Source A

“McDonald's shoots down fears it is planning to replace cashiers with kiosks”

By Hayley Peterson
June 23, 2017

The internet has been buzzing this week about reports that McDonald's will replace cashiers in 2,500 stores with
self-service kiosks.

But McDonald's says is has no such plans. 

It's true that the company is rolling out kiosks, which allow customers to order and pay for their food, in
thousands of stores. 

The touch-screen technology is meant to speed up the ordering process and give people more control over
customizing their food, while reducing opportunities for human error.

Analysts expect the kiosks will help boost McDonald's sales, in part because they will help increase efficiency
in restaurants.

But the kiosks aren't meant to replace workers, as some reports this week indicated with headlines like,
"McDonald's hits all-time high as Wall Street cheers replacement of cashiers with kiosks" and "McDonalds Is
Replacing 2,500 Human Cashiers With Digital Kiosks: Here Is Its Math."

McDonald's has repeatedly said that adding kiosks won't result in mass layoffs, but will instead move some
cashiers to other parts of the restaurant where it's adding new jobs, such as table service. The burger chain
reiterated that position again on Friday.

"Our CEO, Steve Easterbrook, has said on many occasions that self-order kiosks in McDonald’s restaurants are
not a labor replacement," a spokeswoman told Business Insider. "They provide an opportunity to transition
back-of-the-house positions to more customer service roles such as concierges and table service where they are
able to truly engage with guests and enhance the dining experience."

In fact, sales have increased at stores that have added the kiosks, which suggests additional labor needs are a
highly plausible outcome of expanding the digital ordering technology. 

McDonald's restaurants that have been remodeled for the chain's new digitally-enhanced "experience of the
future"  — which includes the addition of kiosks — experience a 5%-6% lift in sales in the first year after the
remodel, and a 2% lift in the second year, according to Cowen analyst Andrew Charles.
For Panera Bread, one of the early adopters of digital ordering technology, kiosks have led to the kind of labor
redistribution that McDonald's has referenced, as well as added labor needs.

Like McDonald's is doing now, the sandwich chain added table service since introducing digital kiosks. Now,
Panera is adding delivery services to 40% of its restaurants after rolling out mobile ordering technology. 

The sandwich chain announced in April that it expected to add more than 10,000 new in-cafe and delivery driver
jobs by the end of 2017, as a result of the delivery service expansion. 

So the nature of some McDonald's cashiers' work may change, but it likely won't result in job termination.
Source B
From What We Believe But We Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty
By Esther Dyson, 2006

We’re living longer and thinking shorter.

It’s all about time.
Modern life has fundamentally and paradoxically changed our sense of time. Even as we live longer, we seem to
think shorter. Is it because we cram more into each hour, or because the next person over seems to cram more
into each hour? For a variety of reasons, everything is happening much faster, and more things are happening.
Change is constant.
It used to be that machines automated work, giving us more time to do other things, but now machines automate
the production of attention-consuming information, which takes our time. For example, if one person sends the
same e-mail message to ten people, then ten people (in theory) should give it their attention. And that’s a low-
end example.
The physical friction of everyday life – the time it took Isaac Newton to travel by coach from London to
Cambridge, the dead spots of walking to work (no iPod), the darkness that kept us from reading – has
disappeared, making every minute not used productively into an opportunity lost.
And finally, we can measure more, over smaller chunks of time. From airline miles to calories (and carbs and fat
and grams), from friends on Friendster to steps on a pedometer, from real-time stock prices to millions of
burgers we consumed, we count things by the minute and the second. Unfortunately, this carries over into how
we think and plan: Businesses focus on short-term results; politicians focus on elections; school systems focus
on test results; most of us focus on the weather rather than on the climate. Everyone knows about the big
problems, but their behavior focuses on the here and now. . . .
How can we reverse this?
It’s a social problem, but I think it may also herald a mental one – which I imagine as a sort of mental diabetes.
Most of us grew up reading books (at least occasionally) and playing with noninteractive toys that required us to
make up our own stories, dialogue, and behavior for them. But today’s children are living in an information-
rich, time-compressed environment that often seems to stifle a child’s imagination rather than stimulate it. Being
fed so much processed information – video, audio, images, flashing screens, talking toys, simulated action
games – is like being fed too much processed, sugar-rich food. It may seriously mess up children’s
informational metabolism – their ability to process information for themselves. Will they be able to discern
cause and effect, put together a coherent story line, think scientifically, read a book with a single argument
rather than a set of essays?
I don’t know the answers, but these questions are worth thinking about, for the long term.
Source C

