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Flippy the Robot Takes Over Burger Duties At California Restaurant (ktla.com)
Chain eatery CaliBurger announced today that its location in Pasadena is the first to employ Flippy, a burger-flipping robot developed by Miso Robotics. The robot is able to take over the cooking duties after a human puts the patties on the grill. KTLA reports: "The kitchen of the future will always have people in it, but we see that kitchen as having people and robots," said David Zito, co-founder and chief executive officer of Miso Robotics. Flippy uses thermal imaging, 3D and camera vision to sense when to flip -- and when to remove. "It detects the temperature of the patty, the size of the patty and the temperature of the grill surface," explained Zito. The device also learns through artificial intelligence -- basically, the more burgers that Flippy flips, the smarter it gets. Right now, cheese and toppings are added by a co-worker. CaliBurger CEO John Miller says the robot can cut down on costs as it will work a position that has a high turnover rate. "It's not a fun job -- it's hot, it's greasy, it's dirty," said Miller about the grill cook position. Less turnover means less time training new grill cooks. Flippy costs about $60,000 minimum and is expected to be used at other CaliBurger locations soon.
No. Again, the amount of the minimum wage has nothing to do with the facts that humans cannot compete with a machine specifically designed to be more cost-efficient at a given task. The fact that you still do not understand this after being given the example from China where pays are a fraction of the West baffles my mind.
Giess what? This has nothing to do with the argument.
No. There are plenty of western countries in which fast food wporkers make around or above 15 dollars an hour and are not in fact stuck in poverty. But the thing is, whether they make 5 dollars or 20 dollars an hour does not alter the fact that in 20-30 years no-one will be making anything doing these kinds of repetitive manual tasks because again no matter the awge point automation is the more efficient route to go, and that's what companies care about. Unless the societies at large address this by adopting systems like universal basic income, the vast majority of people will become stuck in poverty because they have no skillset that would allow them to find work, and assuming that everyone will simply acquire a higher education and be able to find a job is unrealistic, both because not everyone has the mental capacity to be highly educated, and secondly because there will simply not exist enough of these kinds of positions to employ everyone.
If your goal was to come off as the most stereotypical 'ignorant American', you've succeeded with flying colors. You do understand that every single industrialized country outside the US, including my own, already does this and does this with the health care costs being less than those in the US, right? Universal health care hasn't been a point of contention anywhere but in the States for several decades, as you're the only first world nation that still does not get that it's the waty to go if you want to both reduce the costs of the health care system and keep people healthier.
Again, I never claimed that, I pointed out that the root of the problem will remain totally regardless of whether the minimum wage exists or not and how much it is, and you chose to reply by wrapping yourself in the American flag and screaming about totally unrelated things.
You seriously need to do some reading on the topic(s) and educate yourself. Because if you think that automation and issues of poverty can be solved by removing or lowering the minimum wage, your level of ignorance is fast approaching that of your current president.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
machines are across the board more efficient than human beings, even if the human beings make next to nothing.
Speaking as someone who makes these sorts of cost calculations almost daily such a blanket statement is completely untrue. Professionally I am a certified accountant and also an industrial engineer. I manage a small manufacturing company and have to make decisions on automation all the time. Whether a machine is more economically efficient depends on the specific situation. In particular it depends on the volume and value of what is being produced. Many seemingly simple tasks are actually quite hard to automate economically unless you are producing large quantities of the product.
Hell, China is leading the way in automation of production, and they're using it to replace workers that make around 10-15 bucks a day because the machines are simply more cost-efficient and reliable than human workers even at those wages.
That depends on what those Chinese workers are making. I've been to China and I assure you that there is no lack of work for their labor force. Once the unit volume of a product gets high enough, it makes sense to automate almost any process. Having lower labor costs simply means the required unit volume is higher but the calculation is the same. Foxconn can consider automating the assembly of iPhones because they make MILLIONS of them. But there are VAST numbers of things we need to make for which the cost of automation is prohibitive and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Turns out that humans are very flexible, easy to train, readily available, and (comparatively) inexpensive for many tasks both simple and complex. Automation will replace a lot of assembly work (and that is a good thing) but it is not going to replace it all.
Let me give you an example. On my production floor today we are building a wiring harness for a customer. We have a machine that can automate production of the wire leads that go into it. But for this machine to be economical it really needs a production run of about 500 pieces because of the setup time and tooling costs. But we are only making 30 of these harnesses. So for this product (and many others we make) it is provably cheaper to use people to manually make the wire leads. But even if we were making 50000 of these harnesses we STILL would need the people because the only thing the machine can do is make leads. It cannot do any of the hundreds of other tasks that go into making the product whereas I can train almost any human to do most of them and not have to pay $100K up front for a new machine to do each task. To fully automate this job would require unit volumes in the hundreds of thousands to millions. Point is that there is a LOT of headroom between making one unit and the number where automation starts to make sense for people to work in. And this isn't going to change no matter how much people worry about it.
The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless
Oh I wish that were actually true. My day job is running a company that does assembly work and we hire a fair amount of what could reasonably be called unskilled labor. For the unit volumes we produce (we make smaller quantities of a wide variety of products) there is no machine that could possibly economically replace these workers nor will there be one anytime soon.
There are several flaws in your argument.
1) Humans can be easily and quickly re-purposed to a different job. A burger flipping robot can just flip burgers and while it may be efficient at that task it is useless otherwise. To really replace a person you would need far more automation.
2) To replace a human who does more than one specialized task (and most do) you need a far more flexible set of automation which is not coincidentally FAR more expensive. Good luck asking the burger fli