World's First Kitchen-Free, Robot-Run Fast-Food Restaurant(foodbeast.com) |
World's First Kitchen-Free, Robot-Run Fast-Food Restaurant(foodbeast.com) |
Lots of supermarkets are starting to replace humans with self-checkouts and things like this will probably become standard in fast food.
So how is a teenager supposed to fund his pot habit in 2020?
Dog poop scooping? Personal couriers? Game testing? Something we haven't thought of because the relevant industry doesn't exist yet?
Economies aren't static. You can always find something useful to do.
Today I've seen adults in their 30's and 40's jump out of the IT industry to start their own business scooping dog poop out of back yards and making enough money to live on. Same thing with cleaning swimming pools. There are lots of services they could provide.
It's a little disappointing that despite immense advances in technology and production, and increased efficiency, all we're achieving is having people toil the same amount as before, but doing something else.
On a different note, I am curious to see how economy and society will shape up once most low entry barrier jobs are automated.
Source: http://books.google.com/books?id=1DNVzphAHD0C&lpg=PA24&#...
Learn how to maintain/fix robots.
Plenty of jobs don't have the two rules you mention.
That trend is only going to continue. Think about scaling a new website today, I can go from idea to scalable infrastructure without ever leaving my chair or breaking the bank. Imagine how 3D printing, and other new technologies are going to enable a new generation of people to do cool things.
None of this stuff is out of the grasp of teenagers either. I would not be surprised if you start seeing more and more stories about teenagers building new things, and making a few bucks while they're at it. They've always had the creativity, and drive. But now they have the capability.
Look at youtube, i've been watching videos made by teenagers that look better then most movies made in the 1980's. SLR's, and super high quality video, plus cheap computers & applications are enabling amateurs to do near professional quality stuff.
It would probably makes more sense to outsource building a site to someone from low-cost country that have gained experience than to a local teenager. The same sense probably operate on arduino development and 3d design by teens.
And teen entrepreneurship didn't scale for web-develpoment or mobile apps, no reason to think it would scale this time.
In other words, if you expect your life to continue as it has always done, it won't.
I wouldn't worry too much about jobs--you're still going to need people to wash, inspect, prep and load the produce, as well as the meat grinders and bun burners. And there better be someone in there to disassemble the robot periodically to give it a good thorough cleaning and reassemble it.
Also, I love the conclusion in the article - "After all, how 'gourmet' can you get when your cuisinier is made of cold steel and plastic?" I don't know what the author uses to prepare her food, but I guess gourmet somehow means I should prepare my food with wood utensils over an open fire.
Curious that Macdonald's, with so much careful specification of all processes, hasn't done this, at all. e.g. fry/remove/salt fries. (though their standard coffee is mostly automated). Macdonald's is so well-placed, I can only assume it isn't actually cost-effective for them. Maybe it's worth it for Momentum, for the PR? Or, by starting from scratch, they can make radical changes? Or, it isn't happening? (it's just a "concept" so far).
Finally, Larry Niven wrote a short story about automated restaurants "Intent to Deceive" (1968).
The trouble with robotics is that it's expensive and time consuming to scale, and deals poorly with variance, at least for now.
If your McDonald's is a smash hit and you're experiencing much higher than expected traffic, you can scale horizontally by quickly hiring more workers. All of the tricky bits of producing the product (e.g., correct portioning, correct frying, correct cooking) are already automated, so this labor force is easy to bring up to speed.
Compare with a robotic McDonald's, where you'd freak out, order a new burger-maker-matic from your vendor, and wait 6 months for it to arrive.
Or perhaps worse, you have a maximum capacity of 1000 burger/hour, scaled for your lunch-time rush, and those machines are idling the rest of the time. In a normal human environment you just bring in fewer people during the off hours - but with a robotic work force you are always scaled for peak demand. In businesses that are periodically peak-y this is incredibly inefficient.
But maybe the simplest explanation is that big businesses are not very much optimized for innovation, so it took a startup.
