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Noodle Robots Replacing Workers In Chinese Restaurants
kkleiner writes "Recently developed noodle-making robots have now been put into operation in over 3,000 restaurants in China. Invented by a noodle restaurant owner, each unibrow-sporting robot currently costs 10,000 yuan ($1,600), which is only three months wages for an equivalent human noodle cook. As the cost of the robot continues to drop, more noodle shops are bound to displace human workers for the tirelessly working cheaper robots."
Surely a vending machine can cook and dispense noodles?
Welcome our new robot overlords.
Hopefully, since China was the last big pool of cheap human labor, can we please finally now get on with dealing with the fact that we don't need 100% employment anymore? How can we ensure a quality life for everyone now that we know machines can do a lot of the work? By all means, people should still be able to work, but why yank away everything from someone who'd rather do something else?
Mostly random stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukNkCnNJuR8
YouTube link with the robots in action.
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Good, bad or indifferent - all unskilled labor is at risk of being thusly replaced.
Without taking a stance on the relative merits of employment vs progress - do we need a new story every time another menial task is automated?
Nothing says savory noodles like an army of robots with glowing eyes.
Read about it and understand it.
It's not really a robot. It's simple kitchen appliance with dummy head.
This is basically a simple Kitchen Appliance with a face attached. I don't consider this a 'proper' Robot.. If this is a Robot then me super-glueing a Barbie head to my washing machine makes it a "Washing Robot".
What do I do now with my Masters degree in noodle slicing?
Robot uses it's noodle to make...noodles!
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Whenever Marxists talk about economy they like to overstate the importance of labour and understate the importance of capital. They are of-course completely wrong, there is always a cost associated with labour and a cost associated with capital, the more labour costs the more it makes sense to use capital to decrease cost of labour and that's why we get labour saving devices.
The first shovel displaced people from digging holes with their bare hands and sticks.
The first excavator displaced thousands of people with shovels.
Computers displaced untold numbers of individuals, millions upon millions obviously that's because computers are labour savings devices.
In the process we make the operators of the labour saving devices so much more productive because they command these tools. Notice however that without capital (savings used as investments) no person can increase his productivity in any significant manner, you can't just dig with a shovel fast enough to be as productive as a guy operating an excavator.
You can't count numbers with your ruler or an abacus or just a piece of paper and a pen as fast as a computer that runs a program. The person that operates the implement is now much more effective, much more productive than all the manual workers were, but of-course the number of workers that are needed go down dramatically.
It's interesting to hear people talk about "productivity of the economy going up while employees who grow the productivity aren't ripping the reward, instead the owners do". Well excuse me, the owners created the productivity, not the employees.
Employees are not adding to productivity, it is the owners, the investors, the capitalists that are improving their productivity. In case of the noodle restaurants the productivity of the owner (investors) of the restaurant is going up, he can serve more noodles with fewer labourers doing manual work, but it costs him the original investment into the labour saving device - the robot.
People displaced by the robot are not increasing their productivity, they lost all of it, now they have to find a different job. However from POV of the market this is a very good development - the fewer people we need to do things that we do already now, the more supply of labour exists and so prices for labour go down and more businesses can be created because it takes less capital, less investment to hire people at lower prices to do things that were uneconomical while the cost of labour was more expensive before the labour saving devices were added to the economy and replaced these workers.
It is a good thing for any consumer of goods to be able to buy more of them cheaper, to have more choice and to see more competition (even among labour and capital).
The price of the robot is higher than cost of a human noodle cutter, the prices now will come down for human noodle cutter and more restaurants may even open because of this development.
It's possible that most restaurants will eventually have noodle cutting robots and there will be a competitive advantage of having a human cut noodles, maybe somebody will advertise their restaurant as one that does not use robots, some people are gullible enough to prefer that, but that would be a niche item of-course.
More importantly, the restaurant is now more productive, the labour market has more surplus so it may be cheaper for other businesses to hire labour, and that's great. As long as the government does not try to "level the playing field", as it is now in America trying to do for Brick and Mortar stores, that cannot compete with the Internet stores, that are obviously more competitive and can do more for less money.
