Thousands of car crashes a day > not a news
A Waymo crashed > national news
Humans making shitty pizza is not a news. But robots burning a pizza is a news. It'll get better.
If humans were making shitty pizza on average, these companies wouldn't be pouring in their dollars trying to imitate it.
>I've had my fair share of shitty human made pizza so this kind of sounds like the autonomous taxi news cycle to me
I think you need to check the definition of 'news'. Something that happens everyday isn't 'news'.
I don't know about that. Shitty pizza sells very well. Nobody frequents fast-food pizza chains because of the quality of their pies...
apparently they are "hand stretched" but I presume much of the other processes are automated in a factory. (prob not AI robots). A lot is about the quality of the ingredients. Those are wood fired and not frozen.
This type of automation is inherently selfish and should be discouraged, im glad he lost 200k, that 200k could have been used to help employee a few college students who would go onto provide way more value to their community than a robot ever would.
Honestly if you see a company with robots like this, they hate their communities and are inherently selfish and greedy. Do not support them.
You're not getting a robot to stretch out a 16" New York style crust; you might get it to crudely roll out a ball of dough into a thick disk. I'm sure there are certain toppings that are easy to lay out (sausage balls) and some that are difficult (onion slices) so those might get left off.
At a certain point you're adapting a good pizza recipe into a pizza that can be made by a robot, and at that point you're basically just making a frozen pizza on-the-spot and charging a lot for it.
Not just pizza/food ...but this applies to emails and written documents now.
with the good stuff, a good robot would make brilliant pizza
It seems like humans deal with inconsistencies way better than simple mechanical systems, but I wonder how long it will be until we see robotic food systems which adapt to the specific food which they are making. Like noticing that this particular dough is squished oval or unevenly and adjusting the flattening process to correct it on the fly or adjusting the topping stage to work with an oval base instead of the round one. That will be the real change when it comes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1-2gdkOe3A
The waste gets cycled back through.
For a robot pizza maker I'm guessing the back story is like this: entrepreneur who knows nothing about pizza decides paying minimum wage is a waste and opts to buy $160k in machinery to make mediocre pizza cheaper and faster.
It's interesting to see how many breakpoints there are on "partially prepared" food though, like the meal kits vs the old cake-in-a-box etc.
"Making" the pizza with a premade dough and pre-cut toppings is just a 1 minute operation to spread sauce and throw some toppings on it isn't it? Not much bonding there in my eyes...
Sure your homemade pizza improves significantly when you can get your oven very hot and cook it really quick, but homemade pizza from a conventional oven (250C or so), using your own dough and toppings is still miles better than frozen.
I bet you’re fun at parties!
Don't do to France or Italy is my recommendation in all honesty, ignorance is a bliss.
At least the pizza vending machines still seem to be working fine.
And at the end of the day: we have frozen food vending machines that automatically re-microwave crap in them, so there's not real much left on that front to innovate.
Food should be prepared with love. From when the seeds are sown, to when it's arranged on the plate.
You forgot about the sentient non-veg elements that also get added to it. Is that done with love too?
Just feels kinda gross for people to champion the "Doubt all you want but the tech will get better" when a lot of people who don't deserve to be screwed are literally going to be screwed when that day comes. Even with Waymo, like yeah. Cool, car drives itself don't have to talk to a driver sure great. I personally don't feel like it's worth displacing an entire industry of people who don't have other jobs to go to, but some people love to not think about that stuff because futurism. If I call a lyft/uber like both of those aren't my favorite companies at all but I understand the position people are in that work these jobs and it's not a perfect arrangement but I summon them anyways and always treat my driver well and tip well.
The _only_ robotics I'd be in here championing "haters gonna hate, itll get better you just wait and see!" is laundry folding machines. I'm annoyed that we're draining lakes over AI, throwing darts on dartboards of low paying wage jobs and spending millions on building robot automation to get rid of them, instead of perfecting the at-home laundry folding machine. Why can't that just be like a global race man I hate folding laundry.
PS. Being purposefully contentious here :)
A lot of love goes into my food.
However, the economics of the place are what I questioned even then. Would I go there for any reason except curiosity? No, not really, I prefer to have a pizza date in a real restaurant. Also those robots cost according to the article upwards of $100k, to which you must add power and maintenance, you can hire quite a few pizza chefs with that money. So not only it need to be faster and better than your average pizza baker - the most time of making the pizza is the time it spents in the oven, which is also critical - it needs to brimg in crowds as well in order to be profitable.
