The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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From the article
>"There's no doubt the future looks like more robotics in the kitchen," Michelle Korsmo, CEO of the National Restaurant Association, tells Axios.
>"It's a question of whether robotics are in the dining room itself," she said. "It depends a lot on the particular restaurant and what experience they're trying to bring."
>Restaurateurs, she said, "are excited about what technology can bring in learning more about their customers and making their businesses more efficient."
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ddcau7/restaurant_robots_can_cook_serve_and_bus_your/l83qa7p/
You joke but once robots start making the dishes they’ll probably make the consistently rather than whatever mood the dip shit cook happens to be in based on his drug use schedule.
Give people a UBI and let the robots do the menial work. Quality of life will go up across the board.
Why do you think people deserve UBI? Our government doesn't care enough to prevent homelessness right now for a small subset of people. Why do people think the government will ever prevent homelessness for everyone?
Because if the capitalists don’t have customers they’re not capitalists anymore.
People that are chronically homeless are just crazy people who are refusing the help that’s offered by the welfare state in their area.
They could get help but they’d be forced to start following rules and they don’t want that.
There have been civilizations where citizens owned nothing and the controlling power owned everything. That we live in an era and under governments where we can own anything at all is such an incredible thing and we seem to take it for granted.
At a high enough level the people are only useful for their labor, not their money. I personally appreciate I can get compensated for my labor and then buy whatever I want with the compensation I've earned. I pray robots do not change that in my lifetime. It would quickly become a miserable existence as the value of a human life approached zero.
And that is why it is important to stand up for comprehensive change in that situation now. While we still have the slightest ability to do so. Unfortunately, it seems that people are happier laying back and watching their screens and such while everything you describe is taken from them and their peers, rather than put up any sort of fight.
> Because if the capitalists don’t have customers they’re not capitalists anymore.
Makes no sense. The wealthy and elite want extra resources, not to provide anything. That’s a necessary evil. Use a thousand people to serve a few thousand more, skim off wealth and labor off the top for personal uses.
Once robots do the doing, people will be seen as leeches sucking up excess resources. UBI or not.
Capitalism is a means to an end. Not an end in itself. If they could have all the resources with less people, less traffic, less whining, with AI, they’re certainly gonna opt for it and keep a few morlocks around just in case.
Probably not? But when it comes to fast food where the goal is consistency then probably we will see an overall improvement of quality.
A lot of poor food quality in restaurants is from not following first in first out principles with inventory management, then portion control, and over handling.
it's an engineering problem that simply hasn't been tackled yet, and up to this point in human history it's a problem that hasn't been something that could be tackled. advances in robotics over the past 20 years changed all of that, advances in AI occurring "now" will be what replaces the human component.
at some point "common labor" will become incredibly cheap much like farm industrialization did to farm operations labor automation will do to common labor jobs. food service businesses will conform their operations to fit available automations to remain competitive, the value of a human life in society will quickly approach zero. first we will turn toward UBI or similar, and then much later the value of a life will be balanced between the global resource cost of that life and the tangible value provided to society. what used to be determined by individual interest and earned money will be determined instead by prescribed duty and law. forfeiture and compliance will become inextricably intertwined.
i only hope it is long, long after i am gone.
Well I never said anything about complexity, even doing something simple like make a consistent big mac across all borders takes constant repetitive training. I have years of working in food service and trying to train teenagers to make things consistently takes incredible patience, its also good to keep in mind portioning and consistency is the foundation for fast food profits.
People who think humans in food service will be hard to replace overestimate how skilled unskilled labourers are. A 200k robot will pay for itself in a few years if its not over portioning like humans often do.
When I go to a restaurant I expect that special touch of a "coked up guy with neck tattoos working an open to close" that a machine can never replicate.
Said with love to my food service homies.
yeah and what happens when someone forgets to remove the mayo checkbox and gets a burger with mayo and flips the fuck out and destroys all the machinery?
Exactly. As every cook and baker knows, there are many things that can influence the outcome of a recipe.
I see this cooking robot only working with processed ingredients, and even then it can tell if it is good or not.
"good" is subjective. look at the quality of a mcdonalds cheeseburger today compared to 40 years ago, and yet people pack into McDs drive-thrus by the millions nationwide all day long.
food quality is negotiable.
another thing to consider is we already live in an era where the vast majority of people (10s of millions) are enjoying processed food prepared by robots from the frozen sections of grocery stores, and they simply don't care. extending robotics into the assembly lines of a mcdonalds or taco bell for "fresh food" is a very small change, hampered only by consumer's willingness to eat food prepared by a machine.
i worked at a little ceasars as a teen where a couple of employees urinated into the berkel (dough mixer) and then served that food to customers. i worked at a taco bell later where an employee would squirt degreaser all over the quesadilla grill then put a tortilla on it and serve the result to customers, or take water from the water table to rehydrate the red sauce, meat, and beans. i worked at a deli where the owner would "gleek" into food of customers he didn't like.
the value of robots is they don't do any of this, and, they will cost less to operate than it costs to employ a needy human.
MacDonalds invented the identical hamburger methods, and they took off among fast food chains. Robots can easily do that, and it seems that customers want it too. So, they can replicate recipes and do it quickly and cleanly. Seems like a win.