“How cutting-edge technology makes the human touch -- and sound -- even more vital”
By Melissa Ethridge
October 4, 2014

EVER SINCE TECHNOLOGY GAVE US the ability to put an endless number of tracks on a recording and to
manipulate a voice into perfect pitch, the sound of popular music has changed. It has affected nearly every genre
of music. All of this finally hit home earlier this year when I was recording my latest album, This Is M.E., my
first on my very own independent label, ME Records. (I'm very "me, me, me" these days.)

With the guidance of my brand-new managers, Steven Greener and Larry Mestel of Primary Wave, I found
myself in the studio creating music with their client, a fiery young hip-hop producer named Rocc Starr, who has
Chris Brown, Usher and Jennifer Lopez, to name just a few, on his list of productions. It was one of the funnest,
funkiest days I've ever had in the studio. Rocc's massive beats and my crunchy Les Paul guitar made for a
perfect collision of hip-hop and rock'n'roll. It was thrilling to have my vocals guided by a hip-hop master. My
favorite moment was watching Rocc move alongside the engineer so he could take a look at the computer
screen.

"Hey, where's the Auto-Tune?" he asked.

"I'd never presume to put Auto-Tune on her voice," the engineer replied.

"She's singing like that without Auto-Tune?" was Rocc Starr's stunned response. That made my day.

It's true: I do not use Auto-Tune. I learned the art of performing in places like Bud and Faye's roadside bar and
the Parents Without Partners dances at the Knights of Columbus -- gigs where you were in danger of getting a
beer bottle thrown at you if you sang off-key.

Times have changed and artists are led to the studio where they lay down impossibly dense recordings that blast
out of the radio at you, but would require a 20-piece band to re-create on the road. That's not where they want to
spend their money, so they don't.

It's not that big of a secret: I feel bad for the scores of artists that have been exposed on YouTube, captured in
those embarrassing moments when their computerized vocal tracks crashed.

My two oldest children are well into their teen years, and I adore how much their generation loves music. It
defines them just as it did me. They know when it's real and when it's not. It's a currency, something special,
when they know an artist can carry their music live onstage and perform it in the moment.

In 1970, robotics specialist Masahiro Mori published a paper introducing the concept of the "uncanny valley,"
referring to the negative response people have when we observe something that seems human but is not, like in
The Stepford Wives when poor Katharine Ross realizes the ladies at the grocery store aren't real.

Human beings are wired to recognize the soul, the living spirit in each other. I believe the more technology re-
creates what the human can do, the more precious the real thing becomes.

No amount of technology, no Auto-Tune wizardry, can satisfy the souls that want to be touched in the moment
when a human being takes the stage and uses their vocal cords and emotions in ways that can move us to tears.

The uncanny -- the thing that is almost human but isn't quite -- only makes the real more valuable.
Source D

“Does All That Social Media Time Harm Young Minds?”

Consumer Health News
November 7, 2017

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, texting: Sometimes it seems today's young adults are online more often than not.

But new research suggests that the amount of time young adults spend on social media doesn't seem to affect
their risk for mental health problems.

The finding came from a study of 467 young adults who were asked about how much time each day they
used social media, the importance of it in their lives and the way they used it. They also were asked about
mental health issues such as social anxiety, loneliness, decreased empathy and suicidal thoughts.

The researchers found little association between the amount of time spent on social media and mental health
problems. The results were published online Nov. 1 in the journal Psychiatric Quarterly.

The only area of concern was what the researchers called "vaguebooking," which refers to social media posts
that contain little actual and clear information but are worded in a way meant to trigger attention and concern in
those who read the posts.

Young people who tended to write such posts were lonelier and had more suicidal thoughts than others,
according to the study.

That finding suggests that "some forms of social media use may function as a 'cry for help' among individuals
with pre-existing mental health problems," lead author Chloe Berryman, of the University of Central Florida,
said in a journal news release.

"Overall, results from this study suggest that, with the exception of vaguebooking, concerns regarding social
mediause may be misplaced," she said.

"Our results are generally consistent with other studies which suggest that how people use social media is more
critical than the actual time they spend online with regards to their mental health," Berryman concluded.