The government steps in and makes everything more expensive for one reason only: get more money for politicians. They can be on the side of a business that cannot compete in the changing business environment because of all the new labour saving devices (like the Internet, which is a labour saving device).
The gover
You can't handle the truth.
Sprays hot syrup in your face.....
Finally the Chinese have been outsourced, the circle is complete.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Great! We're arming them with knives now!
like to be the first to welcome our new robotic noodle shaving overlords.
Good people go to bed earlier.
How about we let people decide?
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There are a lot of noodle restaurants in China. Based on my extremely limited sampling, for most of them $1000 USD would be a hefty expense.
There are also a lot of cheap (but not quite as cheap) noodle restaurants in Japan (and Taiwan) as well - I wonder if this invention might find more of a market there.
Looking at the picture from the news article, I got the feeling that all those robots looked like the Terracotta Army. If only he could program them to fight Kung Fu, then he might have that army. Then again, he might then put them in the Robot Combat League.
Above comment is simplistic to the point of being deceptive. Twitty $ Grubbers like that forget what civilization is actually about. Lowering labour costs when the required cost of living is higher is a problem and not an end goal worthy of being sought. Capital doesn't care if it is unused, but unused people crash pretty fast, and civil society shortly thereafter. Politicians delegate money for infrastructure. To quote Naheed Nenshi a Mayor of Calgary: "snow removal isn't a right wing or left wing issue." Capitalism seeks the excess benefits for profit while unfairly leveraging the mutil-millenial lineage of human knowledge that brought their enterprise to bear fruit. Its ours, fuck off.
$4,700.00 per year to hire a human noodle "chef"(slicer).
A Chinese restaurant worker's salary for 1 year is $4,700.00! $18 per day, assuming a 40 Hr. work week. Yet, he's still losing his job to automation!
"A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure..."
Give me four. No, four! Two, two, four! ...and some replicant-served noodles.
Time to get into the pile!
From merriam webster:
2: a device that automatically performs complicated often repetitive tasks
It is a robot.
This online short novel is totally relevant to this topic, analyzing 2 possible outcomes to the robotization of labor
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
chow down to our new robotic overlords.
What is civilisation about? From my perspective (or any person's perspective) isn't it about making our lives better, easier, it means being able to access whatever product or service that exists, that people come up with in a cheaper, more accessible manner? Do you have everything that you want? Maybe you do and that's great, most people do not.
Lowering labour costs when the required cost of living is higher is a problem and not an end goal worthy of being sought
- of-course it is the end goal worthy of being sought, lowering labour costs is a great goal, it means that people with very little capital can attempt and start a business by hiring cheaper labour, something they couldn't do before it was economical enough before labour became much cheaper.
Looks like you want to keep barriers to entry to people who may end up providing society with products and services the society has never experienced before.
Obviously this includes cost of living, cost of rent and food and energy, any one of those costs are addressed by businesses that can start operating because all of a sudden even a smallish savings pool can be used to start and operate a business before it even becomes a profitable one.
Capital doesn't care if it is unused
- it's not capital, it's people who should care if there is unused capital. People are not getting the most efficient market if the resources are not being used due to very high barriers to entry that governments set up and maintain to help the established monopolies, which of-course is just a way for politicians to line up their own pockets, while useful idiots (hint) keep cheering.
Civil society is built with capital, there was no society more civil than was built during free market capitalism.
Politicians delegate money for infrastructure.
- we should all work to ensure that politicians cannot do something like that, destroy productivity by misallocating it in any such manner.
snow removal isn't a right wing or left wing issue
- nice rhetoric, while money is being misallocated obviously and snow is not being removed at all or is being removed with a much higher price tag than it would if the market was doing it and not some politician.
" Capitalism seeks the excess benefits for profit while unfairly leveraging the mutil-millenial lineage of human knowledge
- yeah yeah, it's very unfair that a Chinese noodle restaurant owner used his own savings to design and develop a robot that now makes the market more efficient.
that brought their enterprise to bear fruit.