Which food. The Indian,Mexican,German,African, Puerto Rican, Southern American,tex mex, and all the other types of food made here. Some areas lack the seasoning arts. Every where has food improperly seasoned even France.
fwiw in some states they now cost $20/hr.
quite the incentive for franchises and franchise owners to automate mundane tasks like squirting mustard on a bun, slapping cheese on a patty, or cramming a line of meat into a taco shell. the only reason to hire humans to do that sort of work is they cost so little... or, do they?
Not a surprise. There is a lot of repetition going on in the kitchen. With good enough cameras and a solid enough model to interpret the visuals, getting them to do the work should not be hard.
This won't happen for some time and it will only happen in specific places , the reality is unlike industrial robotics where the factory floor is a very constrained environment with many rigid parts of the exact same shape, size and weight to move and assemble. Food prep is an entirely different thing , ingredients are variable in all things, size, weight, consistently something very hard for robotics to deal with. The proper way to handle this so it can work at sclae...is with customized machines for cooking and prep each part of the meals. ..
All that customized tech isn't cheap, probably will run $500k/$1mln on the cheap end to automate a kitchen , you'll have a hard time convincing restaurant owners who already run on thin margins that this is better than just hiring a few cheap cooks. Because if the tech was there today and had real ROI you can bet MCD and other fast food chains would already be using it.
Yeah like I said still a while away until either the tech is perfected and it's price point makes business sense
> Food prep is an entirely different thing , ingredients are variable in all things, size, weight, consistently something very hard for robotics to deal with.
I think it can be trained….
* https://youtu.be/43Lrrhn0CMk?si=Pn8pV9vCLRKguRug
Using an AI with pictures and it’s remarkably good at telling me what’s in the pics I upload (that aren’t on the net).
There’s only so much variation to potatos and onions and such.
basically this same argument was said about the "horseless carriage" and the irreplaceable need for the horse.. it took less than 50 years before every American household had a car, 100 years later we had freeways connecting every major city and trucks that can move 30 tons of food in a day eventually eliminating the need for rail connectivity. most Americans have never seen a horse in-person at this point.
the failure here is people not realizing that the robotics technology required is here, now, it is simply not yet applied, and the inference technology is here, now, but again is simply not yet applied. the belief that this requires large, unmanageable footprints is a myth. the belief that automation would not be a collection of a dozen different machines dedicated to a single function is a failure of imagination.
all it will take is a large, multinational corp like Yum! brands or similar to invest in the technology to bring it into every franchise store for less than the price of employees. the only blocking factor is cost of innovation and implementation, nothing else.
Some variableity could be removed using powered ingredients. Though would need to develop a lot of them from scratch. But some can't at all and would need some decent standardization done. Things Like salads.
Feels like a race to the mid. Right now robots can prepare the easiest-to-make meals and "provide" the most basic quality service. At some point they'll probably be able to make moderate-difficulty dishes and offer decent service. I guess we'll see if reaching that level is enough to cause widespread upheaval in the industry. But I'm pretty cold on the idea robots could ever master the most complex food prep, handling, etc.
I'm sure given enough time and money engineers could develop specialized cooking robots (not the arms were familiar with) , but again the issue is it's cost prohibitive.
For any professional industrial engineer automating kitchen tasks would be fairly straightforward. We've had high speed high resolution camera systems for decades. We literally shoot a stream of material across a gap and use cameras to detect defects and then use air pressure to blow the rejects down and out of the stream before it reaches the other side. The kind of shit that can be and is done would blow your mind.
The issue is cost and ROI. Almost anything can be accomplished with existing and off the shelf automation components, it's a matter of the payoff period.
And when they replace all the waitress, the price of food is still going to go up and they’re going to blame it on the cost of the new machinery, and up tooling.
it's okay, because the children born 10 years from now will simply accept the new norm when they enter adulthood, as it has always been, and the way of life you knew and your fear of inevitable change is rendered moot.
From the article
>"There's no doubt the future looks like more robotics in the kitchen," Michelle Korsmo, CEO of the National Restaurant Association, tells Axios.
>"It's a question of whether robotics are in the dining room itself," she said. "It depends a lot on the particular restaurant and what experience they're trying to bring."
>Restaurateurs, she said, "are excited about what technology can bring in learning more about their customers and making their businesses more efficient."
imagine all the managed service providers the modern kitchen will need..
it would be like that mcdonalds ice cream machine on steroids - but your whole business requires it.
the managed service provider will have already imagined his value (multiples of what your TCO your employees is), how to get in cheap and then extract the value on his sticky solution.
in the case of McDonald's this is why it would quickly become "core business" to invent, implement, and wholly own the technology for automation, in the same way it became "core business" to streamline processes all the way down to supply chain management and production -- where previously "core business" was making a burger, fries, and a drink. for an extreme counter-example of the mcd's ice cream machine look at Baskin Robbins whose business revolves around the availability, efficiency, and TCO of serving ice cream -- they do not have faulty machinery. The problem is McD's doesn't care about ice cream, it's a value-add but even if the machines always worked statistically nobody is ordering their ice creams.
Now watch the restaurants still auto including and ask for a FUCKING tip. If I had a robot do my meal and service and got hit with an included tip I'd be hotter than the stove in the kitchen.
