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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

Next they'll come for the cooks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCVol2iWcc

There are ~487k fast food cooks employed at ~$22.6k average wages. That's more than an $11 billion annual incentive to bring robochefs to retail. And that's just fast food, just in the US.

Robo janitors may take a bit longer. Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The janitors could take the form of underwater scrubbing drones.

Put the kitchen in a shipping container that plugs into the restaurant. When it breaks swap it out for a refurbished one and haul it back to the repair center. With a self-driving truck.

Let customers watch their order being prepared on their phone, micromanaging the bot with special requests.

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Lots of interesting operating considerations.

A few thoughts, having worked in "Quick Service Restaurants" a long long time ago.

Ignoring cost of human labor and a move to equipment maintenance for a moment, one of the key metrics tracked is waste/loss, i.e. from the bins in the kitchen. Amounts of discarded buns, lettuce, tomatoes, burnt or spoiled, past due-date, serve-time etc. it all gets tallied and recorded.

If you get sent one box of frozen fries weighing a known amount, that should translate into (x) number of servings +- a fairly narrow distribution curve. If you go through 10 boxes but only sold 9(x) servings then maybe your staff are overfilling, dropping, burning or eating the fries. Either way, they are losing you cash. The cash at the tail end of your otherwise carefully controlled supply chain.

Anything that cost effectively eliminates waste will be next.

Some parts of the cooking have been automated for a long time. For example, nobody flips burgers anymore. They're placed on a clamshell grill that cooks both sides at the same time and releases when it's done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mj7_a1Egew

The next step will be loading the products into the grill and unloading them automatically...and that's already in the works.

But robot assembly of sandwiches is a long way off. Humans are way more flexible and efficient here. The key is removing the repetitive tasks from their workload.

We saved billions of dollars with automation! Why is no one buying our products anymore? Hmm, it must be because they are spending all their money on avocados!

I think the only way to go is to do basic income funded by an automation tax. Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.

If robo cooks are truly inexpensive, we could feed a lot more people in need for less money.

People are a lot like stray cats in that the more you feed them and house them, the more of them you have eventually. At some point, before we are all underwater, we are going to need to have a fertility discussion.

Long before you tell people they do not have a right to live, you will want to address consumption. Poor people are not consuming as much as rich.

No, quite the other way around: the wealthier a country gets, the less kids are born as parents don't need as many of them to reproduce successfully. In fact this trend is so strong that countries like Japan or Germany are facing a really massive demographic problem as the working population shrinks over the next decades.

IMHO the reason is that in rich societies people has many possible activities to perform. They feel that parenting kids is not one of the most attractive ways to spend their time on. Furthermore raising kids cost more in rich countries than in poor ones, so they can't afford as many as their parents or grandparents could.

Not in petro states, generally.

And you only need one culturally persistent counterexample for this to end badly.

Cooking at home isn't expensive. Robot cooks will probably cost more than your kitchen.

We will share them as public infrastructure.

Should the US Federal Government nationalize McDonald's then? It's already an ambassador for the country anyway.

Taxing automation is absolutely wrong. We want automation. In the same way it would be wrong to say landlords of condos make too much profit because there are so few condos so we are going to tax condos more. More automation is required to contribute to liberate resources to eventually push our civilization to the next level. If anything, incentivize it. We want things behind made with "infinite" productivity. But we need to provide for one another, to guarantee a quality of life worth living, even when you yourself aren't necessarily contributing to that productivity anymore.

In particular, you can use tax policy that actually pushes the economy in the directions you want to fund UBI. Carbon taxes are opinionated in the right direction, or a VAT tax is not opinionated but closes loopholes exploited by businesses like Google and Amazon. You don't want taxes that disencentivize behavior that you want - it is one of the reasons I'm flabbergasted US property tax law exists as it does, because it could be opinionated to incentivize ownership but isn't because of a mix of inertia and manipulation by vested interests to keep it the way it is.