- sure sure, Ms. Warren, the Chinese guy didn't risk his own money to build the robots and didn't build them, you did.
Its ours, fuck off.
- now you are talking, that's the real Marxist, socialist, communist slogan, none of that other bullshit. "It's ours, fuck off", as they shoot the actual people who created the capital in the head (which inevitably leads to their own demise as they can't do anything without capitalists).
You can't handle the truth.
That sucks, i guess its so competitive over there that noodle making machines save money for struggling noodle making companies. Noodles big staple for cheap food over there. By automating the process, something in system is going cause it become crappier. Alot more unemployed people out there. If you want strong economy = People with jobs.
How can you grep this page for "anime" and it come up blank?
Doesn't someone have an anime reference for this? Someone that know anime stuff better than me has got to know one....
A note that this is a specific type of noodle called "knife-sliced noodles". Obviously not all noodles are made like this nor all restaurant serve this type of noodle.
Cripes, a cheese grater could cut more noodles than this.
Once all the menial jobs are replaced by robots, what do people that are only suited to menial jobs do? Not everyone can be a robot technician, and there will be fewer robot technicians than robots.
Given that it is physically impossible for the economy to keep growing (due to resource scarcity if nothing else) at some point productivity increases must lead to either a reduced population or else a lower average work week.
This is happening in North America too...here in Canada one of the major banks just got a bunch of bad publicity for shipping skilled technical labour offshore because it's cheaper. It's becoming a global economy, places with relatively high cost of living are going to have a tough time keeping their population employed.
Socialist and communist don't mean the same thing, nor are either the exclusive domain of Marxists.
Try less rhetoric and you might be a tiny bit convincing.
I'd say that work is virtuous, well, to be more accurate production is. Sending your day digging and refilling the same trench with a shovel gets nothing done except exercise.
Still, there's a whole list of things out there can still stand improvement - people are still living in substandard housing, our roads are crumbling in places, our energy infrastructure is way too fragile, etc...
As such I support the government having a 'federal jobs program' that replaces the military as a entry level job/career that provides training. Our military has become too professional with standards that exclude a good chunk of the population. Lowering said standards would cost lives, so leave them. Have the FJP work on 'infrastructure', which I roughly describe as 'anything that can reasonably be expected to last 20 or more years that improves the quality of life or productivity of US residents'. Note: Education counts as infrastructure in this case - If you're under 40 you easily have more than 20 years of working left.
Keep the pay low enough that most would like a higher paying private job, but high enough that private industry actually has to pony up the cash if they want the workers. Meanwhile you concentrate on using the labor to make life better for everyone - good parks, clean safe roads, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
Well, I for one welcome our new tasty overlo . . . what? They're not THAT kind of Noodle Robots?
We're talking about the boring kind of robots then . . . who greenlighted this?
"I said Cookie robots, not Boogie Robots!"
No need to make it like a humen
A robot shall not make too thick/thin noodles.
come again
They can't accept that they're being beaten by a robot.
Just look at his posting history. roman_mir's been firing off responses all around this thread. These aren't just stupid one liners either. This also doesn't include the possibility of him using other accounts or posting as AC. The man is a machine, literally!
Part of what's broken about the U.S. economy is the minimum wage. In 1968, adjusting for inflation to the current dollar, it was around $12 and hour, or so. Now it's $7 and change. And, unlike 1968, when it was the wage for teenagers working at fast food outlets, now more than 40% of the American workforce is earning less than the 1968 minimum. So how's that globalized economy working for you?
cut full time to 20 hours a week or at least start to 32 then 24.
What's your take on the tragedy of the commons and other market inefficiencies that markets cannot correct?
In a country with a massive population, how will the people who are displaced by thousands of robotic workers make any money?
It looks like with only minor modifications you could turn these robots into automated wank machines.
There is no 'tragedy of commons', there is only the tragedy that 'commons' exists in the first place. Everything must be private, if something is not private, people shouldn't be able to do their bidding there, so no business should be able to profit from property that it's not paying for, renting or owning.
