This robot serves up 340 hamburgers per hour | Hacker News Reader

This robot serves up 340 hamburgers per hour

singularityhub.com

147 pointsJaigus135 comments

Does anyone here have experience with fast food enterprises? It would be interesting to hear about how this sort of machine could affect companies like McDonalds and whether or not it's the future or just a cute idea that won't scale?

I have the feeling that, if this sort of idea was as value as the article implies, McDonalds (or Burger King, or any other big chain) would have put serious money into developing this sort of thing and it would already be everywhere.

(I wish there was a website or publication that took businesses and profiled how they work, the challenges they face and the costs associated with parts of the business consumers might not understand, so these sort of questions were easy to answer. I would love to read how McDonalds works (as a business))

The question is going to be reliability in the long term. Carls Jr. uses a burger conveyor to cook burgers (stick the patty in and in a fixed amount of time it comes out perfectly cooked) for example, but they also have many moving parts and if it breaks, that is half the burger capacity gone (they have two per store usually).

With a complex machine like this, keeping it from breaking is the key. If it works well though...this really could change things.

it comes out perfectly cooked

That's a somewhat subjective statement.

Not necessarily, if you look at it from the perspective of a meat's internal temperatures.

Temperature-wise, it does.

I'd still rather eat a brick. Carl's Jr. continues to insist on using very un-marbled top sirloin and then they cook it to death, with it ending up extremely dry usually. At one point I think they must have experimented with using Gelatin to hold more of the moisture in the meat. It tasted like meat Jell-O.

Ugh...

"For their next model Momentum Machines plans on ... giving it gourmet cooking abilities that seasoned chefs use such as charring the burger while retaining its juiciness."

I'm not entirely sure they could. They probably felt that simple cooking of pre-prepared ingredients and then assembly wasn't an interesting problem to solve, especially since staff can also handle the other requirements of food prep (keeping equipment clean and sanitary for example).

The addition of providing a superior experience (custom meat combos? Slicing ingredients on the fly) might not have occurred to them. I think that emphasising the high output gourmet burger is the way forward. Especially since McDonald's has already proven that "Masstige" does have a spot in the food prep industry.

If automated movie rental machines are so popular why hasn't Blockbuster invested millions in this idea, or are these "RedBoxes" just a cute idea that won't scale?

In 10 years I think your comment will look just as silly.

I was asking a question not making a judgement.

Your question about the economics wasn't silly... I was just pointing out that corporations like McDonalds are very unlikely to start spending money on robotics research or rethinking their entire business. It just isn't in their corporate DNA. Whether the economics make sense or not... McDonalds/BurgerKing/TacoBell etc. isn't the one to figure it out.

To support your point:

Burger King, to take an example, probably doesn't give a crap about the restaurant sales at all.

Most of their profit is from franchise fees, not restaurant sales.

Company restaurant revenues in 2011 were 1638.7 million, and company restaurant expenses in 2011 were 1447.4 million. All told, profit from restaurant sales was 191 million.

Franchise fee revenue in 2011 was 697 million, franchise and property expenses 97.1 million. All told, profit from franchise fee revenue was 599.9 million.

Basically, I can't imagine they care if they are franchising restaurants with people, restaurants with robots, or heck, franchising robot boxes themselves.

They only care that someone is paying them to call it burger king, and giving them a cut of sales

I find this comment a bit short sighted. First of all, it's obvious that the burger king org DOES care about restaurant sales, otherwise they would not be advertising constantly. Even if you ignore the contradiction between their actions and your suggestion about their priorities, applying a little logic to the situation will make it clear. If sales aren't good, how many people are going to be making new Burger King franchises? If sales aren't good, will franchises remain in business to pay them fees?

Yes, they do care about restaurant sales, but, IMHO, only to keep franchisees happy.

I still think they'd be just as happy franchising robots. I could be wrong.

At the risk of sounding nit-picky, you did make a judgment: "I have the feeling that, if this sort of idea was as value as the article implies, McDonalds ... would have put serious money into developing this sort of thing and it would already be everywhere."