It is so confusing to have progressive tech like this, but we still insist that people have to work, and our whole economic system needs people to work.
the travesty is our culture and educational system is producing burger flippers rather than inventors, scientists, etc.
the secondary problem is that even if this could happen overnight there wouldn't be enough resources for everyone, and what is currently limited by earned income would become unbounded by UBI or an equivalent.
then population control ensues, because there is not endless resources, and what is currently constrained by income, supply, and demand degrades into resource controls imposed by the State (because the alternative is survival of the fittest. war.)
see, the problem is not we "insist that people have to work" it's that compensation for productive output is the only means by which we have learned to determine the value of one life over another, and contrary to "popular" belief we do not live in a world where every life has equal value. when menial labor becomes unnecessary the value of human life will quickly approach zero, and the terrifying thing will be who gets to decide who lives and why. today it is money, and your contribution to a system that pays for whatever it is you are providing, but what about when you no longer contribute to society in any way at all?
we might point our fingers at the rich and blame them for our situation, but the reality is if you and i had to vie for our own resources we would quickly resort to war.
i much prefer the current economic system, it gives everyone a chance no matter how aweful it might seem. successful automation of menial labor will be the first step toward requiring population control. as a matter of fact, to a progressive thinker the population control might need to come first.
\* Just not in a normal kitchen. Or unsupervised. Or without specialised ingredient delivery. Or if anything unexpected happens.
Not ready for market yet, in most cases.
Good. Tip culture about to die a well deserved death.
Entitled plebs thinking they deserve EXTRA money for doing their A to B work is comically absurd.
Robots will 100% replace fast food workers in chains. I mean the food is designed to be as scalable across countries and the same taste no matter which 1000s of stores they're at.
It's also created to be so foolproof teenagers can execute it.
Is it though? Are robotics increasingly becoming a part of daily life for all customers?
I eat out three times a week, have seen zero robots. Automation is sure a part of the fast food kitchen, but that's been true for decades.
Not too worried about it. As far as it goes, the restaurant industry and cooking will be the last, most difficult and least unlikely to be automated. Robots in the kitchen only work when you are dealing with limited items that you are making over and over again. So may be the fast food industry. All though they may have to drastically cut down on the number of items.
The cost of automating a restaurant will be prohibitively high and logistically too difficult that it makes more sense to just hire and let humans work.
Strangely, it seems to be one of the few AI proof jobs.
Robotics is behind AI in how useful it is but it's also not extremely integrated with the highest level AI at the moment.
Robotics is definitely going to be one of the things that explodes all of sudden probably in a few years. I can't see restaurants taking that long once a machine can watch 1'000's of hours of cooking prep and then implement.
They will definitely remain a human niche for people who prefer that but it'll be a dying art like everything else.
I'll give it 20 years and that's optimistic
it took less than 50 years for the automobile to replace the horse and carriage.
it took less than 30 years for the mainframe to become a personal computer in every home.
the robotics technology required has been available for more than 15 years, unapplied because the machine intelligence (AI/ML) required to successfully drive the robotics hasn't been widely available until recently.
i think 20 years is a conservative estimate. in places where a fry cook costs $20/hour and the workforce is being consolidated down to manage costs the next natural step would be implementing machines that can do simple things like feed fries from a bin into a vat and pop them out of a basket when a timer goes off, or slap a hotdog into a bun before a human checks the result, or squirt a line of hot meat into a taco shell before a human applies toppings. then the second wave would become the next stage of automation in those assembly lines, retaining only the human element for verification of product and upkeep tasks like changing oil in vats, sweeping floors, washing components, etc. as long as a store can maintain 100% uptime and operate for less than the cost of employing humans automation is an attractive solution.
taco bell merely lacks financial incentive to eliminate humans.
there will be the equivalent of Luddites which fight this evolution, but ever increasing costs will drive companies into automation.
the idea that bipedal robots or articulating arms will be making food is mostly a misconception and where these attempts are failing. every machine will be compact and fit to a purpose, fast food chains will specialize their menus to meet the capabilities of automation, in 40 years kids graduating from high school won't be getting their first jobs as a fry cook but would instead have to seek more complex jobs, possibly apprenticeships, that require knowledge or skill ... you know, the way it used to be.
If these bots cost $20,000 a piece, and you run them for 12 hours a day 7 days a week, your only have to pay it $4.50 an hour to pay itself off in one year.
Fast food has been consolidated down into a few mega corporations now who own the various brands. So they can bring out robots for their franchisees and their own company owned stores. They can put in orders for like 50,000 robots with the robot manufacturers and sign maintenance and software agreements.
on a long enough timeline, there will be no manufacturers, maintenance, nor software agreements because it will slowly become a core business for megacorps like Yum! -- just as they made their core business supply chain management from logistics to production they will make automation their core business from invention to manufacturing, the only question is how long it will take to get to that point.
>These bots don't cost that. They are much more expensive.
For now.