You can't handle the truth.
need single player Health Care
They are cut from a big block of dough directly into the boiling water, not dumped dry out of a package.
There is some truth to the saying, "An idle mind is the work-shop of the devil". Too many idle people is a recipe for mass social problems: drug abuse, crime, depression, gaming addiction, etc.
It may be better to split up work and have shorter work-weeks, but more participants in the work-force.
However, Republicans would have a hissy fit over such an idea. Reality has to bite them in the ass a hundred times before they even consider the possibility it's not 1780 anymore.
Table-ized A.I.
the Paranoia level, where your robot will interpret your actions in the most legally rigid and hostile manner possible and deem you a threat to society, as well as your own safety, resulting in your immediate demise.
You've got quite the chip on your shoulder.
it means that people with very little capital can attempt and start a business by hiring cheaper labour
Yeah we know. Sod living conditions for the labourers, roman only cares for capitalists.
as they shoot the actual people who created the capital in the head
Labourers create capital!
Now tell us again how universal suffrage is unconstitutional and tyrannical, preferably with one of your sockpuppet accounts.
I think the disconnect here is rooted in two things:
1. How quickly we as individuals think the society and economy can or will react to major changes in the cost of labor. Lower labor costs as roman_mir has said mean that everything can be a lot cheaper and hence available in large quantity, variety and qualities. Products can also improve in important ways while staying at the same relative price or even becoming cheaper. Personal electronics are an excellent example of this trend. However not everything that scales in the same way. So while you can buy a lot more computing power for your buck today than you could 30 years ago despite inflation the same is not true for other things like automobiles and housing.
I can understand disagreeing with Warren on political rhetoric but she has done some very interesting research. One of the things she has shown is that since the 70's the costs for many things have gone down relative to our spending power, while others have gotten worse. And the things that have gotten worse are typically longer term choices that you can't just cut back on in a financial crisis. Food has gotten cheaper, which is good, but that is also one of the areas that people, especially fat people like me, can rapidly cut back on in a crisis. You can't cut it all the way buy half it or more should be pretty easy. Meanwhile the cost of transportation has gone up, in a financial crisis you likely can't just tell the bank you'll be paying half your car note until things improve, the same is true for housing, health insurance, and other large outstanding loans. So basically the things that are easier for consumers to control spending on have gotten cheaper, but the big things that they can't control on a short term basis have gotten more expensive.
Of course just because that's what happened over the last thirty years or so doesn't mean that the trend will continue. And a lot of that is likely tied up in consumer expectations. For instance we own more cars today and many families don't plan to ever have only one wage earner.
2. Because of the way our economy and taxes are structured wealth continues to be accumulated at the very tippity top of the social structure faster than it is created. This doesn't make anyone evil. This happens because wealthy people tend to make rational decisions about what to do with their resources. There is some discussion of asshatery when small subsets of that group lobby for more preferential tax treatment but that's not anything that others wouldn't do if their resources allowed them to.
Extreme wealth accumulation is a problem because it inevitably leads to social unrest. The masses at the bottom eventually get to a point where their situation becomes intolerable enough that they revolt in one way or another. Such a revolution is why at least some of my ancestors came to the US, they were associated with french aristocracy. And while no one likes targeted taxes much I think most of us can say we'd rather that than face a reign of terror or similiar upheaval.
Plenty of nations, including Canada and Germany, are doing just fine with health-care plans. Health-care plans don't kill economies. (In fact, we can probably use the stimulus right now. Keynes' record is better than austerity's record when I look at them, but that's a side issue.)
I agree that Obamacare may need tuning, but the GOP is too hell-bent on killing it out-right to bother with a tuning strategy.
Table-ized A.I.
My son, finally having the noodle dream!
All this is, is a cheap CNC machine.
Passionately Indifferent
Warren never connected the dots because she is not interested in the real answer, which is that the reason that prices went up since 1971 had nothing to do with the free market capitalism, but it was direct response to the government printing tons of fake money, which is why where of your complaints about the income inequality etc., should be directed at.
