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.

Comments

Re:What do the humans do?

[Calydor]

In the immortal words of EDI, "I enjoy the sight of humans on their knees."

Re:How's that $15/hr min wage working for you?

[Kiuas]

Priced yourself right out of a job, didn't you?

Guess what? You can't legislate what your labor is actually worth.

No, the minimum wage has absolutely nothing to do with this. It's about total cost per hour, it's about efficiency and machines are across the board more efficient than human beings, even if the human beings make next to nothing. Let's do the math.

The machine costs 60 000. Assume a pay of 5 dollars an hour and you're running the place 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. That comes down to 17280 a year. The machine will still be more cost-efficient that a human being., it will just take 3,5 years to pay for itself rather than the less than a year it will take on a 15 dollars an hour pay. 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. So your equivalents in China are essentially yelling: 'yeah, how about that, priced yourself right out of a job! If you only were satisfied with working at 3 dollars a day you maybe could have kept your job for another 5 years before it was automated!"

The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless, and even most positions requiring a higher education will be in the same situation a couple decades from now with the advances in AI. Anyone who thinks human beings can in the long term remain competitive with systems that are specifically designed to be more cost-efficient than humans, doesn't understand a thing about automation or economics, or what this shift means for economies overall.

Re:How's that $15/hr min wage working for you?

[Kjella]

That comes down to 17280 a year. The machine will still be more cost-efficient that a human being

Well, except that all it does is flip the burger... it doesn't put raw patties on the oven, it doesn't season it, it doesn't put cheese on it. And I doubt it's got any capacity to tell when something's wrong and stop and/or fix it. It doesn't come close to doing the full job. Robots do great for high volume production, like you want to churn out a million iPhones. But Momentum Machines showed off their burger-making robot in 2012 and it's still not here, this flipper is like 1% of the process. By all means automation is real... but this "we'll all be out of a job in five years" hyperbole is too much. Sure if you're young enough to be planning a career many decades out or what your kids will do when they grow up maybe it's a big deal. But when you see how much they struggle to automate the jobs even high school drop-outs do we're not going to have "I, robot" style assistants in my lifetime.

Re:Strange solution

[StikyPad]

Doesn't Burger King use conveyors? All chain pizza places do (to the best of my knowledge).

Re:How's that $15/hr min wage working for you?

[Kiuas]

it doesn't put raw patties on the oven, it doesn't season it, it doesn't put cheese on it. And I doubt it's got any capacity to tell when something's wrong and stop and/or fix it. It doesn't come close to doing the full job

That was not my point. My point is that looking at the wage made by the guy who's replaced (or partially replaced) by the machine is not an argument really. Put another way: saying that 'if people were just satisfied with making less they'd be safe from having their jobs automated' is a false statement.

but this "we'll all be out of a job in five years" hyperbole is too much. - -
But when you see how much they struggle to automate the jobs even high school drop-outs do we're not going to have "I, robot" style assistants in my lifetime.

To be clear, I'm not saying we'll all be out of jobs going ahead, but especially unskilled or lowly trained labor will be disappearing, and it's happening at a rate faster than you probably realize already. The factories that are moved from Asia back to the west employ a fraction of the people they used to, because automating as much as possible is the economically sound option, and this trend will only keep going, and it will get faster the more commonplace these systems become.

I'm not saying we'll get to 'I robot' -level even within my lifespan as someone who's soon 28, but we don't need to get that far for most non-university educated people to have trouble finding work when most of these menial tasks are automated, which will lead to major issues unless we're prepared.

Safety Cage

[Marc_Hawke]

How can a human put the stuff on the grill, or put the cheese on afterwards? Do they have to shut down the robot, enter the safety cage, exit the cage, turn on the robot. I don't see how you can do that with 'food' sitting on the grill.

The pictures in the article don't show any room. The human co-worker would have to slide up next to the robot, get smashed in the gut or the head by a heavy steel pneumatic arm, and then they wouldn't have to worry about their minimum wage job anymore.

Re:Automation requires large unit volumes

[Kjella]

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.

Obviously there will always be a phase of low-volume prototyping, so there will always be business for a company like that. But when you consider that we're 7-8 billion on this planet there's very few items we really need just thirty of. Maybe to my generation it's not that noticeable but my dad has from time to time commented on how amazingly cheap you can buy small electronics, power tools and such. It's almost always from China, probably part of some huge production run where they just thought "Well if we aggregate the whole global demand and undercut the competition with automation then we can sell a hundred thousand units and make it work." even if it's quite niche.

I'm probably stating the obvious to you, but if small production runs become relatively more expensive then we're going to try avoiding them with more computer simulations, VR, 3D printing, modular reuse so even though it can't take over the jobs it can take away the jobs. Particularly that it might be cheaper to just do overkill than designing one bespoke solution for every variation, even if technically it would have been cheaper in large volume. I have some stories from friends in the construction industry about bespoke, place-built work vs pre-made assembly-line modules, that humans are better at the former doesn't necessarily make it the future...