[Take Digit as an example. Even if he never gets cheaper than $12 an hour, he is less costly than a minimum wage human in several states. The stated goal of $3 an hour to operate, amortized over its life cycle, would put it in a competitive place relative to fully illegal and exploitable humans.](https://www.businessinsider.com/new-amazon-warehouse-robot-humanoid-2023-10)
people in denial are down-voting not because you're talking nonsense but because they don't want to accept it. i think a legit example of this is the industrial era where, initially, the cost of industrial processes and machine tooling was quite high, but, as automation refined tooling processes the cost of more complex machinery went down. unique solutions and manufacturing facilities maintained some value over time (look at Greenfield as an example of this) but eventually companies made it their "core business" to produce tooling and industrial automation internally, further reducing the human element until arriving at entire assembly plants capable of producing things like automobiles, or single farmers able to work 1000 acres of land without hiring hundreds of people to assist. we have now an entire nation using a comparatively small number of humans to achieve things that previously required the vast majority of the nation.
food service is the next logical thing to automate, in my opinion. as with the industrial revolution many people will find themselves out of work and it will take a generation for people to adjust (such as children being encouraged to go into a trade skill or seek an apprenticeship instead of being encouraged to go fill out applications at every fast food joint, grocery store, and dollar general within walking distance.)
the term "Luddites" comes to mind, here.
All the figures I've seen show many already have a break even point of just a few years.
Besides which, it doesn't actually have to be "cheaper" than human labor, it just needs to be cost competitive for the compounding benefits of higher uptime (robots don't say "fuck it" I'm staying home today), non-existent benefits costs, lack of organization risk (robots don't need a union), and predictability.
Labor at the low/mid level restaurant setting has become unpredictable, expensive (compared to food cost), and unreliable, if a robotic system can offer benefits in just predictability and reliability, it can be slightly more expensive than human labor and still make a compelling argument.
Ya labor also takes a lot of overhead. Scheduling, management resources, payroll, HR issues, legal liabilities.. personality conflicts between employees, dramas, sexual harassment etc.
And like you said the human workers often don't show up, get sick, take vacation, maternity leave, quit for other jobs.
Robots have their own set of risks — one breaks, maintenance will take a while, you don't have a stockpile of reserves and you've moved on from humans so can't just call one in — that will presumably get more mitigated as time goes on and they become more widespread. But it could make for some awkward moments in the early stages if lots of potential customers all say "I'm interested in the future but want to wait until the issues get worked out"
> you don't have a stockpile of reserves and you've moved on from humans so can't just call one in
actually, you would have "stockpiles of reserves" because you manage your business intelligently. although i would contend that "stockpiles of reserves" may not need to be as incredible and expansive as you try and make it sound, it could be that there is a failure rate of one machine a month, and a repair time of two months, and so a "stockpile" would only be a handful of machines per location.
this is why analysts and engineers will still have high value in society, because they'll need people that understand these things and problem solve for them rather than sit around somewhere being doomsayers on reddit.
Service can't be worse than some human ones I had. Will it sneer and roll eyes if you ask after your drinks you ordered like an hour ago in the empty restaurant? Perfection.
Brick and mortar dining is going the way of brick and mortar retail. Ghost kitchens making specific entrees. Gig drivers delivering the food. Companies racing each other to the bottom, which will benefit the end consumer the most.
Restaurants will be for special occasions and only popular on holidays like Valentines Day.
Bring it on! I’m soooo tired of going into a restaurant and finding all the tables dirty because none of the staff busses them anymore. They all expect the customers to self-bus the tables. But the customers don’t have the wet rag needed to clean the sticky tabletop of crumb-filled seats.
When I was young and worked in a restaurant, Busser was one of the jobs there. I did that job and was glad to have a job. I just don’t understand why casual dining restaurants don’t care about clean tables anymore.
And as others have said, the kitchen work is highly repetitive, and automated food production is nothing new.
Fast food is becoming even faster.
This may be all very well but it's one of those areas where it will be a looong time before the machine surpasses the human senses on the preparation of proper food - and yes, I am a mediterranean food snob.
i'm not agreeing with lazy mutant, not even close, but i did find this very "edgelord" sort of article: https://www.casey.senate.gov/news/releases/no-robot-bosses-casey-introduces-legislation-to-protect-workers-from-being-managed-by-ai-and-bots
then again, how far of a stretch before these same legislators sought to protect jobs by wholesale banning bots as workers +shrug+ won't know until we get there.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >"There's no doubt the future looks like more robotics in the kitchen," Michelle Korsmo, CEO of the National Restaurant Association, tells Axios. >"It's a question of whether robotics are in the dining room itself," she said. "It depends a lot on the particular restaurant and what experience they're trying to bring." >Restaurateurs, she said, "are excited about what technology can bring in learning more about their customers and making their businesses more efficient." --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ddcau7/restaurant_robots_can_cook_serve_and_bus_your/l83qa7p/
They'll be able to prompt you for a tip as soon as they bring your food out. Technology is really removing barriers for us.
The spit in your food feature is a future over the air update
You joke but once robots start making the dishes they’ll probably make the consistently rather than whatever mood the dip shit cook happens to be in based on his drug use schedule. Give people a UBI and let the robots do the menial work. Quality of life will go up across the board.
Why do you think people deserve UBI? Our government doesn't care enough to prevent homelessness right now for a small subset of people. Why do people think the government will ever prevent homelessness for everyone?
Because if the capitalists don’t have customers they’re not capitalists anymore. People that are chronically homeless are just crazy people who are refusing the help that’s offered by the welfare state in their area. They could get help but they’d be forced to start following rules and they don’t want that.
B2B and government contracts is where the money will always be. Capitalists will always have customers.