By the way, there was much more income inequality in 19th century than in the 20th, Rockefeller's wealth by the end of his life was equivalent of 600,000,000,000 USD, Carnegie had about 300,000,000,000 dollars by end of his life.
In fact out of 37 richest self-made people in USA, 27 were born prior to 1850. Only 3 were born in the 20th century - Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Sam Walton.
1870 to 1913 time period increased overall wealth of all the people in USA comparatively more than any time before or after. This was done without most of what is called 'government' today, including most departments, agencies, income taxes, money printing (inflation), regulations, etc.
Over the 19th century the value of the USD went up by 100%, prices were falling throughout the century while competition was growing. The real middle class (small business owners and professionals) were created in that century. Many in the US mistakenly think of the 1950s as the time when the middle class was created, but that is absolutely false. That wasn't the time of middle class, it was time of lower class being in a position of relative monopoly on production, while other countries were in a post-war destruction and rebuilding period, USA didn't suffer destruction of any infrastructure. Of-course as the productive output grew, so did the government and it was taking on more and more powers and taking away more and more liberties.
Eventually they destroyed the money completely, defaulted on it in 1971 and investment capital started moving out, which is the consequence of people with investment capital not willing to see it being destroyed by the government created inflation.
Inflation hurts the lower classes the most, as they can't really shift their income and assets from dollar denominated into something else, like commodities or other currencies and businesses across the world.
In case you didn't realise it, wealth is created by people that you believe "concentrate" it. Sam Walton created the wealth by creating the company that caters to the poorest of Americans, provides them with the goods they want to buy at prices they can afford. He doesn't transfer wealth from anybody, he creates it.
Of-course in case of current banks, that's not the reality, they are involved in wealth transfer and people should be upset about it. You can thank gov't for failing to adhere to principles that USA was built upon: rule of law, Constitution, individual freedoms, things of that nature that would not allow gov't to choose winners, to make winners out of losers and to force others to pay for that.
You want to complain about gov't stealing money? Be my guest. But I am not interested in ideas that promote theft and redistribution based on some misplaced notion of 'fairness' or 'justice', which is not fairness or justice at all, but is theft and discrimination.
You can't handle the truth.
And I'm just writing to you all to say bronze fucking sucks...
If you read the article, and another article linked in the article, its not just noodles. Foxconn has already eliminated 1 million jobs from its factories (making iToys), and put on a permanent hiring freeze by starting to employ robots instead of people. There will likely be job cuts at Foxconn soon too. Now the thing is this: if you can replace cheap labour in China with a robot, then you can replace China with a cheap robot in the US (nasty how the race to the bottom goes full circle). The difference is powering the robot (which might still be cheaper in China), and then shipping product (which might make it cheaper to manufacture in the US). Manufacturing might yet return to the US, if China sells the US cheap Chinese robot technology. You might say that is silly, but Dell relied on ASUS till ASUS didn't just manufacture, but design and engineer as well. Then they offered cheaper and better products than Dell.
Frakkin' toasters!
There are two types of noodles here in China that I enjoy simply for watching the human chef prepare: - Daoxiaomian are the knife-cut noodles these robots make. - Lamian are a pulled noodle that these robots can not make. Both noodle types are typically found in the same establishment, typically a Halal eatery staffed by a Muslim family from Xinjiang or Qinghai. At least that's what I have experienced in cities outside the capital of Beijing. Since the same dude who cuts the Daoxiaomian also pulls the Lamian I don't see how this would actually save the typical noodle-joint owner any real money. But it would still be cool to see a noodle-pulling robot. A simple noodle-cutting robot is boring.
-- Jimtown Kelly
The definition you include specifies "complicated" tasks. What this machine does is barely more complicated than what commercial meat slicers (that have been around for decades) do. Just because you put a fancy plastic head with glowing eyes on the machine does make it a robot.
Even the inventors description of what inspired the idea (a windshield wiper) points to the fact that this is a simple appliance, not a robot.
Sure it's built to look like one but as far as I can see it is just an automatic slicer.
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