MobCity Magazine- June 2014 Issue

The All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

By Oliver Hektor

 

Today marks the day that I have decided never to step foot in an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant again.  You may think that it had to do with the particular restaurant I went to.  On the contrary, the new restaurant looked like a beautifully adorned grand banquet hall with wall to wall sumptuous entrees from sushi and dim sum to steak and crab legs.   The patrons however were a little less than remarkable.  One tiny elderly lady joined me in the Brazilian barbecue line where I waited patiently for one of the attendants.  She looked at me and eagerly pointed to the small sausages.  I nodded and called to one of the chefs to assist us and ordered a slice of top sirloin for myself.  She curtly informed me that typically the person who is waiting in line first should be served first.  Taken aback, I kindly informed her that I was waiting in line first but she denied it and indignantly turned her attention back to the meat attendant.  Later at the dessert line, I opened the small glass sliding door where more than a dozen types of tiny delectable desserts stood wait.  As I carefully chose my dessert and was removing it from the shelf, a woman opened the glass sliding door from the opposite end, bumping my wrist, causing my miniature mocha mousse cake to go kersplat on the counter.  With a huff, she stomped over to the other side of me, impatiently waiting as I reached for a new cake.  A few seconds later, an oversized woman towered over me in a different line as I used the small thongs to take a couple more items.  She impatiently snatched the thongs as soon as I was done with them.  Was I missing something here?  This was an all-you-can-eat buffet where they served food all day.  There was no impending cut-off time in which the restaurant would close the buffet lines or a time limit on how long you could sit in your table.  Why were people so strangely impatient?

As I looked around, I saw people dodging to and fro with their plates and a determined look on their faces as they made a bee line for the food.  They sat and inhaled their mound of food only to rush back to the buffet line two or three more times for more fodder.  Close by were glassy-eyed waiters who stood and watched all the guests gorge themselves silly and would step in occasionally to ask, ‘Are you done with your plate ma’am?’  Some guests were overweight, some were downright obese, a few had terrible acne and still others just had an ill-favored look about them is all.  I had a sickening feeling in my gut, and I don’t think it was from the sashimi.  A feeling of disgust crept up on me as I took in this alien all-you-can-eat buffet culture.  There is something inherently wrong with a system that asks you to come and shovel as much food as you want in one sitting for twenty bucks.  Perhaps people are caught up in the idea of getting their money’s worth and then some.  But if you look at it in another way, you are paying for a three-pound weight gain, indigestion and a lower self-esteem for eating like a bear going into hibernation.  It just doesn’t seem to be all that worth it.

If I could describe the atmosphere of the buffet restaurant in one word, it’s manic.  That is what happens when there is no official end to a meal and moderation goes out the window.  Each bite is a different dish and all the flavors just mash together under the constant, frenetic mastication.  I glanced up and saw a petite woman working on her dessert plate with a couple other semi-finished plates pushed aside.  I was reminded of a music video I saw called ‘Wide Thing’ where an Asian with blue hair shovels bite after bite of crappy fast food in her mouth in order to appease her boyfriend who’s into big butts.  By the end of the video, her butt is five times as big as before and her boyfriend nods approvingly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX0ZxbvVDPA Read the full article at: http://www.whoismillennium.com/press_room/the_all_you_can_eat_buffet

The Robot Economy- New Grads Beware

By Hitesh Patel      

'If your prospective job involves learning a set of logical rules or a statistical model that you apply to task after task, it is ripe for replacement by a robot.'    

Congratulations! You've worked hard for four years, slogging through endless lectures, study groups, tests and, of course, countless embarrassing drunken blowouts, to emerge a victorious new graduate. Your future couldn't possibly look any brighter, right? Well, the problem is that while you were toiling away the past four years at your studies so that you could land a plum job, so were millions of computer programmers also toiling worldwide. Their work, however, was of a decidedly different nature- making sure the plum entry level jobs that you might have stepped into become automated so that their employers can use that money towards what they deem to be more important ends.

Don't feel too bad, though. This is the continuation of a trend that began with the first programmable machines and has only gained momentum. While it may seem like cause for despair, it is not. It is a call to adapt. Frank Levy of MIT and Richard Murane of Harvard, a pair of economists who have studied the impact of automation on human employment, describe this next phase as the 'Grand Restructuring'. Simply put, if your prospective job involves learning a set of logical rules or a statistical model that you apply to task after task, it is ripe for replacement by a robot. As computing power continues to increase and programmers continue to innovate, there are very few occupations that will fall outside of this category. Levy and Murane predict the surviving jobs will be of three kinds: solving unstructured problems, working with new information, and carrying out non-routine manual tasks. It is hard to imagine a robot that could plot corporate strategy, design buildings, fix plumbing problems or style hair for instance.

Sanjiv Singh, a longtime faculty member of the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, provides a viewpoint from inside the robotics field. According to Singh, robotic devices can relieve people of jobs that are dull, dangerous or dirty, whether those jobs are on mind-numbing assembly lines or in unpleasant environments, like clearing land minds or welding on the ocean floor. They can also enhance people's ability to performs tasks. Yet the worrisome step is when robots go from assisting human workers to making them obsolete.

One view from outside the field comes from someone in the creative arts. Stryker, singer-songwriter with pop rock group Millennium, eschewed a lucrative corporate position long ago to pursue a creative path. 'We were helping to implement a company-wide software system designed to integrate virtually every department's function, from product development to inventory management. I came to understand through this experience that the jobs we held (even executive-level ones) could eventually be rationalized down to a complex but definable decision tree and then automated. That raised an interesting philosophical question...Read the full article at: http://whoismillennium.com/press_room/the_robot_economy_new_grads_beware/