This would be nice if it were true. Since the top 0.1% have figured out how to own the nation via politics and trying to dumb down the general populace to ignore what they're doing I don't have nearly as much confidence in automation as you do.

I'd go insane if I weren't optimistic that we can eventually reach a post-scarcity, totally automated, enlightened civilization. The alternative is our destruction anyway. Its going to happen in much the same way as space colonization or uploading our consciousness if we continue on.

And there is kind of a doublethink in that statement. To stop automation requires state intervention in the first place. It would, naturally, be done on behest of corporations who want to prevent automation competing with them in some form, but I imagine the money backing automation outweighs the resistance on that front. If the government is out of the control of the people, automation cannot be stopped anyway. Reclaiming democracy is necessary regardless of if you have an automation employment crisis or not because if you don't have influence over your own destiny malicious entities that do will insure you suffer for it.

I wonder what the guy who lived like 300,000 years before you thought... Probably just trying to get something to eat and not die.

>we can eventually reach a post-scarcity, totally automated, enlightened civilization

this won't happen automatically. it will have to be a conscious decision. how do you propose to get there instead of the dystopian future where things are infinitely more scarce for some and not for others which seems to be our default trajectory

How is that our default trajectory? Things aren't infinitely more scarce for some these days. Poverty has been in long term decline across the world. The poor today are much better off than they were in the past despite huge populations; this is essentially because of improved technology. Much of it automation.

The top 0.1% very much enjoy their iphones, yachts, entertainment options, and the other products of a strong economy. They don't have much incentive to tear it all down.

Automation has overall improved quality of life significantly. We can now grow so much food that we can easily feed the world many times over. Clothing has become so cheap that many items are practically free. And trips around the world are no longer accessible to only that top 0.1-1%. It's not all gloom and doom.

We could feed the world, we don't. We could vaccinate, give clean water, nearly free electricity to every person on the planet. We don't. It's not that we don't have the resources, we consciously choose not to do these because they would cause a minor inconvenience to those who have enough. The top .001 percent don't even live in the same reality as the rest of us, and there's plainly no way they could. The don't interact with anyone who isn't like them.

> We want automation

But we might just not want it _yet_. There’s a lot of work to be done first to prepare people for being layed off, reskilled, or retired en masse.

Why wouldn't the price of food plummet in an automated world? The cost of labor is priced into everything you buy. I still think we're a few decades from these scenarios, but I am not willing to solve a theoretical problem (permanent unemployment) until it becomes a problem in reality. Right now we've got 3.7% unemployment despite all this tech. So I remain very skeptical of this theory playing out and UBI being necessary.

Cost disease, i.e. things cost as much as they do because they always have. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

because in this case food prices are going to skyrocket in a climate change world.

You can't grow food faster. You can only make more of it which requires more resources. The jobs being created today are mostly poverty level jobs or high end jobs and this trend is expected to continue which hollows out the middle class. Pure unemployment numbers aren't useful since the expected date increases with a tighter labor market haven't been happening at all. Once worker wages became decoupled from the value that they actually created, none of the idea that you're paid what your with was valid. Now you're paid what you can negotiate which depends entirely upon how much power you have. Most workers have none.

> Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.

Can't make money by paying people to buy your products. Ford raised wages in order to attract better workers and reduce employee turnover.

Or we recognise that as we automate further that there's less collective work for humanity, and we move away from the idea every adult should be required to work 40 hours a week to survive?

>Or we recognise that as we automate further that there's less collective work for humanity

This has basically never been true in the history of work-saving technology improvements. Such advances tend to create entirely new, previously impossible jobs.

What entirely new, previously impossible job does automating away McDonald's workers create, that formerly employed McDonald's workers are qualified for? Are we going to send them all to coding bootcamps so they can program the kiosks and... oh wait, those jobs are already taken, never mind.

Your statement tends to be true when automation involves some kind of revolutionary technological paradigm shift, and the number of people being automated out of work is sufficiently small that societies can easily reabsorb them into the workforce. But most modern automation doesn't create new jobs or new technologies, the infrastructure for automation already exists and is stable. It just removes jobs, and at an unprecedented scale.