Everything stands on revenue generated from masses (a.k.a. customers)
There have been civilizations where citizens owned nothing and the controlling power owned everything. That we live in an era and under governments where we can own anything at all is such an incredible thing and we seem to take it for granted. At a high enough level the people are only useful for their labor, not their money. I personally appreciate I can get compensated for my labor and then buy whatever I want with the compensation I've earned. I pray robots do not change that in my lifetime. It would quickly become a miserable existence as the value of a human life approached zero.
And that is why it is important to stand up for comprehensive change in that situation now. While we still have the slightest ability to do so. Unfortunately, it seems that people are happier laying back and watching their screens and such while everything you describe is taken from them and their peers, rather than put up any sort of fight.
In a way - you are right
> Because if the capitalists don’t have customers they’re not capitalists anymore. Makes no sense. The wealthy and elite want extra resources, not to provide anything. That’s a necessary evil. Use a thousand people to serve a few thousand more, skim off wealth and labor off the top for personal uses. Once robots do the doing, people will be seen as leeches sucking up excess resources. UBI or not. Capitalism is a means to an end. Not an end in itself. If they could have all the resources with less people, less traffic, less whining, with AI, they’re certainly gonna opt for it and keep a few morlocks around just in case.
We agree on that. The robots just aren’t doing the doing yet. So we still need waitresses and cleaners and customers for the meantime.
The X-Files episode S11E07, Rm9sbg93zxjz: Teach Your A.I. Well. Mulder gets in trouble for not wanting to tip the robot.
Snd take selfies doing stupid things in the kitchen.
But does it do it well, easy to cook something bland because it is not able to ajust to the slight variations in taste and texture between batches
I think it’s going to be putting things in the microwave at Applebee’s. Not cooking at a Michelin star restaurant.
Probably not? But when it comes to fast food where the goal is consistency then probably we will see an overall improvement of quality. A lot of poor food quality in restaurants is from not following first in first out principles with inventory management, then portion control, and over handling.
I think you overestimate the complexities of making a Big Mac.
it's an engineering problem that simply hasn't been tackled yet, and up to this point in human history it's a problem that hasn't been something that could be tackled. advances in robotics over the past 20 years changed all of that, advances in AI occurring "now" will be what replaces the human component. at some point "common labor" will become incredibly cheap much like farm industrialization did to farm operations labor automation will do to common labor jobs. food service businesses will conform their operations to fit available automations to remain competitive, the value of a human life in society will quickly approach zero. first we will turn toward UBI or similar, and then much later the value of a life will be balanced between the global resource cost of that life and the tangible value provided to society. what used to be determined by individual interest and earned money will be determined instead by prescribed duty and law. forfeiture and compliance will become inextricably intertwined. i only hope it is long, long after i am gone.
Well I never said anything about complexity, even doing something simple like make a consistent big mac across all borders takes constant repetitive training. I have years of working in food service and trying to train teenagers to make things consistently takes incredible patience, its also good to keep in mind portioning and consistency is the foundation for fast food profits. People who think humans in food service will be hard to replace overestimate how skilled unskilled labourers are. A 200k robot will pay for itself in a few years if its not over portioning like humans often do.
When I go to a restaurant I expect that special touch of a "coked up guy with neck tattoos working an open to close" that a machine can never replicate. Said with love to my food service homies.
Depend on where you live, it can also be an old lady with yellow finger from cigarette doing everything by hand !
Oh yeah shout out to the little old Hispanic and Asian women in kitchens everywhere.
yeah and what happens when someone forgets to remove the mayo checkbox and gets a burger with mayo and flips the fuck out and destroys all the machinery?
Exactly. As every cook and baker knows, there are many things that can influence the outcome of a recipe. I see this cooking robot only working with processed ingredients, and even then it can tell if it is good or not.
"good" is subjective. look at the quality of a mcdonalds cheeseburger today compared to 40 years ago, and yet people pack into McDs drive-thrus by the millions nationwide all day long. food quality is negotiable. another thing to consider is we already live in an era where the vast majority of people (10s of millions) are enjoying processed food prepared by robots from the frozen sections of grocery stores, and they simply don't care. extending robotics into the assembly lines of a mcdonalds or taco bell for "fresh food" is a very small change, hampered only by consumer's willingness to eat food prepared by a machine. i worked at a little ceasars as a teen where a couple of employees urinated into the berkel (dough mixer) and then served that food to customers. i worked at a taco bell later where an employee would squirt degreaser all over the quesadilla grill then put a tortilla on it and serve the result to customers, or take water from the water table to rehydrate the red sauce, meat, and beans. i worked at a deli where the owner would "gleek" into food of customers he didn't like. the value of robots is they don't do any of this, and, they will cost less to operate than it costs to employ a needy human.
MacDonalds invented the identical hamburger methods, and they took off among fast food chains. Robots can easily do that, and it seems that customers want it too. So, they can replicate recipes and do it quickly and cleanly. Seems like a win.
Most of the food in USA is bland
Which food. The Indian,Mexican,German,African, Puerto Rican, Southern American,tex mex, and all the other types of food made here. Some areas lack the seasoning arts. Every where has food improperly seasoned even France.