It was this judgment that I felt super-serial was responding to.

Somewhat OT - in Redwood City, it's not unusual to see lines of 3-5 people at each of the two Red Boxes at the seven-eleven on fifth avenue. I'm guessing those two redboxes do more business than the entire Block Buster in downtown RWC based on how fast that line turns over.

Block Buster got squeezed out by automation - At the high end from iTunes and on the Low-End from Netflix/Redbox/Amazon.

I'm starting to see the Seattle's Best Coffee machines (powered by Redbox, image[1]) replacing Starbucks stands inside grocery stores. The machines are way smaller, cost less, and make more consistent coffee. They seem like the younger sister to the "Microsoft Starbucks" machine [2], which are apparently available to anyone buying 4 cases of beans per month.

[1] https://lh3.ggpht.com/-0vJb6GbCYGs/Tn9dFJkPPUI/AAAAAAAAGtE/2...

[2]https://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communi...

Why is it Microsoft Starbucks? is it in the MS campus? Or running Windows?

I believe they were first introduced inside of Microsoft (in '05 or '06, I think). And it was a huge relief, too, let me tell you. They replaced these awful Farmer Brothers industrial-style coffee urns.

You'd punch in your order (tall drip, decaf, etc.), and it would grind beans and brew your coffee all in about 20 seconds. They're quite spectacular.

They're a simply amazing blessing. You press 3 buttons (cup size, right or left coffee (right is always house blend), then "Start"), and a minute later you have delicious coffee. Anywhere on campus, any time of day or night. The machine does Short (8oz), or a Tall (12oz) which makes a beautiful latte in my 16oz cup with 4oz of milk.

You probably already know this, but for those who don't Seattle's Best is a Starbucks company --they used to be the brand found in bookstores, when those were popular --now they seem to be the brand SBUX uses for in-store (substore) locations.

Seattle's Best started out as their own company that was then acquired by Starbucks in the 00's sometime. At around the time they were acquired, they became the cafe brand for Borders bookstore, and we all know how that worked out in the end :) B&N has always franchised Starbucks directly in their stores (or at least, for as long as I can remember).

Redbox's boost into it's current fame didn't have as much to do with automation as it did with the price and convenience factor.

People were tired of paying $5+ to rent from Blockbuster and get nailed with late fees all the time. Redbox simplified this model ($1/day until you return it). Of course the 24 hour kiosks are a boon too.

They have them, they call it blockbuster express.

At a McDonald's store in my country that I worked in, the labor costs were only around 15% of the store's costs, whereas the cost of food (excluding wastage) is around 25%. Since the minimum wage in my country is about twice as high as that in the US, I wouldn't be surprised the relative labor costs are even lower there. McDonald's also happen to pay 20% above minimum wage over here.

Burger assembly is only a small part of the labor cost. You have the cashier, the fries person, drinks, management, salad/deli assembly, cleaning (during opening hours as well as final cleanup afterwards), as well as carrying stock from the truck back to the store.

Whether those machines would be profitable would depend on whether it is worth saving 5% of the cost of a burger in exchange for the capital and maintenance cost of the machine.

McDonald's isn't a burger company. It is a real estate company.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/73533-mcdonalds-is-a-real-es...

You could make the back room potentially a lot smaller if it was all in a machine.

As for the link - I don't buy his arguments: "First, it buys and sells properties, as one might suspect."

I've never seen a McDonald's close down. I'm sure they do sometimes, but they probably realize really quickly if the place will be profitable or if it needs to be sold asap. So effectively they never cash in on any long term real-estate investments. If the real-estate values goes up, more than likely you're gunna be selling more burgers too.

The second point he makes is kinda semantic. At the end of the day McDonalds needs to extract money from the franchise. They can charge more for using the brand, more for the ingredients or more for rent or whatever. It doesn't really have any significance. At the end they are trying to get as much money as possible out of the franchise without running the owners bankrupt.

His last point about them getting bought and all their real-estate sold.. I dunno maybe he was trying to just be cute - but net worth of assets is taken into account into the stock price. It's the kind of stuff that's on quarterly reports. Kinda scary that this guy is an investor.

