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Comment by silverquiet | Hacker News Reader

> But manning a grill – keeping track of burgers and cheese and buns and onions, and being able to flip the different objects at the proper time – turned out to be a tremendously sophisticated robotics problem, one too tricky for the startup to tackle

I suppose if my software job gets automated out of existence, I can go to work flipping burgers.

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10+ years ago when I worked in fancy kitchens we would every once in a while get a white collar guy (always a guy) interested in changing careers to something they could be "passionate" about. I saw it work a couple times but never with tech people. We stopped even letting them try lol. They'd come in expecting to be in a position of authority, expecting us to be grateful for all the changes they'd immediately want to make to how we did things.

To some extent this was also true of the other professionals. But they'd usually shake it once they got humbled by seeing up close how fast a good cook can actually shuck perfect oysters or just calmly handle the intensity of the line during dinner. Never saw a programmer adapt to it.

One of my former coworkers is now a high-end chef after he abruptly quit the company I was working at. He's married now and he seems happy.

It's cause he made all his money in tech first. It's a hard life otherwise.

I never worked in a kitchen I'd remotely describe as fancy, but I've certainly worked a fast food kitchen or two. I know way better than to go to one looking for meaning; it'd strictly be more of a last-ditch paycheck thing for me at this point, and not an option I'd like to be forced into; that's for sure.

Mostly I'm just disappointed that apparently we're determined to make humans toil in order to free up the robots to create art; I rather preferred the opposite vision.

> Mostly I'm just disappointed that apparently we're determined to make humans toil in order to free up the robots to create art; I rather preferred the opposite vision.

Are we "determined" to do that, or did art just turn out to be vastly easier to automate than anything involving the manipulation of actual physical objects?

Didn't McDonald's solve this problem decades ago?

Yeah, apparently Flippy is now only for working a frier. The article says it can use intelligence to properly cook different things like wings or onions. The fast food way of doing this would just be to put a timer over the frier with a preset and a picture of a wing/fry/whatever on it that you press when you drop the basket in.

I'm sure it could save some labor, but you know the thing probably costs a hundred thousand dollars and also comes with a SaaS contract that's twice what a worker would cost already. And you still need a worker to get stuff out of the freezer and load up whatever hopper the machine is working out of.

Fun fact: McDonalds cooks don’t even flip burgers. The process involves a grill press which cooks both sides at once. It’s less work in half the time!

Almost all cooking steps in a McDonalds kitchen involves a timer and some form of automation. The humans run the overall process and final assembly, but automation - microwaves, warming ovens, toaster belts, auto-rise fry baskets, grill timers - runs all the repetitive and standardized cooking sub-processes.

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