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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.
In the immortal words of EDI, "I enjoy the sight of humans on their knees."
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Using a general purpose assembly robot to flip burgers at a normal grill seems like a poor solution. Why not use a conveyor oven ? Or a two sided contact grill for one or two patties.
...is not going to be happy with this.
How is this an improvement over the double-sided grills that cook both sides at the same time?
Example: http://www.garland-group.com/P...
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.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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
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.
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.
"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
...is wondering what all the fuss is about. All people do there is put the patty on the rotating chain and out comes a fully cooked burger from the other side.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Well, except that all it does is flip the burger
You say that like it's no big deal, but it's a really, really big deal. It doesn't call in sick. It doesn't have car trouble and miss a shift. It doesn't come in late. It doesn't come in hungover. It doesn't cause drama with the other employees. It doesn't spit in the food. It doesn't require training every 3-4 months because the previous robot doing that job quit, and it's a new hire. And when new ones are deployed, they don't need training. They can just have the brains of the current one copied over.
All of this represents huge savings for a company. It's not just the cost of the robot that has to be considered. It's part of a much bigger structure, and I'd bet that it immediately cuts down on some externalized costs.
And yes, all this does is flip a burger. But how much longer before another "all it does" is cut potatoes and fry them? And how much longer before another "all it does" is season and form patties? (Actually, for most big chains that's happened already.)
But when you see how much they struggle to automate the jobs even high school drop-outs do....
Like flip burgers?
I'm really not sure how you come to the conclusion that the concern of automating jobs away is hyperbole. Lets take all these hypothetical 18 year old HS dropouts who used to make $7/hr flipping burgers. Kids who can't really do math, struggle with basic literacy, and in short don't have really useful life skills. What other jobs are increasing in number that would fit those (lack of) skill-sets, in order to offset the ones lost to automation?
We're automating janitorial work, kitchen work, automotive work, factory work, etc. Almost every possible job that someone with minimal skills could do is getting squeezed, and there just aren't new ones being created. What new jobs are being created are high-skill jobs, and that doesn't offset the loss of low-skill jobs.
Can you point to an industry with an increasing need for low-skill workers? If so, please share. Because I can't find anywhere near enough to dent the number of people that are and will be put out of work due to automation.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
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.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
The McDonalds kiosks are a nightmare: Nobody ever uses them, staff have to be dedicated to TRY to get people to use them, Half the time they're out of receipts and you give up, the other half the time you pay cash and have to use the counter-person anyway.
But more importantly, they're a failure because they put the impetus for resolving problems on the purchaser, not the staff. If I use a kiosk and can't find my item/can't order what I want, the problem becomes mine.I have to fix it, I feel silly if I can't.
If I order from a person, the problem immediately becomes theirs. They have at least some training on this, and understand the system better.
All kiosks do in McDonalds is make people feel dumb. The last thing you want to do, as a business, is have your customers associate shopping there with feeling embarrassed and stupid.
That *might* apply to drugs and devices, but the vast majority of the cost of health care is doctors' & nurses' salaries, real estate, and facilities. None of those are things that are made cheaper abroad by being overpriced in the US.
fast food workers because they are stupid enough to think they deserve $15.00 for flipping burgers
It doesn't matter how much you think you should get paid for doing something, if I'm doing anything, I need to get paid a certain amount just to live. The burger joint could just not pay $15/hour and instead just pay $5/hour and see what happens. Ohh, no burgers to sell, now you're out of business. Well then, flipping burgers must be worth $15/hour.
The idea of "worth" is extremely abstract and not intrinsic.
I know, right? There's no tomato picking machines, apple picking machines, blueberry picking machines, or raspberry picking machines, AND THERE NEVER WILL BE!!!
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
That hasn't worked since the '70s when HMOs came into existence, supposedly to curb rising healthcare costs. They chose to pay for regular checkups and other routine care in order to avoid expensive major medical events. It was a market based "solution" to the already rising cost of major medical.
Clearly, the market was wrong. If fear of regulation hadn't paralyzed us for decades, perhaps healthcare wouldn't be such a disease ridden swamp today. At this point, I doubt the industry even knows how to operate in a reasonable manner. Half measures just won't do the job anymore. We have an industry that doesn't even understand the concept of prompt billing, accurate accounting, or even timely notification. The private bureaucracy is already so inefficient that the government bureaucracy actually looks pretty good.
The rest of the first world is doing much better with their single payer systems. Are you saying Americans are uniquely incompetent?