Automated burger assembly machine operator.

> What (..) job does automating away McDonald's workers create?

This is going to sound like a crude joke, but it's not: baby maker.

I am not hopeful about the future.

But most modern automation doesn't create new jobs or new technologies, the infrastructure for automation already exists and is stable. It just removes jobs, and at an unprecedented scale.

If that were true then we'd see record unemployment and virtually no open job reqs. We see the opposite, therefore, it isn't true. In the UK unemployment is at near all time lows, wages are climbing 3x faster than inflation. It's a good time to be a worker despite equally record levels of automation.

As for which jobs are absorbing people whose former work was automated, who knows?

If you insist on endless cynicism, a lot of the people freed up by automation of food factory jobs went and got worthless degrees and now sit in comfy offices creating pointless PowerPoints, earning/burning money to justify the bosses departmental budget. Don't assume everyone who started out burger flipping stays in food service forever!

Before you have said "unprecedented scale", do you realized that in XIX and XX century advances in agriculture production LITERALLY removed about 98% of the jobs of that era?

> new, previously impossible jobs.

like this? https://www.vox.com/2018/5/8/17308744/bullshit-jobs-book-dav...

“Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.”

This is a pernicious myth that needs to die - Ford increased wages to reduce turnover and thus the costs associated with it - if a few employees on the margins could then afford to buy his cars then all the better, but it would not appreciably increase demand. It doesn’t even make sense logically.

Robots are so much high maintenance than just touch panels and voice rec. Thus while it is a good idea the hurtles are much higher to get a positive ROI.

Think to the future my friend. In time the technology will get better.

Touch panels seem to be way better than trying to figure out how to speak in "Robot English" instead of just pushing buttons that do what you mean (mostly) without fail. Also some people who take your order are rude and make whats just supposed to be a convenient grab for food into an awful experience.

Seems to be easily solvable with an app on your phone, you order as you queue and by the time you reach the counter you already paid.

Given that this is a drivethrough we're discussing, I'd love to not have more things to encourage people to use their phones while operating heavy machinery.

The way some of these places do it is you park at a pick up spot (I remember Chick-fil-a doing this). So you order before you go pick up the food. Usually while at a grocery store, or have a friend order for you.

As a guy that maintains robots at a factory. They are literally a 1 hour side task once a month. The robot arms basically only needed a rebuild once in 15 years. The tooling is the only thing that goes bad and needs replacing every month and it's designed such that only a small part of the tooling needs replacement.

Do you have some contact information? I'd love to ask a few questions about this.

As a guy buying robots for a factory right now I have heard many stories like this. Including some robot arms operating for over 22 years with minimal maintenance. Incidentally, I am building a factory to build food robots!

Nope, they'll come for the managers first. See Manna by Marshall Brain

Thanks for the recommendation - looks like an interesting read.

Automated cooking seems more achievable to me, at least somewhere like McDonalds with fairly standardized items. The inputs and outputs are much more defined and there's much less need for AI.

> Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The robot janitors could take the form of underwater scrubbing drones.

Anything that complex would probably go through a chemical wash rather than having a robot get into every corner. Some medical equipment like endoscopes are cleaned this way.

Robots are great for repetitive tasks that have low variability like industrial parts that are almost exactly identical to spec. But when things aren't exactly to spec, I'm not sure that the robots would be easily able to recover with where the tech is today. Like let's say a slightly customized order, few buns stick together, something falls, tomatos are slightly more mushy than normal, or isn't loaded to the machine exactly right.

This is true but predictable failure modes can be designed around.

San Francisco has some self-cleaning public bathrooms that work like that. Locks between each person and cleans the whole thing including the floors. Pretty cool.

Except when they’re not working, which is every single time I’ve tried one.

Only been in one, the one on Stanyan street near Waller. Worked fine for me!

