This adds to the incredibly bothersome recorded Carl’s Junior drive through greeting. “Welcome to Carl’s Junior! Would you like to try our incredibly fabulous burger deal?” If you merely say “Yes” no one will hear what you say. You will get to where you are going with something other than what you ordered.
“For a moment, the
Librarian’s eyes glance upward, as if he’s thinking about something. This is a
visual cue to inform Hiro that he’s making a momentary raid on the Library.”
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That’s the same argument politicians make when opposing a higher minimum wage.
I’ve worked in american fast food, and I don’t think any member of society should be forced to do the same. Unless you get into management they are near universally exploitative and awful.
If there are not enough good jobs, or if people are struggling to feed their families, those are problems that we can and should address. They are terrible reasons to justify the continued existence of bad, subsistence level jobs.
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Let us know when you’re prepared to indemnify Boing Boing against the predator threat asshats who try to threaten us for every legit image we post, even with attribution and the like, that costs us actual dollars to defend.
Then we’d be happy to post those less.
The threat to images on the internet isn’t AI, it’s assholes abusing the system. It’s always assholes.
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What are you talking about?
The PRIMARY argument politicians arguing against higher minimum wage go to is in fact precisely the opposite - that the people working these jobs are just teenagers earning after-school money, and not adults trying to survive, and so a higher minimum wage isn’t necessary.
No, we need to stop stigmatizing “bad, subsistence-level jobs” as such, and accept that everyone deserves a living wage regardless of the “prestige” conferred on the job by privileged snobs. Not everyone has the luxury of working in a clean pressed shirt in an office.
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Somewhat offtopic, but the CommonCanvas team is currently working on a stablediff model trained on an exclusively Creative Commons dataset. Regardless of how the assorted legal challenges to the big genAI models go, having models trained on clean open source datasets seems like a much more sustainable approach.
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Fast food jobs don’t pay living wages, though.
I agree that any job that pays a living wage(avg $25.02/hr for 2023 according to MIT) with health benefits and doesn’t abuse its employees is a good job, whether you’re cleaning toilets, digging ditches, or sitting in an office 9 to 5. I have done all of those jobs as an adult, btw, so I’m really not sure where you came up with the idea that I’m stigmatizing certain jobs based on the work required.
Fast food jobs aren’t bad because they’re fast food, they’re bad because they pay minimum wage with few benefits and no guarantee of full time employment. Something like half of all fast food employees rely on public assistance programs to make ends meet. Don’t take my word for it: The GAO did a study [PDF, 91 pages] in 2020 that identified the 25 businesses in each state with the most employees on medicaid and/or SNAP. It’s not all fast food, but there’s a lot of fast food in there.
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The solution is not to eliminate these jobs. It’s to regulate these jobs.
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… A.I. still has trouble with the “drive thru” concept
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Absolutely! Strong labor protections for all workers would be awesome. We can write in rules to protect jobs from automation at the same time, like those New Jersey gas pump attendants.
That doesn’t really change the reality of those jobs today, however.
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Well, Hell, now I don’t even know what we were arguing about. 
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I do not care if it a robot or AI.
If i go to a fast food place it has to be fast and right. If the AI is faster and get it right then all orders should be done that way.
Hell any job a machine can be faster and cheaper then a person. I will take the machine.
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I have forgotten almost everything about Snowcrash, but somehow I knew that’s what you were referencing.
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Wow, Hi, welcome to BoingBoing! The banner above your very first post said I should welcome you, so I am! You are contributing so much, you very important person you, you one-man island. Keep up the good work of being the only person in the world who matters. 
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But now that capital doesn’t need people working these unfulfilling menial jobs, people can be free to move on to better things, like becoming writers or artists or…oh no. 
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You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and you see a tortoise — it’s crawling toward you
You reach down and flip the tortoise on its back
The tortoise lies on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help
but you’re not helping
Why is that 
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Now that was some high quality snark.
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Can I interest you in a fleshlight?
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Every person who works a full-time job deserves a living wage. You can’t end poverty just by giving everyone college degrees or vocational training, because there will always be so-called “unskilled” work that needs doing and the people who do it deserve to live in dignity every bit as much as the “skilled” workers do.
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It’s a hard one.
I don’t see the point of retaining human workers in dangerous, unfulfilling jobs which could be done by robots.
I do see the point of retaining humans in joyful, intellectually rewarding jobs even though robots could do it cheaper. (As well or better? To be proven.)
Amazon is already flooded with really shitty ChatGPT created fiction. Who anywhere is benefitting from that?
To address the specific topic of fast food drive-thru menus, I don’t see why a simple app with a flow-chart of options wouldn’t be cheaper and better than using so-called AI. We already have it in the UK for the more toney drive-thru places.
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