So yet again this seems to me a dumb way to use automation and robotics. Either you have to make those robots out of cardboard and make them last forever, or the financials just do not even out and you just make average pizza at a huge loss. Just because you can automate somethong does not mean you should.
I know fast food employees typically don't give a fuck (I was one way back) but there's always been something about a human being being there that I fundamentally appreciated about the experience.
[Cue the Carl's Jr ordering scene in Idiocracy]
And that counts double for the food being made. I don't want to hang the soulless robot painting in my house; I don't want to consume the soulless robot food. Even the teen just aching to get through his shift can't avoid imparting humanity to their work. If the burger is off-kilter, a person did that, and that's different than when an unsensing, unfeeling bot does.
[Cue the burger reveal scene from Falling Down]
But I'm old, so... you young whippersnappers and all that. Maybe it's different.
I can do for example pizza tasting on par with best restaurants out there. I don't do the best dough, but I can do toppings no restaurant can/does offer - ie various old aged cheeses like AOP gruyere, old dutch gouda, aged cheddar, italian ones, mixed with truffles or black garlic and so on. Better olives than restaurants use. Ham I know source of, not cheapest questionable crap from warehouse. Spices & herbs mix that is again not used in restaurants.
Just a footnote - its very different product compared to typical US 'pizza', in some cases I would call those cakes (ie Chicago style, pizza-inspired cake), but above is still valid.
Not as common as many places in the world, but it's also not rare. How true it is in the US depends a lot on where in the US you are.
I am saying this non-ironically as I understand what you are talking about, but very few people are geeky about how the document or email is written and thought out. Which is the whole reason we see these insane adoption levels of AI slop documents and emails nowadays.
(of course if this became popular there would be a service in China you could outsource it to. Probably already is for hanzi)
I’ve heard they’re hurting nowadays because many of them outsourced delivery to Uber Eats/Doordash and are so fucking expensive now, you may as well go to a nicer pizza place.
Freezing ingredients doesn't really make them taste super different on a pizza to me. Sure if you buy a cardboard cheap frozen pizza there is not much dough and toppings, but if you take the one that comes close to what you would pay in a restaurant it's not much different in my view.
I also think comparing the quality of cooking of Italy with France is unfair. Italy seems to have a way more basic cooking style.
Genuine question because I’ve never made my own pizza base before so I have no frame of reference here.
By the way, which pizza styles were you referring to?
No way is a person doing it for mass production.
My dream is a free of cost at the point of service Uber pool like service that takes you door to door in one of those Ford transit vans.
Over time, you learn patterns and put in mass public transit and the door to door vans then become door --> van --> public transit --> van --> door
At least that's my dream for the US where we are spread apart like this
Instead it's a little battery-powered multi-passenger buggy, covered with ads and limited to downtown.
>door --> van --> public transit --> van --> door
Still works like this but once you take the train or bus outside of downtown, then you're back on your own for the "last miles" except for a few other non-contiguous neighborhoods where they are beginning to add additional cells of this limited-area connector service.
This has been willingly subsidized by the major businesses in each service area, so it is free to use on its own, once you get onto the regular public transit though, then normal fares apply there.
There's no reason it won't improve because we know that there is actually a world in which amazing pizzas exist.
Teleporters seems a rather random comparison for the sibling reply
Maybe it doesn’t really matter, Marinara is pretty easy to make, 5 ingredients in an oven. Can we improve upen speed, like they say on the article? Up to a point yes, but there’s a bottleneck, the dough itself. It takes certain amount of time to make it into a oval shape, you can’t go too fast, since you break it. And then it has to be in the oven a certain amount of time, no matter what. That has nothing to do with automation, but the physical facts of the matter itself.
Now you have an average pizza that cost a fortune to make, but we accomplished it slightly faster than $10/h pizza chef. You see why those startups all fold?
That's a truly dialled in experience based on many iterations and fine control of input factors.
That's the parallel I'm envisaging.
Robo pizza doesn't need to mean 30 second pizza.
Just a perfect pizza at the end of the process with no humans involved.
I see that as infinitely achievable.