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Comment by kushti | Hacker News Reader

Probably prices will not be doubled, but even more jobs will be transferred to China / other countries. And the Valley will win as well due to increased demand for automation.

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Food service workers and laborers are the most likely to be affected by these wage increases. I don't think anyone's going to be driving to China to get a Big Mac or flying in shelf stockers from Shenzhen.

Automation is inevitable regardless. Keeping wages low will not prevent McDonalds from implementation labor-saving technologies.

Expensive labor helps automation a lot. It's the question of economy after all, if humans are cheaper than robots, there's a little incentive to spend money on deploying the bots.

It will dictate when the labor-saving technology is cheaper than cheap human labor. If fast food workers were making $200/hour, it would probably be cheaper to replace them with robots today.

Keeping that inflection point far away gives us time to solve other issues (like housing affordability) that will impact the minimum-wage class of workers extremely hard when they're automated out.

> And the Valley will win as well due to increased demand for automation.

You mean a win for humanity. How can anyone be against automation?

Well, the oft-maligned Luddites were against automation because it was a tool used to cut them out of the income stream. To be absolutely certain, however, they weren't anti-technology, they were anti-getting-screwed.

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