their lives better is to eliminate their livelihoods abruptly and without consulting unions or any representative of the workforce in question.
Instead your perspective presupposes this kind of approach defined by serial bullshitters/MBA majors could ever actually be kind and helpful to the people having their livelihoods further dehumanized in favor of bigger and bigger profits.
I suggest we stop listening to tech bros who think what we “need” is to treat fastfood workers like they are temporary replacements for robots until we can replace them completely with robots (which there is no conclusive evidence will ever really work and actually quite a bit of evidence it won’t).
I suggest we start putting robber barons (CEOs of massive corporations) in jail and use that money to raise wages and benefits to fastfood workers. A couple more Luigis wouldn’t hurt either.
This is a war and the ruling class understands that perfectly, I suggest we start acting accordingly and put unquestionable solidarity with other workers first. Period.
Yeah fuck AI but can we stop shitting on fast food jobs like they are embarassing jobs to have that are somehow super easy.
What you should hate about AI is the way it is used as a concept to dehumanize people and the labor they do and this kind of meme/statement works against solidarity in our resistance by backhandedly insulting people working in fastfood.
Is it the most complicated job in the world? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean these jobs aren’t exhausting and worthy of respect.
The whole point of AI is to provide a narrative framework that allows the ruling class to further dehumanize labor and treat workers worse (because replacement with automation is just around the corner).
Realize that agreeing to this framework of low paid jobs as easy and worthless plays right into the actual reasons the ruling class are pushing AI so hard. The true power is in the story not the tech.
I have to had so many conversations with people still thinking fast food is only for high school kids. It’s odd. If I say how will they be open during school hours, they make up some bullshit ‘get a better job.’ It doesn’t make snese. Most of these people don’t have good jobs and are lucky to be supported in their current lifestyle. They don’t see that though.
I try to push the point of ‘they are paying for your time and for you to be on standby.’ you don’t need to be actively moving all 8 hours. Your bosses don’t. I’ve seen so many waste of time meetings to justify their welfare jobs. It’s comical. They don’t produce value. They are leeches. Not all, but too many.
I hate that talking point so much (and hear it all the time from people complaining about immigrants turkin ur jerbs). The Fast-Food-Jobs-Are-Brutal-And-Pay-Shit-Wages-Because-They’re-Building-Teen-Character narrative is anti-worker bullshit that denies folk job security and a living wage.
Someone’s widowed nan needs this job. The single dad living next door needs this job. A diverse workforce - that includes young people looking for a summer gig - need this job.
Can we also talk about how much everyone, everywhere relies on service industry workers and how much everyone would absolutely lose their goddamn minds if they had to make their own burgers and fries twice a week, AND how these staple institutions, jobs we deemed so important that we made people work at them during a pandemic, how much the prices of these sandwiches and snacks has gone up in the last few years, how even bringing up the possibility of increasing minimum wage for these difficult and demanding jobs leads to an entire social “discourse” and fierce debates about if people should be able to afford things.
Also centrists who think of themselves as tech savy will smugly tell you the only way technology can improve fastfood workers lives is by eliminating jobs and thus all the ruling class has to do is push inflation up and these types of people will shout down anyone who argues we need to pay fastfood workers more to compensate because that must be pushing against the “natural” path of technological progress.
It is just another form of bootlicking honestly.
The AI cult/singularity bros is absolutely a bootlicking cult, if not licking the boots of the giant tech companies that have no intention of making the world better, then they’re licking the imaginary boots of some kind of AI-mommy that they predict will just “be invented” any day now, aaaannnny day, and that AI will make everyone wealthy.
Literally, they think an artificial super intelligence will help them pick stocks and invest and everyone will be rich. Don’t dare ask how, just believe it. Don’t ask what the several billion people are going to do who live subsistence lifestyles working land and manual labor to support our entire infrastructure. I guess they’ll also pick the right stocks and get rich and all the presidents and corporate leaders will just throw their hands in the air as their accumulated wealth becomes worthless overnight.
I am so tired of human ignorance and escapism. We gotta live in the now, and solve the problems we have right now, and stop finding creating ways to blame others so we don’t have to do the hard shit.
I agree and to sharpen the edge to this point even more, this is also about centrists looking to AI for hope because they have utterly and completely ceded control over narratives about what kind of futures are possible or desirable to conservatives and the ultrawealthy.
People think the best way towards a more humane society is by beating around the bush and never drawing a line in the sand for when abuse and exploitation have gone far enough and while it is understandable to a degree as an individual coping strategy, it is precisely this kind of societal mindset that fascism catches on and grows like wildfire in.
This kind of escapism can only lead one place in the end.
I don’t think it’s shitting on fast food jobs at all. The point of this is that taking orders at a fast food is, in the micro, an extremely easy task. What makes the job as a whole exhausting is the fact that you have to do that for a full shift and the human brain gets stressed from doing that. But AI doesn’t, and yet it’s messing up the simplest part of the job.
I don’t agree we can just authoritatively state in broad terms that working fastfood is extremely easy in any framing, especially for shit pay and lack of quality recuperation time associated with getting treated like you aren’t really a human being (more like an approximation of a robot).
That is my whole point.
I never said “working fast food” is extremely easy. What I said is, listening to a customer speaking and just relying that to a machine is extremely easy.
Doing that for a full shift is NOT easy. Doing that while being stressed because the pay is shit and you might even have another job on top of that is NOT easy. Being treated as a robot for half of your non-sleeping life is NOT easy. But all of those things are not easy for a human. None of these are issues for a software, whose hardest task is simply “listening to a customer speaking and just relying that to a machine”, which is, taking out of the equation human matters like stress, emotions and whatnot, extremely easy.