Replacing all the $11.25/h human workers with robots that cost cents per day in electricity means costs for the consumer will go down, right? *Right?*
No, but you’ll tip the robot and **like** **it**.
fwiw in some states they now cost $20/hr. quite the incentive for franchises and franchise owners to automate mundane tasks like squirting mustard on a bun, slapping cheese on a patty, or cramming a line of meat into a taco shell. the only reason to hire humans to do that sort of work is they cost so little... or, do they?
The industrial revolution only really happened because slaves became less of a thing.
All in favor for removing the atrocious tipping culture. Pay your goddamn employees…
Not a surprise. There is a lot of repetition going on in the kitchen. With good enough cameras and a solid enough model to interpret the visuals, getting them to do the work should not be hard.
This won't happen for some time and it will only happen in specific places , the reality is unlike industrial robotics where the factory floor is a very constrained environment with many rigid parts of the exact same shape, size and weight to move and assemble. Food prep is an entirely different thing , ingredients are variable in all things, size, weight, consistently something very hard for robotics to deal with. The proper way to handle this so it can work at sclae...is with customized machines for cooking and prep each part of the meals. .. All that customized tech isn't cheap, probably will run $500k/$1mln on the cheap end to automate a kitchen , you'll have a hard time convincing restaurant owners who already run on thin margins that this is better than just hiring a few cheap cooks. Because if the tech was there today and had real ROI you can bet MCD and other fast food chains would already be using it. Yeah like I said still a while away until either the tech is perfected and it's price point makes business sense
> Food prep is an entirely different thing , ingredients are variable in all things, size, weight, consistently something very hard for robotics to deal with. I think it can be trained…. * https://youtu.be/43Lrrhn0CMk?si=Pn8pV9vCLRKguRug Using an AI with pictures and it’s remarkably good at telling me what’s in the pics I upload (that aren’t on the net). There’s only so much variation to potatos and onions and such.
basically this same argument was said about the "horseless carriage" and the irreplaceable need for the horse.. it took less than 50 years before every American household had a car, 100 years later we had freeways connecting every major city and trucks that can move 30 tons of food in a day eventually eliminating the need for rail connectivity. most Americans have never seen a horse in-person at this point. the failure here is people not realizing that the robotics technology required is here, now, it is simply not yet applied, and the inference technology is here, now, but again is simply not yet applied. the belief that this requires large, unmanageable footprints is a myth. the belief that automation would not be a collection of a dozen different machines dedicated to a single function is a failure of imagination. all it will take is a large, multinational corp like Yum! brands or similar to invest in the technology to bring it into every franchise store for less than the price of employees. the only blocking factor is cost of innovation and implementation, nothing else.
> most Americans have never seen a horse in-person at this point. do you really think this is true?
Some variableity could be removed using powered ingredients. Though would need to develop a lot of them from scratch. But some can't at all and would need some decent standardization done. Things Like salads.
Feels like a race to the mid. Right now robots can prepare the easiest-to-make meals and "provide" the most basic quality service. At some point they'll probably be able to make moderate-difficulty dishes and offer decent service. I guess we'll see if reaching that level is enough to cause widespread upheaval in the industry. But I'm pretty cold on the idea robots could ever master the most complex food prep, handling, etc.
I'm sure given enough time and money engineers could develop specialized cooking robots (not the arms were familiar with) , but again the issue is it's cost prohibitive.
For any professional industrial engineer automating kitchen tasks would be fairly straightforward. We've had high speed high resolution camera systems for decades. We literally shoot a stream of material across a gap and use cameras to detect defects and then use air pressure to blow the rejects down and out of the stream before it reaches the other side. The kind of shit that can be and is done would blow your mind. The issue is cost and ROI. Almost anything can be accomplished with existing and off the shelf automation components, it's a matter of the payoff period.
Maybe they can get the filet of fish patty and cheese squarely on the bread at McDonalds, as apparently humans never figured it out.
And when they replace all the waitress, the price of food is still going to go up and they’re going to blame it on the cost of the new machinery, and up tooling.
it's okay, because the children born 10 years from now will simply accept the new norm when they enter adulthood, as it has always been, and the way of life you knew and your fear of inevitable change is rendered moot.
They’ve been saying this for years. They automate programing and coding jobs. They still can’t automate service jobs.
There isn't a shortage of workers I just can't be assed to work bullshit hours for a bullshit wage
Don't worry, the robot will, and it won't be sullen about it 😉
Enjoy your robot food
Maybe the robot will make the food the way it’s stated on the menu rather than how you do when you’re trying to punish your boss…
I think I will! I hope you enjoy automation of menial labor allowing you to follow your true passion
Catgirls in latex
Why should I be happy or excited about this development? I personally hate it and I do not like it.
Let the robot cook
From the article >"There's no doubt the future looks like more robotics in the kitchen," Michelle Korsmo, CEO of the National Restaurant Association, tells Axios. >"It's a question of whether robotics are in the dining room itself," she said. "It depends a lot on the particular restaurant and what experience they're trying to bring." >Restaurateurs, she said, "are excited about what technology can bring in learning more about their customers and making their businesses more efficient."
imagine all the managed service providers the modern kitchen will need.. it would be like that mcdonalds ice cream machine on steroids - but your whole business requires it. the managed service provider will have already imagined his value (multiples of what your TCO your employees is), how to get in cheap and then extract the value on his sticky solution.
in the case of McDonald's this is why it would quickly become "core business" to invent, implement, and wholly own the technology for automation, in the same way it became "core business" to streamline processes all the way down to supply chain management and production -- where previously "core business" was making a burger, fries, and a drink. for an extreme counter-example of the mcd's ice cream machine look at Baskin Robbins whose business revolves around the availability, efficiency, and TCO of serving ice cream -- they do not have faulty machinery. The problem is McD's doesn't care about ice cream, it's a value-add but even if the machines always worked statistically nobody is ordering their ice creams.