> I've never seen a McDonald's close down. I'm sure they do sometimes, but

FWIW, I've seen two close down. This is in Brisbane, Australia (for those who are interested, one on Roma St, and another a bit further out, near the Albion Five-ways IIRC). They'd both been around for a while.

Not saying this changes anything about your point, just making an observation.

I've seen a single McDonald's close down. So I guess it does happen.

"I've never seen a McDonald's close down."

Fewer people will see one close down than you might expect; the ones that close down are the ones that not enough people go to, so only small numbers of people see it close down - if lots of people were there to see it close, it wouldn't be closing.

I've seen Quizno's and Subway sandwich shops close and Wimpy restaurants but never a McDonald's, KFC or Burger King.

I've seen plenty new ones open but never a closure.

This is in Glasgow, Scotland.

There was a McDonald's beside the southern General hospital in Govan that has now closed

Edinburgh's Princes St had once two Burger Kings. One is now an HSBC, the other was in a building that is now being demolished.

There used to be McDonalds on university avenue near UW in Seattle, they closed it down sometime after I graduated. That was a high traffic store also, so it must have been a lease issue.

I'm sad that these restaurants are what I'll be faced with if I ever visit Glasgow. I visited the UAE and McDonalds, Hardees, KFC, and Burger King were by far the most common places to eat there; much more common than local restaurants.

These restaurants are absolutely everywhere and have been for a long time so don't be surprised about it.

There are however plenty of better restaurants out there, Glasgow included, so don't be sad!

It's a real estate company because for many franchise stores, it owns the land and collects rent and franchise fee from the franchisees.

“McDonald’s real moneymaking engine was its little-known real estate business, Franchise Realty Corporation; envisioned and created by Harry Sonneborn. The obscure McDonald’s alter ego company was based on Sonneborn’s unique even lesser known financial formula.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_J._Sonneborn (First CEO)

As I explained the "rent" is just a way of extracting money from the franchise. They are not necessarily charging the local market rate for commercial real estate (if it's a very busy McDonalds they can charge way more). They don't realistically sit down and consider maybe replacing the McDonalds with an American Apparel so they can charge more rent. So it's not the typical landlord<->renter relationship where the landlord considers getting new tenants and the renter considers moving to a new place.

You've never seen one close down, because they do extensive research on vetting each location before they put one up; but also, they remove all identifying signage etc. within 24 hours of a location being closed, since they don't want to hurt their brand by implying failure.

>You could make the back room potentially a lot smaller if it was all in a machine.

You might not want to, though. You might want to keep the redundant infrastructure around in case the automation breaks down and you need somebody to flip burgers in the interim, after all, the jobs you're replacing aren't terribly skilled.

It's also worth noting that maintenance people normally get more (significantly so for the more complex machines) then normal crew, and given how frequently the machines break already you start seeing the costs of a robot being more then the cost of paying someone to do the work.

Further the machines get cleaned constantly, and are deep cleaned every night. That takes people, and given how low the crew numbers are normally, you're not going to save anything by having robots make the food.

There doesn't need to be a cashier. If there was a wall of touch screens, and all the food production was automated, you'd only need unskilled labour. Cleaners, and someone restocking the food inputs. You could have someone service the machine once a week, or in emergencies - but they already have expensive machinery running, so they probably already have the support staff infrastructure for those jobs.

EDIT: I should have said 15%/5% of revenue, not costs.

It's better to automate and mechanize the food production and harvesting processes, then, which is already happening in agriculture.

All McDonald's are run by franchisers. New locations have to put up a quarter of the startup price and pay back the rest as a loan http://www.bizquest.com/McDonalds-Restaurants-franchise-for-...

Even if it costs less in the long run, increasing their startup costs might decrease growth enough to make it now worth it. And since they demand uniformity everywhere, they'd be in the position of imposing change on their existing franchisers who might not want it, which is never fun.

