It does and it doesn't. The idea is that low income service workers move to more affordable parts of the country. The high cost of living areas become less desirable because many service workers have moved out so either housing costs decrease or wages increase or a combination of the 2.

With regards to automation, I am not sure where people get the idea that low income jobs are the first to go.

First, from a economic perspective, it makes little sense to replace low income labor with automation. You aren't saving much. Also, there is a social aspect and more intangibles to many low income work that makes it harder for AI to replace.

On the other hand, highly definable, optimizable, but technical work that is highly paid will be most at risk from automation. If you are a backend software developer, you will be more at risk from automation than a barista.

Really?

Even if you dont agree the assumptions involved are straight forward.

Simple job = low paid.
Simple job = easier to automate.

right, if jobs were being automated by waving a wand (ie. every job was equally automatable), of course the complex, higher paid jobs would be the first ones to be automated. duh.

I mean, the whole process of reservations/getting seated/ordering/asking for more stuff/paying could be easily automated today, but it isn’t, except in a few places. I’d imagine there’s a reason for that.

The cost savings aspect is just one part of my argument.

Just because a job is easy to train another human to do doesn't mean its easy to automate is my second point.

Consider the areas where AI has made the most advances, games like chess and GO. It would be astoundingly difficult to train any human to reach even a master level competency in Chess/1 dan in GO but more straightforward for AI because the application and framework is well defined and contained.

Now consider a barista or a bartender, there are many more intangible social aspects of the job that simply arent easily definable from a machine learning perspective. There are lots of out of the box situational conditions that have to be dealt with.

So if your work resembles more of a chess player, then ypu're more likely to be replaced by AI as opposed to having your job resemble a barista or bartender.

These aspects of the restaurant worker's job are already being automated, especially the reservation portion but if you want to automate knowing to get the kids a high chair, recognizing allergies, accomodating diners who are in a rush to catch a show, recognizing the difference between a business lunch and a first date and how the service should be different for that, recommending the right dishes when people are indecisive, etc.... Thats very hard to do.

If all you've got is your BI the play is to gather a few friends in the same position and move somewhere rural and rent a house together. Those areas would experience major growth until even more ppl are on a BI and try the same thing. I almost wish that I will live long enough to see the hysteria.

Technical workers are at risk as well, however, their work is more complicated than making coffee, stocking shelves or ringing up items. It will be much easier to automate tasks with simple decision trees than those with complicated ones. The first robot burger flipper has been deployed, it's only a matter of time until it improves enough to attract one of the big fast food places.

All of the above are much more automated than 10 years ago.

Complexity for humans and complexity for AI are separate concepts. Consider "type in the message that you see" security protocols vs doing monte carlo simulations.

If we look at the manufacturing jobs that got automated away already, you'll see that they are more complex from a human perspective than being a barista but much easier from an AI perspective. Manufacturing jobs in the 70s and 80s weren't low pay either.

What is the material difference in manufacturing an automobile and manufacturing a latte?

This is one of many attempts to estimate the probability of some specific jobs to be automated. They could be wrong in details but they give the general picture. Current income in those jobs doesn't seem particularly relevant

machines already "manufacture" drinks (cocacola anyone?)

But making a latte is more akin to repair a car than to fabricate it.

We aren't talking about a cyborg making somebody's drink and chatting them up. We are talking about walking into a Starbucks, punching a couple buttons on a keypad to indicate what you want, a machine making what it is you punched in, and it being moved to a designated pickup area. What are the social dynamics involved here?

If the job of a barista was just to make the same drink repeatedly, then obviously that job will get automated but probably not before some other job that was just as repetitive and well defined but higher paying, for example auto manufacturing.

There are aspects of a barista or bartender's job that are not easy to automate that are not present in a manufacturing job.

Such as

None. And if your job resembles the above process, then you're at high risk of being affected by automation. My point is that whether you'll be affected is more contingent on the nature of your job than the perceived complexity from a human perspective.

There is also the idea that if Starbucks becomes completely automated, the brand loses a lot of value due to the increased perception that it is just mass manufactured crap. Will people still pay 4 dollars for a cup of coffee completely made by a machine?

Do you not agree that there are many beer bars?

Would you also not agree that beer pouring automation and vending whether draft or bottled is solved?

Yet strangely there are no beer bars where the bartender is replaced by a machine.

Even in Japan, where beer vending machines are all over the place, places with live bartenders are packed.

To some extent but we are also talking about customer facing robots that are cute and anthropomorphised. it's not going to be some soulless customer experience. Punching buttons is definitely not part of that future.

Tons of work going on in this area. It's just a matter of time.

Well yea, that, but don’t forget to separate them by gender.

I like how giving people all things they need to live a comfortable life without asking anything of them is considered dehumanizing.

The minimum-wage job of scanning my groceries and letting me pay for them has already been automated, but maybe there's been similar progress in higher-paying tech jobs as well.

It’ll hit some harder and sooner than others but it’s an inevitability that will affect prett much every industry.

We can subsidize people’s lives out of compassion but for it to be sustainable there has to be a mechanism that constrains reproduction or else the burden will grow exponentially. There’s nobody hurt more by an increase in the number of poors than other poor people. They’re competing for the same jobs, sharing the same pool of public resources and when they reproduce they’re spreading it all even thinner. And when you make life so good that having the child is not only not a burden but potentially a source of income, good luck convincing companies and people with money to stick around to bare the cost.

When you choose to deal with poverty with UBI rather than providing the necessities of life, this is the path you go down.

Amazon wants 3000 cashier-less stores opened by 2021.