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Robot Serves Up 360 Hamburgers Per Hour
kkleiner writes "No longer will they say, 'He's going to end up flipping burgers.' Now, robots are taking even these ignobly esteemed jobs. San Francisco based Momentum Machines makes a robot called the Alpha that can churn out 360 gourmet burgers per hour. The company plans on launching the first ever burger restaurant chain with a cook staff made entirely of robots. You think Americans are obese right now? Just wait."
Nothing says appetizing like a burger popping out flanked by greased chains...
Why would this make us more obese, this won't make more fat food then we already have, just a new way of doing it. It will just put a few low paid cooks out of a job and leaves one job for some guy that fixes the machine.
Oh sure it will, there is almost certainly some percentage of fatties that are partially kept in check by the shame of ordering multiple day's worth of food from a skinny teenager. Once you're ordering from an nonjudging robot it will be much socially easier to ask for 3 burgers and 2 orders of fries.
It will be like the guys that would never set foot in a physical porn shop, but have no problem purchasing it online.
Time to reread Manna. The cooks, the manager, the cleaning staff, and finally you, until nobody has any work or any money.
The thing about that though is the question of what economic activity arises for people to participate in for employment. We're already living in an age where most of the useful labour is done by a relatively small percentage of the population. Most of the rest works in various types of service job. Robots like this can replace human workers in entire large segments of those service industries. Sure there are other service jobs, but there are a lot of them that really are of the replaceable with a simple shell script variety. With a little more machine intelligence, the majority of them probably are replaceable that way. Eventually, there won't be any low or no-skill jobs left. Even the jobs fixing the machines will be done by machines. The simple fact is that most people aren't high-skilled labour and even those who are highly skilled or are very, very good at their jobs often can't compete with a custom designed machine (shades of John Henry). The truth is that the new economy jobs that gradually replace the old ones are worse and worse and the typical labourer is going to have to sell their labour on what is increasingly a buyers market.
The problem is that farming, mining, manufacturing, food service, retail sales, warehouse jobs, delivery, construction, etc. can all conceivably be replaced almost entirely by machines. The owners of the machines, farms, mines, factories, restaurants, stores, warehouses, delivery companies, construction companies, etc. will then be the only people producing the tangible things that the consumers truly need, while the majority of the consumers will be working in service jobs producing intangibles that people don't really need.
In other words, we are in danger of transitioning to post-scarcity technology without transitioning to a post-scarcity economy. That leaves most people, at best, working themselves to death in completely unproductive, pointless jobs.
Burgers are never flipped at McDonalds or Burger King. McDonalds uses a dual-surface grill, contacting the beef from top and bottom. Burger King uses a broiler with flames on the top and bottom.
No flipping burgers. Note this for future reference.
Kriston