Hmm. It might have been ten years since I tried to use one of those here, generally I found them to be broken or continuously occupied for absurd lengths of time, I.e. camped in. There’s a reason nobody is advocating for more of these to be installed despite demand for well, public sanitary facilities.

I did however use the same model in Palo Alto recently. Turns out they’re not bad if they’re well maintained and charge a small fee (50¢) to use.

You're missing a trick I think ... Why not do an IKEA style build-it-yourself burger operation, where food is cooked and deposited into a box with how-to-build-your-burger instructions printed on top. The perfect personalised burger experience! We might even get websites that sell McD hacks that you can add to your self build burger experience!

I mean, what is the real MVP for McD? It's sourcing, uni-forming, storing and then cooking food. Assembly doesn't really need to be part of it.

In Austria, for a few shining years, we had "build my burger" where you could use the order terminals to create your perfect burger. For a year I ate a mess of three chicken patties and lots of cheese on a daily basis.

Sadly, they got rid of it.

The new terminals have an option to customize your burger, I guess that's pretty much the same thing. Or did they remove it only recently?

There's the terminal customization, and no-holds-barred buffet-style Just a Bunch of Food to mixup.

You can customize burgers, yeah, but with "My Burger", you could think up insanities like 3 chicken patties and 5 pieces of cheese.

Like the 1€ Hotdogs at IKEA?

This is what fuddruckers basically does.

If you get robo servers and robo cooks your kitchen janitorial needs go way down.

at this rate they will soon need robo customers.

Next they’ll come for the liquidator. The Burger King on the NYS thruway north of nyc went to touchscreen ordering. Everyone refuses to use it and there is one long line going to the one register that remained.

Really? I've seen touch screen ordering at McDonalds all over the place and most people seem to have no problem with it. Why do you think people avoid it?

We have those and they are slow. I wonder when they’ll put them in the drive through.

The ones that McDonalds has here are fairly well implemented. Certainly preferable to dealing with the average cashier not thrilled about the job. But I haven't travelled enough to see what systems are being used in other regions of the world. It seems that what you and others are saying is that they are not all the same.

Custom orders are really slow to enter

You should also have some kind of hash of the order as a simple hex string, or "correct horse battery staple" thing, if you always order the same thing. Or the terminal could read a QR Code.

The couple I've seen have had bad menus (what? Options? I just want the damn thing like usual, there are options? I don't care, where the hell is the "just buy it like normal" button?) and have suffered from the same jank that every non-Apple touchscreen I've used has, somewhere on the medium-bad side of that spectrum. Feels like HTML+JS running on Android, which is very possibly exactly what it is. Missed touches, animation stutter, stuff like that. They're way worse than just ordering.

I've used the McDonalds one in Canada and it seemed pretty good. I think the "options" button is partially an upsell, since they want to try to advertise extra stuff.

Maybe they're A/B testing or they've changed. The ones I've seen took you through a screen or two of options and such before adding whatever you'd selected to your order, with the "just friggin' add it" button far less obviously placed than it should have been. Also took some thinking to figure out where certain things might be in the menu.

[EDIT] My experience is muddling through the process once the first time I saw one just to see what it was like, but it definitely took several times as long as just walking up and ordering (and all I ordered was a coffee), and watching my wife try to use one on a family trip, spend about ~2x as long as it would have taken to just order at the counter, curse at it, give up, walk over and order at the counter.

I can beat one customer and cashier most of the time. I'm just one person at lunch and know what I want. A customer will stand up there and make decisions and not have payment ready, etc.

The local Mickey D's put in a couple of tall touch-screen systems that I found surprisingly difficult to figure out. The touch screen was slow to respond -- nothing more frustrating than tapping a glass screen and wondering why nothing happened -- and the decision path didn't make sense. I suspect whoever designed it had one kind of user experience in mind, then it was modified by a different group to change the UX, leaving it worse than before. Anyway, I notice that no one uses it, and I visit frequently (it's so close that I often drop by to get the $0.99 coffee, and now my 14-year-old has started working there).