"Momentum Machines – the minds behind the burger maker — have expressed plans to create their own “smart restaurant” chain, serving burgers made by their own crime-fighting cooking robots. According to the company’s site, the technology will provide “the means for the next generation of restaurant design and operation.”"
Yes, you'll have robots cook you a meal at home eventually. This is just the first step. I don't want that massive thing in my kitchen. When it's tiny, portable, and user friendly ... then it's fine.
> Robots in a restaurant benefit only the owner, not the customer (esp. when they burn the burgers like in the pictures).
I've had plenty of humans make me a shitty burger. The good thing about machines is that once you tune them, they'll make the same exact burger, every single time. That's a huge benefit to consumers. Now I won't have to eat someone's bad day!
OTOH, the robots will ignore your complaints and never try to be friendly for a higher tip ...
When I was at school we would sometimes turn up over an hour late or just skip the day altogether. Was a culture shock when I started my first job and got a roasting for being 5 mins late.
No worries, my credit card company listens to complaints. And you know, those are the best kind of complaints, because they get your money back.
In the end, robots will be extremely friendly ... because they have no sense of "fairness" or self-interest ... only a programmed instruction to make the customer happy or if things really get out of hand, to call the cops.
Most people seem to be choosing to spend productivity gains on "more stuff" rather than "more time". And that is certainly their prerogative. :) I mean, with so many people working so productively for so many hours, there is a lot of cool stuff available nowadays.
You didn't specify, do you think it is a morally white area? or a morally black area?
Better yet let's move away from colors. Do you think sex trade is immoral?
I'm genuinely curious because it wasn't obvious form reading your comment - and I'm not sure I have strong feelings one way other the other and so it would seem to me to be the epitome of a "gray area"
Cleaning lawns, walking their dog (scales wonderfully, as you can walk with more than one dog at a time), buying their groceries for them (easily worth it, as you would only buy exactly what was on the list and not 'hey this is cheap') and it scales reasonably.
That list is by no means exhaustive, btw. Just of the top of my head.
None of these can be done by robots anytime soon, none of these require a high school education.
Yes I have some idea of how though this is -- my granddad started working as unskilled labor at age 14, and he raised both him and my grandmother from homeless near orphans to living in a (small) house with a car and in the process raising two kids to have families of their own.
Cleaning lawns often requires average intelligence. If I have to tell the person common sense things and basically supervise the work (people with this intelligence often don't adapt well to change, the kind of change required for each customer) and will tend to be slower and require tasks to be broken down for them. You don't want to have someone completely break down when you send them to the store and the brand you specify isn't available.
From people I've seen, they're already barely functioning in jobs. As the job market gets tighter, many of these people have been pushed out. Some have had advocates able to argue them on to disability, but others haven't.
You could do this. I could do this. But you're overestimating the capacity of 10% of Americans, perhaps as much as 15-20% of Americans.
That doesn't mean there aren't downsides, though.
Sure you could automate that kid, but while trying not to be sappy, that's another face you get to see during the day amidst a traditional day filled with computers, iPads, and now according to this -- machines making our food.
When I want to socialise with people, I'll go to a bar, my friend's house, a coffee shop, etc. If I want a burger, I want to get issued with that burger ASAP, without having to deal with someone who you may consider to be a nice person, but I may consider to be a douche-bag.
If that well-paid smiling person didn't have to work at the burger place, she might have something more interesting to talk about when we meet in a proper social environment.
Sometimes I can go a few days to a week where me and my friends are all busy doing things, I buy all my stuff from the self checkout or via amazon and don't really interact with anyone.
Then when on friday night I go out to a busy party it feels like a shock.
Don't get me wrong, I think some work certainly could be automated, but at the same time, we need to consider the human cost of automating that work. A glib response of "learn how to write specs" or referring to people that do some tasks as "fucking idiots" does very little to advance the conversation.
I'm saying if someone can't do intellectual work, get them to do something that uses other skills. But let's make that something useful, rather than something we could automate away.