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Robots Are Already Replacing Fast-Food Workers (recode.net)
An anonymous reader quotes Recode:
Technology that replaces food service workers is already here. Sushi restaurants have been using machines to roll rice in nori for years, an otherwise monotonous and time-consuming task. The company Suzuka has robots that help assemble thousands of pieces of sushi an hour. In Mountain View, California, the startup Zume is trying to disrupt pizza with a pie-making machine. In Shanghai, there's a robot that makes ramen, and some cruise ships now mix drinks with bartending machines.
More directly to the heart of American fast-food cuisine, Momentum Machines, a restaurant concept with a robot that can supposedly flip hundreds of burgers an hour, applied for a building permit in San Francisco and started listing job openings this January, reported Eater. Then there's Eatsa, the automat restaurant where no human interaction is necessary, which has locations popping up across California.
More directly to the heart of American fast-food cuisine, Momentum Machines, a restaurant concept with a robot that can supposedly flip hundreds of burgers an hour, applied for a building permit in San Francisco and started listing job openings this January, reported Eater. Then there's Eatsa, the automat restaurant where no human interaction is necessary, which has locations popping up across California.
Is there a machine that washes the dishes? That would be news.
You have simply never heard of savory pies. Pizza is one. Pies need not be sweet.
Bruce Perens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ...sad that idiocracy may eventually be viewed as a documentary.
Someone had to do it.
This kind of tech has been around since the invention of the multifunction hot beverage machine. It grinds beans, steeps coffee, blends creamer and such to the users specification. theres not much special about extending this to fast food. mcdonalds has had pilot instances of french fry machines for more than a decade now.
the trouble with these machines comes when capitalism rears its ugly head. hot beverage machines become brake-dust dispensers as the drive for profit leads to borderline rancid beans sourced from auction in a 50lb hopper. in the 21st century i cant think of a single person that would stuff 60 cents into one of these and expect a decent cup of black coffee (the arguable standard by which such a machine is judged to make other beverages.) Pretty soon ingredients like cheese are replaced with cheese topping, and other ingredients become dehydrated synonyms of their original embodiment. Automation of fast food is an excellent idea, so long as silicon valley understands that doing so further enables companies to cut costs and corners, ultimately delivering a mediocre product from an almost bankrupt franchise. McDonalds is the meat-space embodiment of this capitalism-until-death model, with kiosks to place orders and automatic fry droppers and ten pound caulk guns filled with toppings shipped four thousand miles across the country. Maybe companies will realize customers dont embrace automation if the machine is flipping garbage, but the continued existence of the 'hot beverage' machine in my companies breakroom seems to suggest companies dont give a shit what customers want in an automated form factor.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The answer: rank robots by capabilities, tax them as virtural workers, pay proceeds into Social Security system
We're moving in that direction, but we're not there, just yet. I think we'll have a rough couple of years, while the automation steps in. Eventually, it'll make things cheaper, but I would imagine that the prices of things will remain on the same gradual increase they've always been alongside inflation, for a while, at least. Eventually, the reduction of full-time employment among the general population will drive prices down. Ultimately, it'll break capitalism, assuming that Congress doesn't step in to make laws preserving it (i.e., banning excess of automation). I can't imagine that we'll be in a place where a UBI is practical for another 15 to 20 years, though. There's just too many problems to solve, first.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
Luckily all the high-school dropouts flipping burgers can just go to college and get a degree in liberal arts. Problem solved! They've lived so frugally over the years they surely must have enough money saved up to pay for that plus kids/rent while unemployed.
Oh wait, no, maybe the solution is raising minimum wage? Oh, that'll accelerate automation you say? Hmm.
Institutional unemployment is best paid for institutionally (free education) or else the problems will be paid institutionally anyway (crime, poverty, social welfare programs.) I knew someone who never went to high school because her broke parents were too poor to afford the $50/year fee; if that fee were waived, that $200 would've paid for itself many times over in reduced social welfare costs.
