You walk in and download the menu over the wifi, pick what you want and pay with your card. You are then issued with a long unique code.
A machine prepares your meal and your phone prompts you to approach one of the vending areas. You then enter the code or scan an image and your food appears through a hole.
How many employees would be needed for serving > 100 per hour?
http://www.onlyinjapan.org/2010/10/20/fuamen-the-new-japanes...
[note: And yes, I do realize that the above predictions will require radical advancements in automation that are not easy to predict - call me an optimist. :-) ]
Though I expect it to be a touch screen coated with thick plastic that horribly obscures the actual menu. Like a shoddy ATM at a corner store.
Then again, I'm perpetually disappointed with the slow pace of advancement. I often expect too much.
There is just no way to make it economical versus hiring humans for $10/hour in that time frame.
I'm not so sure. Take a look at the machinery that produces packaged food now-- it's fairly impressive that every step is automated and human intervention is seldom involved. I don't see a technical reason an entire McDonald's couldn't be completely automated now. If you can analyze and quantify each step in the process, you can build a machine to perform each step.
Customers expect to give special orders (hold the pickles, hold the lettuce), but you can provide those options in a software interface. Customers expect handling of exceptional circumstances (the pie is too dry, please replace it), but McDonald's-style preparatory science can help prevent such things (e.g. instead of cooking 12 pies at once, the equipment could cook a pie every few minutes.) I think the biggest problem is customers expecting to give orders in spoken language, but we're having trouble cracking that nut with software (noise, dialects, etc.) Also, there's political backlash for having few (if any) employees.
I think the next generation will view buying most things via some text or graphics based menu as nothing unusual at all.
Moving this type of sale onto the internet was not a change. Moving the food service industry, where human interaction is expected, into an environment without human interaction goes against people's expectations and habits. Is such a change technically feasible? Yes. Is it practical? Yes. Profitable? Sure, if you can change people's expectations.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I don't even think it'll be a difficult change. I personally would prefer it. But the first chain of restaurants to offer automated food service (and I do believe it'll need to be a chain) has many psychological barriers to overcome, in its investors and its customers.
My understanding is the cash registers at a lot of fast food chains currently use pictures/icons rather than text (and a lot of cashiers can't do simple math for making change if the machine doesn't calculate it for them or there was an error or you would like to change something after the drawer is open). I don't see why this wouldn't work for ordering, and no need to translate into "all major languages".
Also - I would far, far prefer to order my food from a decent touch screen - I suspect the accuracy would greatly increase. (One of the best inventions ever in the takeout was the video screen showing you what the order taker thought you had ordered)
This was pre-pc era and the one he wanted cost as much as a house. We teased him all night about how speedily he could balance his checkbook or play checkers. Finally he'd had enough, pounded the table and said with a red face in ten years you will all have a computer that sits on your desk.
Our only exposure at that time was to the IBM 360 mainframe the school had and that only made us laugh harder. Truth is he was right, every last one of us had a pc in ten years.
The computer industry moves faster than you think. A few years later I went to a local store to see one of the first laser printers for sale. This one was $10,000 and as a group of us looked at it with the proud sales guy. I said as soon as I could get one for under $1500 I'll buy it. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy and the salesmen said maybe in ten years it will happen. Actually I got an HP Laserjet in around three years for $1499 and still have it - somewhere.
I'd wager that most of us on HN will have a robot in our house in well under ten years. I can't wait;<).
A Roomba can be had for the price of a few weeks' groceries.
Industrial assembly robots run about $60k, though deployment costs are over 3x that. Curiously, reprogramming a robot is considerably more expensive than the robot itself, according to one source.
If you have a well-defined, and reasonably attainable task, costs are likely predictable and possibly finite. If you've got a poorly defined and hard-to-reach goal, expenses will likely rise to meet resources.
As well as, you know, vacuum with the damned thing.
If we ignore robotic vacuum cleaners and toys. But there are some incredibly cool robotics applications.
What needs to happen is a "killer application" of a robot in workplace that will be transferable to home. Off the bat I believe that robotic cars (or autopilots as they will be known) will be first major application of robots that can be transplanted from corporate world into home use.
And I can easily see that in 10 years a lot of new cars will be 1. electric and 2. will have an autopilot option.
If they do, I wonder, do most of us already?
Of course I'm not talking about proper restaurants here, I'm talking about somebody who creates a fast food joint based on what can be automated as easily as possible. If something requires a human to make then it doesn't go on the menu.
After all Mcdonalds was basically designed to emulate a factory from the era as much as possible and factory production processes have moved on substantially.
The supervisor role would basically be replaced by a technician, but since humans need allot more supervision than robots, if there was enough reliability and redundancy built in then instead of a full time manager these chains could simply rotate engineers interchangeably between sites (since they are all using the same equipment which does not have human quirks like loyalty).
It would probably be better to replace the single robot with things like a toaster robot and a lifting robot etc.
Penny: Really? They’re going to make a robot that spits on your hamburger?
Oops. Bad example, appears to vend only pre-made pizzas. This one actually makes it from scratch: http://www.letspizza.co.uk/gallery.html