“I’m sick of apps owned by American oligarchs who want to steal my data! This app owned by Chinese oligarchs will surely be a better experience”

These two paragraph are full of the common assumptions and generalizations we assert as a society about fastfood work and frankly I am tired of having to nod my head and pretend like they are indisputable facts. Nothing you said is evidence, you have just dutifully sketched out the narrative we use to dehumanize fastfood work (and other “essential work”).

…so what exactly is wrong about what I said? You’re saying they’re assumptions and generalizations but didn’t bring any counterpoint.

People have been convinced by the rich to think fastfood work is demeaning, pathetic and worthless and I think it is honestly pretty disgusting how willing people are to jump on that bandwagon and do free work for the ruling class in helping undermine worker leverage to demand a decent life.

I… really don’t think that’s what’s happening? At least barring the aforementioned delusional people. If anything, jobs that are considered horrible and demeaning like certain teachers and nurses get MORE sympathy from the public exactly because we see that’s a terrible way of living and that’s not okay.

What do you think we should do then? Act like it’s an awesome job and everyone is happy doing it? Wouldn’t that have the opposite effect of making people think all is good and nothing needs improvement?

…I don’t think I understood your point. I’ll try giving my answers to these questions but I’m sure I misunderstood most of them.

For one, why is the profession of feeding people hot food in a speedy manner in remote places or late hours considered so unworthy of a basic respect that people constantly shit on it as a job?

In otherwords, why does fastfood work have to be seen as unworthy of being considered a respectable job?

Because it’s a terrible job that I don’t think anyone actually wants to do. We’ve already talked about how stressful and unsatisfying it is as a job, there’s pretty much no upside to it.

why can we only ever ask of technology in the context of the food service industry “how do we remove the humanity from this thing?” and never “how do we restore or embue humanity to this thing?”

Personally, because I don’t think it’s possible. It’s a very “mechanical” job (save a very small number of people like restaurant chefs), and giving it “humanity” (less stressful shifts, less pressure and higher pay) is counterproductive to both what companies want (more money) and what customers want (to eat food for cheap and quickly, even at odd times or in odd places).

I think it’s one of the best jobs to be replaced because it’s easy (for a machine) and no human actually likes doing it. The issue is, of course, that the cut costs will go straight to the pockets of the CEOs and will not be used to improve the customer experience (or at least make it cheaper), so the working class will just have less jobs while having to pay the same to eat, but that’s a widespread issue with capitalism that’s far harder to fix.

If there is an existential crisis here to be solved it is clearly not with helping massive corporations further slash operating costs and investments in stable decent employment, but with examining and addressing what horrifically went wrong that we have slept walk (by and large) into thinking this is an ok or healthy way to think about other human beings.

I feel like you’re conflating two things here: people that don’t consider “working at a fast food” worthy of respect (imo rightfully, because again, it’s a terrible job), and people that don’t consider “people who work at a fast food” worthy of respect (probably because they believe in the “hustler” mentality and are convinced that it’s their fault if they’re stuck with a shitty job).

My opinions on a job and on someone who work at said job are vastly different, and not just for the food industry. I’m guessing a lot of people also think similarly, I’ve never seen people shit on fast food workers as people, except for the aforementioned delusional types who think anyone could be a billionaire if they just put in “enough work”.

Again, sorry but I don’t think I really got the meaning of your last comment so do tell me if I completely missed your point and all my answers were gibberish based on assumptions I had.

I never said “working fast food” is extremely easy. What I said is, listening to a customer speaking and just relying that to a machine is extremely easy.

Doing that for a full shift is NOT easy. Doing that while being stressed because the pay is shit and you might even have another job on top of that is NOT easy. Being treated as a robot for half of your non-sleeping life is NOT easy. But all of those things are not easy for a human. None of these are issues for a software, whose hardest task is simply “listening to a customer speaking and just relying that to a machine”, which is, taking out of the equation human matters like stress, emotions and whatnot, extremely easy.

I don’t think it’s shitting on fast food jobs at all. The point of this is that taking orders at a fast food is, in the micro, an extremely easy task. What makes the job as a whole exhausting is the fact that you have to do that for a full shift and the human brain gets stressed from doing that. But AI doesn’t, and yet it’s messing up the simplest part of the job.