I’d like to see an introduction of better social support systems as we replace these jobs en masse.

*cough* UBI *cough*

I work in government and we have systems that are planning on going live that will automate entire departments away coming in 2024-2025. It's not perfect but it is being iterated like you said. It's all about reducing headcount over the long run.

The key is to set up that support system, not to try and stall the march of technology. If we did that we'd still have milk men and dozens of farm hands per square acre.

I recently reread "Beyond this Horizon" by Heinlein, after reading "Progress and Poverty" by Henry George. I had no idea at the time how much RAH was pulling from Georgian political economy while simultaneously writing about a future where 95%+ is fully automated and has only high level human oversight. That's the kind of forward thinking we desperately needed during the early 1900's, and are now in a state of emergency over. He refers to our current model as "Pseudo-capitalism" and illustrates in the first conversation of the novel how automated capitalism and collectivism are functionally only "culturally relevant" since the automated capitalist model of the novel includes a UBI and most of the basic needs of society are met for free. He then explains that even purely socialist societies still require some system of finance externally and therefore a requirement of internal financial tracking and accounting. Thus both societies are fundamentally the same in practice despite their ideological differences.

He's most famous for ideas like "TANSTAAFL" but he also ideated much more progressive societies that people don't talk much about if they've even heard of them.

People freed from chores fear for their income. Guess it’s about time for ~~universal income.~~ fully automated luxury gay space communism

You're making a fundamentally bad assumption: that this is in any way "good faith".

The billionaires and giant corporations can make more money by employing less people. That's it.

It's limitless greed. They don't care about living wages or "stepping stones" or funding the country or how many people get thrown out onto the street. It sounds like I'm exaggerating, but it's the truth and we're all witnessing it. This is capitalism run amok: They can become even richer and nothing matters more than that.

The solution is - instead of rejecting technology, which isn't going anywhere and will only progress and can't be stopped, because under capitalism it will lead to workers starving - we reject capitalism.

It's literally the only way that would actually prevent people from suffering (and significantly help the planet, too).

https://www.globallearning-cuba.com/blog-umlthe-view-from-the-southuml/marx-on-automated-industry

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/mar/18/fully-automated-luxury-communism-robots-employment

The low pay and bad conditions of “unqualified” jobs often gets excused because they, allegedly, are “stepping stones”, a means of sustaining oneself while working towards more specialized careers.

If you destroy a significant amount of those positions, where does that leave those people?

This is happening not just in “unqualified” jobs. A good chunk of junior level professional positions are evaporating too. High functionality automation has taken a bite out of lots of IT jobs. I look at my own path in rising in IT and see it largely doesn't exist anymore.

I don't have any answers as far as what the end game of this looks like or what could or should be brought to bear to change course. I'm thinking there will be small pockets of seasoned IT professionals that are kept on to maintain system/processes until those age out and are replaced. This could take decades at the normal pace of giant corporations and government.

If it's anything like Maggie's legacy in the UK. It just leads to generations of poverty and society degradation that even now don't look like they will be reversed. Like it's mad that life was better when people crawled in a hole to mine coal by hand.

But hey it least it was an excuse for a party when she died.

Most coffee places use automatic coffee machines, as long as they have good beans the coffee is good. Getting the correct weight of grounds and tamping them down is not a process difficult to automate.

The problem is that any job is going to be targeted for automation in high income countries because the cost of the worker is going to be far higher than the equipment.

My grandma used to go to people's houses in the morning and brew pour-over coffee for them and put it in an old school Thermos. Mr. Coffee killed her job and she killed herself the following year.

That's what i was thinking. Bean to cup coffee machines...

Some of that turn is physical plant. Kitchens, especially, are built to serve human forms, where tech solutions to food prep would rather be stand-alone boxes. It's a far harder problem to make a robot that uses a restaurant's existing grills, ovens, and deep fryers than it is to make a box that turns out perfect french fries. It's a riskier proposal for a restaurant to replace its fry station, where a human can make fries, onion rings, egg rolls, or whatever new fad hits tiktok, with a fries-and-rings-only box with less than 10 years commercial proof. Generative AI, for all its faults, is just code that runs on a computer you already have, or maybe in a cloud service with zero physical footprint. Relative to replacing your barista with a vending machine, trying ChatGPT for a quarter or two is practically zero risk.