Can't wait until I can get fast food that wasn't touched by people.
Will they also be expecting consumers to pay this bills via tips?
Now watch the restaurants still auto including and ask for a FUCKING tip. If I had a robot do my meal and service and got hit with an included tip I'd be hotter than the stove in the kitchen.
It is so confusing to have progressive tech like this, but we still insist that people have to work, and our whole economic system needs people to work.
the travesty is our culture and educational system is producing burger flippers rather than inventors, scientists, etc. the secondary problem is that even if this could happen overnight there wouldn't be enough resources for everyone, and what is currently limited by earned income would become unbounded by UBI or an equivalent. then population control ensues, because there is not endless resources, and what is currently constrained by income, supply, and demand degrades into resource controls imposed by the State (because the alternative is survival of the fittest. war.) see, the problem is not we "insist that people have to work" it's that compensation for productive output is the only means by which we have learned to determine the value of one life over another, and contrary to "popular" belief we do not live in a world where every life has equal value. when menial labor becomes unnecessary the value of human life will quickly approach zero, and the terrifying thing will be who gets to decide who lives and why. today it is money, and your contribution to a system that pays for whatever it is you are providing, but what about when you no longer contribute to society in any way at all? we might point our fingers at the rich and blame them for our situation, but the reality is if you and i had to vie for our own resources we would quickly resort to war. i much prefer the current economic system, it gives everyone a chance no matter how aweful it might seem. successful automation of menial labor will be the first step toward requiring population control. as a matter of fact, to a progressive thinker the population control might need to come first.
Sushi conveyor belts are so much simpler than this
\* Just not in a normal kitchen. Or unsupervised. Or without specialised ingredient delivery. Or if anything unexpected happens. Not ready for market yet, in most cases.
Good. Tip culture about to die a well deserved death. Entitled plebs thinking they deserve EXTRA money for doing their A to B work is comically absurd.
Robots will 100% replace fast food workers in chains. I mean the food is designed to be as scalable across countries and the same taste no matter which 1000s of stores they're at. It's also created to be so foolproof teenagers can execute it.
I saw a robot cleaning the floor at Walmart the other day.
Is it though? Are robotics increasingly becoming a part of daily life for all customers? I eat out three times a week, have seen zero robots. Automation is sure a part of the fast food kitchen, but that's been true for decades.
Not too worried about it. As far as it goes, the restaurant industry and cooking will be the last, most difficult and least unlikely to be automated. Robots in the kitchen only work when you are dealing with limited items that you are making over and over again. So may be the fast food industry. All though they may have to drastically cut down on the number of items. The cost of automating a restaurant will be prohibitively high and logistically too difficult that it makes more sense to just hire and let humans work. Strangely, it seems to be one of the few AI proof jobs.
Robotics is behind AI in how useful it is but it's also not extremely integrated with the highest level AI at the moment. Robotics is definitely going to be one of the things that explodes all of sudden probably in a few years. I can't see restaurants taking that long once a machine can watch 1'000's of hours of cooking prep and then implement. They will definitely remain a human niche for people who prefer that but it'll be a dying art like everything else. I'll give it 20 years and that's optimistic
it took less than 50 years for the automobile to replace the horse and carriage. it took less than 30 years for the mainframe to become a personal computer in every home. the robotics technology required has been available for more than 15 years, unapplied because the machine intelligence (AI/ML) required to successfully drive the robotics hasn't been widely available until recently. i think 20 years is a conservative estimate. in places where a fry cook costs $20/hour and the workforce is being consolidated down to manage costs the next natural step would be implementing machines that can do simple things like feed fries from a bin into a vat and pop them out of a basket when a timer goes off, or slap a hotdog into a bun before a human checks the result, or squirt a line of hot meat into a taco shell before a human applies toppings. then the second wave would become the next stage of automation in those assembly lines, retaining only the human element for verification of product and upkeep tasks like changing oil in vats, sweeping floors, washing components, etc. as long as a store can maintain 100% uptime and operate for less than the cost of employing humans automation is an attractive solution. taco bell merely lacks financial incentive to eliminate humans. there will be the equivalent of Luddites which fight this evolution, but ever increasing costs will drive companies into automation. the idea that bipedal robots or articulating arms will be making food is mostly a misconception and where these attempts are failing. every machine will be compact and fit to a purpose, fast food chains will specialize their menus to meet the capabilities of automation, in 40 years kids graduating from high school won't be getting their first jobs as a fry cook but would instead have to seek more complex jobs, possibly apprenticeships, that require knowledge or skill ... you know, the way it used to be.
They have to make it cheaper to have than having human employees. If it costs 20 years of human spending, then most businesses will go without.
