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: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?

[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.