The one at mine is a completely smooth experience.

Same here. His McD's must have cheaped out.

My local McD had touch screens with exactly the experience you describe. I got in the habit of repeatedly tapping until I got the button to respond.

This last week I noticed the UI had some major improvements and was ultra snappy.

I expect they took user feedback and are slow rolling a version 2.0.

The McDs touch screen location in Union Square is the most annoying thing ever, it's very slow, oddly hard to understand, and if you want mostly diet coke with a little root beer on top, you can't order it.

Couldn't figure out how to order a sausage egg and cheese biscuit. After wasting 5 mins navigating around I had to cancel and order from the human. Why put myself through that? If anything goes wrong, the order taker knows how to deal with it. So I just order from the human now.

Panera has a great touchscreen experience.

Problem with my local panera is that half the time there aren't any pagers at the touchscreen station, while there's a 3 foot stack of them at the register.

Another problem is that guided access isn't always active on the iPads, meaning you can go to different apps and potentially change settings around. Since most jailbreaks these days are just apps, an attacker could go to safari and download a jailbreak app signed with an enterprise certificate and have a (tethered) exploit potentially stealing anything from panerabread.com passwords to credit cards.

They do have the issue that they run out of baked goods but don't update the state of the ordering system. I assume it is legitimately difficult to keep perfect inventory of the items to make that work, but it does lead to some confusion.

Sounds like McDonalds is making the same mistake the automobile companies made with their infotainment systems, cutting corners to save on hardware and just being too inexperienced on software. The infotainment systems of the past couple of years have been a huge improvement over those of the past decade so maybe McDonalds and the food service industry in general will just have to go through the same painful process the car companies did.

What I don't understand is why the McDonald's mobile apps are region-locked. If I am an American and I visit Canada or Japan, why do I have to use the register or kiosk? I should be able to use mobile ordering, just like back home.

Disclaimer: I currently work at a company in the QSR+mobile ordering space

It takes a TON of work to get the menus+availability, payments, local tax laws, security/privacy right for specific regions. Menus are not a solved problem - think about the case where a user wants a fillet o'fish, but hold the sauce and the top bun. Is the fillet o'fish the same item in the US as in Japan, even? What about other regional items? etc.

Also - McDonald's is run by McDonald's corporate and Franchisee's. Sometimes, corporate has the buying power, but most of the time, it's the individual franchisees that make the buy decision - for even things like mobile apps and ordering. Many times, restaurant brands you see here in the US, when traveling, are owned and operated by completely different sets of corporate beings.

It seems like you could afford some duplication. US filet of fish could be menu item 23701 and Japan Filet of fish could be menu item 23702. I can see how this would be hard, but I don't think you would get any pity from the people who work on health care service billing codes.

I would avoid it just because of all of the various fingers that have touched it before me.

You mean...like the doorknobs?

If you make doorknobs out of brass, they might still get poop on them, but many types of bacteria and viruses can’t survive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_properties_of_co...

Maybe we can start making public touchscreens out of brass...

Ok, but most doorknobs aren't brass.

How many doorknobs do you typically touch outside of your home a day? Most doors here are automatic. Plus, I would be reluctant to use someone else's keyboard at work, even.

But...why? Do you have an autoimmune disorder? Generally find yourself especially vulnerable to the errant bug? How do you feel when you breath in someone's fart? You're a walking bag of mud expressing discomfort at other bits of mud in the world. One bit in a million might be annoying. One in a billion actually painful.

I don't like touching the screens either.

https://metro.co.uk/2018/11/28/poo-found-on-every-mcdonalds-...

Traces of faeces have been found on every single McDonald’s touchscreen swabbed in an investigation by metro.co.uk. Samples were taken from the new machines that have been rolled out at restaurants across the country – every one of them had coliforms.

Senior lecturer in microbiology at London Metropolitan University Dr Paul Matewele said: ‘We were all surprised how much gut and faecal bacteria there was on the touchscreen machines. These cause the kind of infections that people pick up in hospitals.