As an increasing number of people are shuffled into a decreasing number of jobs, it'll lead to wage depression. Higher productivity will lower costs of goods and services to offset this somewhat, but lowered job security and making more people unemployable is a more serious price paid. The only winners here are those who own the means of production. Publicly available replicators or central planning are potential solutions. Nationalized real estate + basic income could work as well.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
meanwhile the rest of us want timely service, properly cooked food, correct change...can't wait for robots to have the jobs.
The folks with all the money realized a few decades ago: there's just too many people (as other than prostitutes and bodyguards, we don't need them anymore due to off-shoring, computerization and automation).
But rolling the cattle trucks is a bit too on the nose, so let's go with Permanent War, sugar-based industrialized food, set them at each others' throats with race and religion-based hatreds, choke-off competent and well-funded primary education, and what the hell, add in the idea that vaccines are a bad idea.
There are two minimum wages. One is a minimum the government sets for all employees to be paid and the other is the market minimum in which must be paid to attract and keep employees working under the conditions presented.
The government minimum is largely static outside acts of government but the market minimum is largely moveable with unemployment. The easiest and best way to raise a minimum wage is to reduce unemployment and let the market for employees demand a higher wage. This is a problem however because the economy has crapped out so badly that fast food jobs are seen as careers now instead of first jobs and stepping stones on a path to bigger and better opportunities. The worst part of this problem is that instead of looking at the situation and saying we need more and better jobs, a lot of people are content outside of wanting to raise the pay for these menial jobs.
When I got my first legal job (other than mowing yards and crap), unemployment in my area was low. I started at minimum wage but quickly progressed above it. All I had to do was basically show up on time and put a bit of effort at doing the work. My second job, which hired me away from my first employer at a raise, I went the extra mile for them and did pretty much anything they asked to the best of my ability and my pay quickly reflected it too. I was making 13 dollars an hour rolling burritos and flipping steaks on a charbroiler in the mid 1990s. $13 an hour might not seem like much but according to an inflation calculator one dollar in 1995 had about the same purchasing power as $1.56 in 2016. So in contrast, think of it as being paid almost $20 per hour in today's world and the minimum wage at then was $4.25 an hour (it went up from $3.35 when I first started working a few years prior).
If employment was there, by necessity, the minimum wage an employer could pay to keep an employee would by higher than the minimum wage. Those fast food jobs would go back to first job experiences and as stepping stones for people to show they can show up to work and follow directions enough to be hired at someplace that pays more.
Well, sure, but these were primarily women's jobs at the time they were automated out of existence. "Washerwoman" is common parlance.
Want to know what other woman's job got automated out of existence? Computer. Many women were computers. They were replaced by electronic computers. So replaced that you automatically think of a computer as a machine today, and "Many women were computers" sounds funny.
Bruce Perens.
Why are they earners? Doesn't earning imply doing something, rather than having something? I thought the latter was called a "rentier".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No, the machines are now getting much smarter. Grinding flour takes a purely mechanical machine. The second generation could use pneumatic computers and simple electrical systems to control them.
But now computers are ubiquitous and cheap. And they can see. Not very well, but well enough to automate things that were unthinkable a few years ago. Such as picking out parts jumbled in a bin. Or flipping burgers that are not in exactly defined places.
This third generation will not take over the world. But unlike second generation machines, they can pick strawberries. And will soon be able to clean offices, and paint houses, and pack supermarket shelves, and drive trucks etc. Anything routine.
Initially the robots are only just a bit cheaper than labour, so slow introduction and minimal price changes. But over time, they get better and cheaper, until anyone that still relies on labour will not be able to compete.
And real "robots" are not humanoid, with arms and legs. They are purpose built machines, but with far more intelligence than existing machines.
But the interesting case is still many decades off. When computers can program themselves.
http://www.computersthink.com/
By your line of reasoning all taxation is just like your Venezuela scenario.
Meanwhile most normal people think some level of taxation is necessary for a government to run so then the debate from there is what is reasonable.
Also, UBI isnt really socialism as it has nothing to do with the state controlling the means of production.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
French fries
In a factory, shape a potato into a fixed size rectangular prism, save the rest for things like hash browns
Package the blocks in a multi-level grid
At the restaurant, feed the grid into a cooling unit
Have a machine remove a row from the grid and feed it to the cutting machine
From the cutting machine, feed the row of potatoes through one at a time
Per serving of french fries, press a matching metal rectangular prism into the top of the container to force the potato block through a cutting grid made up of cutting wires. The wires are found on the base of the potato storage.
