Restaurants Place Big Bets on Cooking Robots
axios.com
axios.com
- Lower-end restaurants adopt cooking robots and make it difficult to see the kitchen from the customer area
- Higher-end restaurants make their humans even more visible and push a hibachi/omakase model where the chef makes the meals in front of you
"Human made" is going to be the premium brand keyword of 2030.
At one point, roughly 90% of the human race worked in manual agriculture, generally as some form of unfree labor (serfs or slaves), with most of the other 10% as foot soldiers, then a thin veneer of nobles and priests at the top.
Replacing human labor with machinery is pretty much the only thing that has ever improved the general standard of living, whether they are shareholders or not.
2. Comparing modern economics to serfdom is ridiculous on it's face.
3. What, exactly, are you thinking automated career tracks are going to get replaced with this time around? Keeping in mind you've got Industrial, AG, manufacturing, service, and white collar sectors, the first three are already heavily automated. Automating the last two results in massive unemployment. I'm not hearing any push for realocation of wealth so yeah, how exactly does this not completely brick the economy? While we're on the topic of "improving quality of life" how do you frame the near total economic collapse of rural communities in the US and the transition from a single breadwinner middle class to basically mandatory dual income households as "improving quality of living"?
It wasn't an "error". It was the way things had to be, as shown by pretty much every society that advanced past the hunter-gatherer or roaming barbarian stage. Europe. India. Japan. China. The Americas. All had "nobles" and serfs/slaves/peasants doing hand agricultural labor. Even as far back as Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt!
> 2. Comparing modern economics to serfdom is ridiculous on it's face.
Blind assertion is not proof.
> 3. What, exactly, are you thinking automated career tracks are going to get replaced with this time around?
Dunno, but it's happened every time so far. No one hand-weaves cloth any more (except as a hobby). Essentially no one is a blacksmith any more. Hundreds of professions from broom makers to fullers have been replaced by automation.
Imagine someone asking this question at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It's not possible that they would have said "programmer" or "airline pilot" or "open heart surgeon", or even "convenience store clerk" or "Uber driver".
That's been the history of technology for millennia now. Probably way back in the Paleolithic there was a person like you grumbling that this newfangled flint-knapping was going to put all the pointed stick makers out of work.
I'm not talking about the "60s".
I'm talking about the entire history of the human race from the Paleolithic until now. It's nothing but a long, long list of technological disruptions, and somehow we're all still here and mostly still employed.
> increases in required workload to maintain "middle-class" lifestyles,
I'm sorry, that is simply patent nonsense. You could easily lead a '60s middle-class lifestyle (one family car, eating out just a few tiems a year, maybe one short vacation, house < 1,000 square feet...not to mention all the things we have today that weren't available at all then. For example, the Internet) for a lot less than what the typical "middle-class" lifestyle of today costs.
The average house size in the United States has doubled since 1960.
When I was in graduate school, I bought a small house (about 900 square feet, I think) because I was living on a TA salary (plus, I hate landlords).
The thing is, when that tiny house was built in the 1940s, it housed a married couple and four children. I know because I bought it from the children (their father had passed on, and their mother moved to a nursing home).
> Advances in ag tech combined with massive consolidation in the industry gutted rural ag communities with no obvious replacement.
Imagine what it must've been like when all the serfs were emancipated.
> I see your coy ad hominem bs trying to frame me as a neo-luddite and I'm not impressed.
Oh, it was neither "coy" nor was it an ad hominem. It was explicit.
I don't really care whether or not you're "impressed". Why would you imagine that I would be?
In Brazil where labour is cheap you will see a lot of staff at bars, restaurants, shops, etc. on a ratio that seems absolutely overstaffed for the amount of customers. While in Sweden is the complete opposite, in a fully packed large bar you will probably see 4-8 staff members (including guards) for the whole bar, including kitchen.
But, yes, it's a balancing act and does depend on the cost of a bit of extra slack or "just in case" margin.
I think it will be a niche. People are overindexing on how much they like things done with “soul” when they cant even define it
fungible consciousness concept adds funny spices to food too
I agree with all of your points, but…
These Japanese words seem to have taken on vastly new meanings in the US.
1. Hibachi is a charcoal brazier/grill, not a griddle. I think you are referring to a teppan(yaki) (which is a flat griddle). Teppan for making food in front of customers can be found in places like okonomiyaki restaurants and higher end steak houses (subdued affairs minus the Benihana “tricks” by the chefs).
2. Omakase is just chef’s choice. It is not related to whether the preparation can be seen or not. I’m guessing you mean simply sitting at the “sushi bar”/counter seat rather than at a table. One can watch their food being made at a classic diner counter seat as well. Note that one of the best sushi experiences I’ve had in the US (outside of LA in a converted house) was omakase sushi in which we never saw the chef.