> Traces of faeces have been found on every single McDonald’s touchscreen swabbed in an investigation by metro.co.uk. Samples were taken from the new machines that have been rolled out at restaurants across the country – every one of them had coliforms.

Did they swab the food bags and food that came out as well? Poo particles are probably everywhere.

I think I've heard this ("there's poop on it") about everything. Keyboards, doorknobs, kitchen sinks, toothbrushes, etc.

Either it's simply not true, or it is true and it doesn't matter.

I think it's true, but you have an immune system that makes this largely irrelevant.

Isn't this the result whenever someone investigates any surface people touch? Not everyone washes their hands, but everyone poops. The result is sadly predictable.

What about the money in your wallet, and the change returned to you when you pay? None of it is hygienic.

This may be my old man moment.

I used them a couple of times at different places. It’s just too slow, which is magnified by the dark patterns trying to get you to buy meal deals or whatever.

I was really surprised, honestly I was expecting the process to be better than the usual.

We have those in New Zealand and they were initially awful - slow, hard to navigate/find stuff, actually missing lots of menu items. They seem to have swapped out the system now though and they seem to be relatively usable.

New Zealand was the first country to get them, I believe, which is why they had usability problems to start with.

Here in Hong Kong, every McDonalds has 3+ touch screens, I hardly see anyone lining up at the counter these days. I for one only use the touch screens.

I used one in HK too, and various other places. One benefit for busy cities is that they are great for allowing tourists to go at their own pace if they struggle with the local language (and often have language options to help them).

That's very true, especially for introverted people like me, who don't like the attention when struggling with a language.

It also helps that the devices are pretty responsive, and allow you to order everything.

The downside is that I often see older people struggle with it, I guess for them it would be easier to talk to a human.

> who don't like the attention when struggling with a language

I suppose I am the opposite. I enjoy attempting to order food in a tongue I am learning. But going through the process with a native English speaker, I'd rather just push a button on the kiosk.

I use the McD touch screens. It works, but it takes about 30 clicks to buy something. Also, I was flummoxed until I figured out that [Add To Order] actually means "I'm done, I want to pay now".

I suppose all this was extensively play-tested, but I have no idea what sort of person play tested it given the result.

Yeah, I also find usability sucks, so I usually go to the register if the line isn't too long.

Maybe the software is different per country/region, because here it takes maybe ~5 clicks to buy something. And you can easily add multiple items before paying.

The end game is to remove all drive throughs and fast food joints, and replace them with drone and/or pneumatic tube food delivery. I'm hoping for the tubes.

Unclear why one needs kiosks when the user's device is much more compelling. While there are some (very good) exceptions, many remain yesteryear's technology and meh to outright garbage UIX. The only reason is to maintain some local control and (when available) human common sense in the equation.

Brick & mortar kiosks are the DVD Netflix of fast food.

Do you really want dozens of apps on your phone, one for each restaurant you could possibly eat at? I don't.

WiFi web portal you use in the store?

Yes, that would work, but then that does not provide the marketing department with the same level of invasive tracking and push notification as "an app" does. So guess which option gets built....

My local mcdonalds has 3 panels and no cashiers at all except drive thru. People use them all the time and this is BFE Texas. Assistance is available of course, via the people who would normally bring out your order,for people who can't use them properly.

That will pass. At one point I could jump to the front of the airline check-in queue because nobody was using the touch-screen check-ins. Now the touch-screens are the only way.

Anecdotally, McDonald's in Australia and New Zealand have touchscreen ordering and I can't remember the last time I saw someone actually ordering in person.

It's so much nicer to be able to take your time, actually view the menu and costs of items, and choose what you want to eat without a line of hungry people waiting behind you.

Most Burger Kings here in Sweden have touchscreen ordering and I hardly see anyone using the register any more. Personally I find it such a far superior experience.

Robo janitors are closer than you think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3bgMyMQB9U

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