You are subscribing to an abstraction of the inherently human labor of preparing a to-go meal for someone that assumes one can or should utterly remove the human aspect of that interaction.
…and before someone comes at me with some form of an argument that I am arguing against a future with automation that will be better for everyone I want to emphasize that is again accepting a number of framings implicitly without first critically examining them.
For one, why is the profession of feeding people hot food in a speedy manner in remote places or late hours considered so unworthy of a basic respect that people constantly shit on it as a job?
If it is truly as demeaning and inhuman as we all casually assume when we use fast food labor as the butt of our points, as an insult in the form of association, than why can we only ever ask of technology in the context of the food service industry “how do we remove the humanity from this thing?” and never “how do we restore or embue humanity to this thing?”.
In otherwords, why does fastfood work have to be seen as unworthy of being considered a respectable job? If there is an existential crisis here to be solved it is clearly not with helping massive corporations further slash operating costs and investments in stable decent employment, but with examining and addressing what horrifically went wrong that we have slept walk (by and large) into thinking this is an ok or healthy way to think about other human beings.
…I don’t think I understood your point. I’ll try giving my answers to these questions but I’m sure I misunderstood most of them.
Because it’s a terrible job that I don’t think anyone actually wants to do. We’ve already talked about how stressful and unsatisfying it is as a job, there’s pretty much no upside to it.
Personally, because I don’t think it’s possible. It’s a very “mechanical” job (save a very small number of people like restaurant chefs), and giving it “humanity” (less stressful shifts, less pressure and higher pay) is counterproductive to both what companies want (more money) and what customers want (to eat food for cheap and quickly, even at odd times or in odd places).
I think it’s one of the best jobs to be replaced because it’s easy (for a machine) and no human actually likes doing it. The issue is, of course, that the cut costs will go straight to the pockets of the CEOs and will not be used to improve the customer experience (or at least make it cheaper), so the working class will just have less jobs while having to pay the same to eat, but that’s a widespread issue with capitalism that’s far harder to fix.
I feel like you’re conflating two things here: people that don’t consider “working at a fast food” worthy of respect (imo rightfully, because again, it’s a terrible job), and people that don’t consider “people who work at a fast food” worthy of respect (probably because they believe in the “hustler” mentality and are convinced that it’s their fault if they’re stuck with a shitty job).
My opinions on a job and on someone who work at said job are vastly different, and not just for the food industry. I’m guessing a lot of people also think similarly, I’ve never seen people shit on fast food workers as people, except for the aforementioned delusional types who think anyone could be a billionaire if they just put in “enough work”.
Again, sorry but I don’t think I really got the meaning of your last comment so do tell me if I completely missed your point and all my answers were gibberish based on assumptions I had.
These two paragraph are full of the common assumptions and generalizations we assert as a society about fastfood work and frankly I am tired of having to nod my head and pretend like they are indisputable facts. Nothing you said is evidence, you have just dutifully sketched out the narrative we use to dehumanize fastfood work (and other “essential work”).
You are participating in a very dangerous slight of hand here by saying that in a society that utterly defines your worth and potential from your job that it is theoretically reasonable to disparage a job because why would anyone ever conflate a person with their job??
Everything about our society conflates the identity of people with their job (especially along vectors of oppression), any attempt to divide those two except as basically an academic excersize is pointless and harmfully obscures the extremely class based rigidity of the society we live in (speaking as a USian, tho I am sure the pattern isnt tooo different elsewhere).
People have been convinced by the rich to think fastfood work is demeaning, pathetic and worthless and I think it is honestly pretty disgusting how willing people are to jump on that bandwagon and do free work for the ruling class in helping undermine worker leverage to demand a decent life.
…so what exactly is wrong about what I said? You’re saying they’re assumptions and generalizations but didn’t bring any counterpoint.
I… really don’t think that’s what’s happening? At least barring the aforementioned delusional people. If anything, jobs that are considered horrible and demeaning like certain teachers and nurses get MORE sympathy from the public exactly because we see that’s a terrible way of living and that’s not okay.
What do you think we should do then? Act like it’s an awesome job and everyone is happy doing it? Wouldn’t that have the opposite effect of making people think all is good and nothing needs improvement?
What does sympathy matter to the subjects of said sympathy? The whole “essential worker” thing is a load of feel good bullshit people tell themselves to absolve themselves of guilt for participating in a society that brutally exploits the economically vulnerable.
My point is this is precisely why people both shit on fastfood workers and then tell themselves nonsense about how society treats them as essential workers. It is about narratives around how little someone can be worth and what kind of ideologies become normalized when you decide it is ok to decide for a massive workface that the only way to make their lives better is to eliminate their livelihoods abruptly and without consulting unions or any representative of the workforce in question.
Instead your perspective presupposes this kind of approach defined by serial bullshitters/MBA majors could ever actually be kind and helpful to the people having their livelihoods further dehumanized in favor of bigger and bigger profits.
I suggest we stop listening to tech bros who think what we “need” is to treat fastfood workers like they are temporary replacements for robots until we can replace them completely with robots (which there is no conclusive evidence will ever really work and actually quite a bit of evidence it won’t).
I suggest we start putting robber barons (CEOs of massive corporations) in jail and use that money to raise wages and benefits to fastfood workers. A couple more Luigis wouldn’t hurt either.
This is a war and the ruling class understands that perfectly, I suggest we start acting accordingly and put unquestionable solidarity with other workers first. Period.