All that said, “open kitchens” will almost certainly become signs of a premium dining experience.
A bit more on the hibachi controversy: https://selftaughtjapanese.com/2018/10/09/a-confusing-japane...
...that is, until the robotic chefs bribe the politicians at the Capitol Grille by giving them more french fries with their burgers to support laws for robot rights!
Then, we stop this charade. If these cooking robots are just glorified assembly lines that require uniform inputs, they should be taxed to the point they do not displace a human. And if you manage to get a "robo-chef" that actually can make good food starting with fresh ingredients, you get all the incentives to put this on every home, school or office building.
A human line cook is also part of a "glorified assembly line that requires uniform inputs". This does not preclude the use of real/fresh ingredients, and also of course requires the employ of a human prep team to turn lumpy items into uniform ingredients.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Paying people to dig holes only to fill it back again also results in humans getting paid and the local economy "benefiting". That doesn't mean we should be mandating that companies do that, or get the government to enact such programs.
- At no point I said that the only alternative is to keep people employed sub-optimally. If automation does indeed produce more wealth and if the people that are out of the job can pursue better opportunities, then sure let's use it. But it should also be taxed. If we really are aiming for a society that is so automated that will rob the opportunities for the large majority of people to have meaningful work and a living wage, then at the very least some of this wealth needs to be distributed to everyone.
And having a person flipping burgers even though there's a machine that can do it does "produce wealth or material well-being"?
>- At no point I said that the only alternative is to keep people employed sub-optimally. If automation does indeed produce more wealth and if the people that are out of the job can pursue better opportunities, then sure let's use it. But it should also be taxed. If we really are aiming for a society that is so automated that will rob the opportunities for the large majority of people to have meaningful work and a living wage, then at the very least some of this wealth needs to be distributed to everyone.
How do you decide what should be taxed or not? Should any sort of labor saving device be taxed? Before industrialization 80-90% of people worked in agriculture. Now it's in the single digits. You can therefore plausibly make the case that agriculture "rob[bed] the opportunities for the large majority of people". Should we be taxing tractors as well? Or are burger flipping robots somehow different?
You are thinking McDonalds, I'm talking "The greasy spoon diner next to where I lived in Cambridge that had really good philly cheesesteaks". Yes, having people employed there provides lots of benefits beyond the food. For starters, it was a third-place for some people. If we lose these places, we lose a lot.
Also, I'm talking about taxing restaurants and food that is processed (i.e, not fresh ingredients, preservatives added to extend shelf-life), artificial sugars or sweeteners added for flavor, etc). If you don't want to tax fast food chains because of automation then do it because their food is as addictive and as damaging to our health as cigarettes, if not more.
Yes, agriculture robbed the jobs but it was fine because we could move on to do other things. But we are about to lose the automation race, machines are getting better at doing things that used to be only years of travel ning. "Creative" jobs are getting eliminated because of LLMs. We are not there yet, but we already started this discussion of dispensing of software engineers because of Copilot et caterva. You think you might be safe from the chopping block, but this is not true to the millions of people entering the workforce now.
> Should we be taxing tractors as well?
No. We should be taxing the land owner to make sure the peasants can survive. Or even better, taking it from them and split it more equally.
I don’t want a weird melody or a bad picture, I can have fun making those on my own if you’ll just please save me the time to sort through the laundry basket and get that stuff washed, ironed and back in the wardrobe.
Don’t mistake what I’m asking for here, think ironing exoskeleton not laundry autonomous agent.
A more honest headline would be "restaurant owners place big bets on eliminating workers."
Have they tried higher wages?
how much % does executive/board make up of total expenses? They might seem big on an absolute basis but I doubt they're the reason restaurants have thin margins.
Contrast this with the very simple robot Costco uses to put sauce on their pizzas (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaMFqgslxRc), which is basically a turntable.
In Japan you can order your katsu curry on a machine, pay, hand in a ticket, and grab your food when someone calls your number. Same for sandwich shops in the US. Automats used to have bays where you'd just go up to a window, put in a quarter, and take out some premade food. There's no reason you couldn't handle pancakes, bacon & eggs, spaghetti, etc the same ways. Your cooked food is already sitting under a heat lamp in the kitchen waiting for the waiter to bring it to you; why not just get up and get it yourself? You get your food faster, or when you're ready for it.
Yeah this would displace a lot of workers. But that's what progress does: an advancement displaces old workers, and new efficiency creates an opportunity for new products and services which need new workers. The treadmill of labor in a progressing society.
Fast casual is a pretty popular category with better burgers etc. that you order at the counter. In the UK, it's pretty common to order and pay for pub food at the bar and have someone just deliver it to your table. If I'm by myself and there are seats at the bar for eating that's what I'll often do.
Totally depends on the experience you're looking for. On the other hand, if I'm having a "nice" meal out, I probably do expect table service.