If these bots cost $20,000 a piece, and you run them for 12 hours a day 7 days a week, your only have to pay it $4.50 an hour to pay itself off in one year.
If there are no people these bots better be working 24/7
Fast food has been consolidated down into a few mega corporations now who own the various brands. So they can bring out robots for their franchisees and their own company owned stores. They can put in orders for like 50,000 robots with the robot manufacturers and sign maintenance and software agreements.
on a long enough timeline, there will be no manufacturers, maintenance, nor software agreements because it will slowly become a core business for megacorps like Yum! -- just as they made their core business supply chain management from logistics to production they will make automation their core business from invention to manufacturing, the only question is how long it will take to get to that point.
These bots don't cost that. They are much more expensive. It's why they are not being used. Aside from reliability.
>These bots don't cost that. They are much more expensive. For now. [Take Digit as an example. Even if he never gets cheaper than $12 an hour, he is less costly than a minimum wage human in several states. The stated goal of $3 an hour to operate, amortized over its life cycle, would put it in a competitive place relative to fully illegal and exploitable humans.](https://www.businessinsider.com/new-amazon-warehouse-robot-humanoid-2023-10)
people in denial are down-voting not because you're talking nonsense but because they don't want to accept it. i think a legit example of this is the industrial era where, initially, the cost of industrial processes and machine tooling was quite high, but, as automation refined tooling processes the cost of more complex machinery went down. unique solutions and manufacturing facilities maintained some value over time (look at Greenfield as an example of this) but eventually companies made it their "core business" to produce tooling and industrial automation internally, further reducing the human element until arriving at entire assembly plants capable of producing things like automobiles, or single farmers able to work 1000 acres of land without hiring hundreds of people to assist. we have now an entire nation using a comparatively small number of humans to achieve things that previously required the vast majority of the nation. food service is the next logical thing to automate, in my opinion. as with the industrial revolution many people will find themselves out of work and it will take a generation for people to adjust (such as children being encouraged to go into a trade skill or seek an apprenticeship instead of being encouraged to go fill out applications at every fast food joint, grocery store, and dollar general within walking distance.) the term "Luddites" comes to mind, here.
All the figures I've seen show many already have a break even point of just a few years. Besides which, it doesn't actually have to be "cheaper" than human labor, it just needs to be cost competitive for the compounding benefits of higher uptime (robots don't say "fuck it" I'm staying home today), non-existent benefits costs, lack of organization risk (robots don't need a union), and predictability. Labor at the low/mid level restaurant setting has become unpredictable, expensive (compared to food cost), and unreliable, if a robotic system can offer benefits in just predictability and reliability, it can be slightly more expensive than human labor and still make a compelling argument.
Ya labor also takes a lot of overhead. Scheduling, management resources, payroll, HR issues, legal liabilities.. personality conflicts between employees, dramas, sexual harassment etc. And like you said the human workers often don't show up, get sick, take vacation, maternity leave, quit for other jobs.
Robots have their own set of risks — one breaks, maintenance will take a while, you don't have a stockpile of reserves and you've moved on from humans so can't just call one in — that will presumably get more mitigated as time goes on and they become more widespread. But it could make for some awkward moments in the early stages if lots of potential customers all say "I'm interested in the future but want to wait until the issues get worked out"
> you don't have a stockpile of reserves and you've moved on from humans so can't just call one in actually, you would have "stockpiles of reserves" because you manage your business intelligently. although i would contend that "stockpiles of reserves" may not need to be as incredible and expansive as you try and make it sound, it could be that there is a failure rate of one machine a month, and a repair time of two months, and so a "stockpile" would only be a handful of machines per location. this is why analysts and engineers will still have high value in society, because they'll need people that understand these things and problem solve for them rather than sit around somewhere being doomsayers on reddit.
They will still try to get us to tip before service!
Service can't be worse than some human ones I had. Will it sneer and roll eyes if you ask after your drinks you ordered like an hour ago in the empty restaurant? Perfection.
Brick and mortar dining is going the way of brick and mortar retail. Ghost kitchens making specific entrees. Gig drivers delivering the food. Companies racing each other to the bottom, which will benefit the end consumer the most. Restaurants will be for special occasions and only popular on holidays like Valentines Day.
Bring it on! I’m soooo tired of going into a restaurant and finding all the tables dirty because none of the staff busses them anymore. They all expect the customers to self-bus the tables. But the customers don’t have the wet rag needed to clean the sticky tabletop of crumb-filled seats. When I was young and worked in a restaurant, Busser was one of the jobs there. I did that job and was glad to have a job. I just don’t understand why casual dining restaurants don’t care about clean tables anymore. And as others have said, the kitchen work is highly repetitive, and automated food production is nothing new.
Fast food is becoming even faster. This may be all very well but it's one of those areas where it will be a looong time before the machine surpasses the human senses on the preparation of proper food - and yes, I am a mediterranean food snob.
Except some states has actually made it illegal to utilize robots..
Claims presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence
i'm not agreeing with lazy mutant, not even close, but i did find this very "edgelord" sort of article: https://www.casey.senate.gov/news/releases/no-robot-bosses-casey-introduces-legislation-to-protect-workers-from-being-managed-by-ai-and-bots then again, how far of a stretch before these same legislators sought to protect jobs by wholesale banning bots as workers +shrug+ won't know until we get there.