The uncooked fries land in a basket and are dropped into a cooker for a deterministic period of time.
The basked is lifted and moved over a salting area
Salt is applied from above
The basket is moved over a funnel
The fries are dropped and a container is located beneath to receive them.
The fries are moved by conveyor belt towards the customer.
The basket moves to another station to be pressure washed
The salting area is cleaned by rinsing with water
Once a day (or more often) the deep fryer is turned off and once cold enough drains the oil from the bottom via a valve. From above a wire brush lowers to clean the bottom and a hose is used to clean the rest draining through a second valve on the bottom. The oil is then refilled.
The used oil travels through pipes to be picked up by a biodiesel company collecting waste.
Empty containers for carrying potatoes are placed in a second rack where a new grid is built from empties
Access to the grids of full and empties are reachable from the building side where they can be loaded and unloaded by a robotic truck.
Burgers
Burgers are formed and packed into a tube like structure that can be stored frozen
Burger is loaded into freezer at restaurant in rows on a rotating base to make each tube accessible as needed
A mechanism moves up and down the tubes to the next available burger
The mechanism places pressure along side rails on the tube to stabilize the tube
The mechanism using pressure from the back pushes (possibly hits) the burger and forces it out of the tube into a catching mechanism
The burger is moved onto a conveyor belt and carried into a cooking area
The burger is moved onto a heated and oiled teflon pan, a second heated and oiled teflon pan is placed on top to cook from above.
Bread is stored in the freezer in a similar tube but as separate top and bottom.
Bread is moved from cold storage using a nearly identical mechanism to the burgers
The bread is defrosted by hot air as it travels over the conveyor belt
The burger once cooked is placed on the bottom piece of bread
The frying pans are flipped and moved over a pressure washer, washed and then sprayed with oil
Ketchup, mustard, etc... are placed via tubes from above onto the top bun.
A cylinder that matches the size of the burger and bun surround the burger and vegetables are slices and/or chopped from above
The cylinder moves away and is pressure washed
The top bread is places on the burger
The burger rolls onto a piece of cardboard which is folded from the sides and then put on the delivery conveyor.
I can go on for a while... I am 100% confident that it wouldn't take much time, effort, money or intelligence to build a fast food restaurant that cleans itself, cooks all the food, changes oil, etc... In addition, the restaurant can be easily designed to support automatic loading and unloading of all the materials from the delivery truck with no effort from a human. Additionally, the truck itself can be self driving. Additionally, given time, it would be possible to automate substantial parts of preparing the food for the restaurant.
What I don't understand is... why do we even have employees at fast food restaurants anymore. At $15 an hour, I would rather replace them with robots. Probably could do it within a year.
Not "sperm donor".
I'm not sure that counts as a job. i.e. Working an 8-hour shift, 5 days a week would be difficult for most.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
We're not all going to be the robot owners. Robots are capital, and the trend of the last 30 years has been to push more and more of the capital upwards and away from the 99%.
Yes, robots will get cheaper, too, but cheap isn't free and if we continue laying off people faster than they can amass capital to buy their own robots, then the magic isn't going to happen.
Nor are a lot of us suited for the limited set of jobs that are expected to remain - and I should note that Japan has expended considerable effort on robotic care for the elderly (thanks to a shrinking lower-age population), that IBM's Watson is considered a first-class medical expert in its own right, and that robot surgery has been out of the realm of Science Fiction and part of everyday reality for some years now. So that wasn't the ideal example of where the newly-unemployed can retrain for a new source of capital.
Historically, new occupations have been spawned when older occupations died, but we're simply not seeing anything new open up on a major scale this time. What? You think that Robot Repair is going to be a growing field? We ALREADY have technology sufficient for a simple robot to roll up to a more complex one, unbolt a failed component and attach a new one, then roll over to the dumpster with the old one. Nobody's going to be tinkering with fine-grained repairs any more than they repair the electronics on a digital watch or TV. It's simply more cost-effective to get a new unit from the factory and scrap the old one.