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Comment by mtdewcmu | Hacker News Reader

>> For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills.

What?? I have to acquire social skills or a robot will take my job? I'm pretty sure I have more social skills than a machine...

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I believe it means that flipping burgers do not require you to have any social skills (besides flipping a bird to your "manager" when he/she doesn't see it). And this position is very likely to be automated really soon [0].

[0]: http://gizmodo.com/5962656/this-robo+griller-can-flip-360-bu...

"Momentum Machines estimates that every fast food franchise in America spends an average of $135,000 annually on staffing."

Think about that for a second.

$135,000 is all the entire staff of a McDonalds sees per year, in pay and benefits.

It's already almost a vending machine, for all it contributes to our population's welfare.

I believe it's "staffing" as is, i.e. efforts to fill the open positions. It's not payroll.

You'd expect hiring to be touchy-feely work that couldn't be done by machines. But, ironically, that seems not to be the case, as companies outsource to "recruiters" with computer-driven systems.

I hope robots will not run to me before I even had a chance to browse the store. "Do you need any help? - No, thank you."

No, it's saying you have to acquire social skills to get a job that a robot can't take from you.

As a programmer... damn I'm doomed in the long run ;)

You'd always have the job to code the robot which would be able to take your current position :-)

Yeah. Why cultivate social skills, when humans are being replaced by robots? I'd rather have programming skills.

I already replaced that job with a small perl script.

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