Definitely not true. I worked for a corporate store during high school, and only later in College moved to a franchise for a year. At my corp store, we were one of the first stores in the country to move to the batch cooking method (with microwaves no less!), as well as the speakerless drive through (take orders directly at the window). None of those was replicated at the franchise I worked for later.

McDonald's is most assuredly continually doing R&D on their processes. Undoubtedly they have investigated robotics over the years and the most likely explanation for why they have not been widely adopted is the ROI is not there.

Restaurant profit margins are not high, there is way too much competition. Until recently, and probably even now, the robotic technology needed to automate the kitchen would have been prohibitively expensive and likely unreliable. Restaurant kitchens are hot, greasy, steamy environments. Also anything that's used for food production has to be able to be regularly cleaned by immersion or high pressure hot water or chemical cleaning. Not great for electronics and precision mechanisms unless they are built to rugged specifications (not inexpensive). Even ordinary, manually operated restaurant equipment is very expensive compared to what we buy to use at home, and the reason is that reliability must be very high; you cannot afford to lose your production capability for even a short time, since restaurants are the ultimate just-in-time production operation.

Finally, unlike more traditional factory operations (e.g. automobile manufacturing) where robots replaced highly paid unionized workers, the average McDonald's worker probably makes less than $10/hr with minimal benefits. At maximum staffing, labor costs for the kitchen staff might be $50/hr, and at most times of the day, less than that. There's just not a huge savings to be had.

Especially as if you had these machines, you would have to have at least 1 on-site engineer at all times (most likely two) to be able to fix / correct them when they go wrong - who would cost you $50 / hr.

Ideally, you should be able to serve more people for $50/hr with the new system (robots and engineer) VS. $50/hr with the current staffing.

People don't just come in when you can serve more of them.

McDonalds are working with a certain flow of customers mostly based on location, time, etc, not on "ability to serve".

Now, if they start throwing people off because they are just too many to serve, that's another thing...

But Moore's Law is at work, and humans can't make that much more productive at making sandwiches.

Moore's Law in observation made about transistor density; not some universal law of technology.

They saying this chinese noodle slicing robot costs the third of an employee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukNkCnNJuR8 (also they are other restaurants already using robots: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=robot+chef)

As someone who is addicted to chinese handmade noodles, this is very cool! Perhaps this will increase the quality of noodles in the states eventually.

That $10/hr worker is also available for mopping floors, cleaning bathrooms, moving and unloading boxes, refilling condiment/utensil dispensers, taking out the trash, etc. When business is slow, the robot just sits.

McDonalds is seemingly trying to create an image of a wholesome restaurant, serving naturally made and original food. McDonalds in Canada has a series of videos showing how their meat is natural, and their fries are 100% potatoes etc. I feel that mechanizing their burger making process would be counter productive to this image.

"I wish there was a website or publication that took businesses and profiled how they work, the challenges they face and the costs associated with parts of the business consumers might not understand, so these sort of questions were easy to answer. I would love to read how McDonalds works (as a business))"

Not for all businesses, but for public ones, there is something pretty close: SEC EDGAR [1]. Search for the most recent 10-Q (concise quarterly filing) or 10-K (more detailed annual filing).

[1] http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml

Right, but in McDonalds case, the parent company isn't the one operating the franchises most of the time, and the franchises are almost always small companies privately held.

So you don't get an accurate look at how the average McDonalds franchise operates.

Other businesses have their earnings obscured by different sources of retail, or inexact expense breakdown.

The fact is that mechanization is competing against humans. And so long as the human wage can be driven down in real terms, the falling minimum cost of mechanization won't meet it. But there is inelasticity in human wages, created by things such as food and having a roof over your head. When the lines cross by enough to outweigh the political backlash, the companies switch to machines, and one more category of job disappears forever.

Thus I have said: in a few years time, we are going to face the choice - either we all retire, or we'll all be sacked. To take option 1, first discard money and capitalism.

There are many such websites and publications. The "problem" is that there isn't a single one for all types of businesses (hardly surprising). But for just about any business category you can think of, there are multiple trade publications (often free) that cover that domain.

One of the top 3 hits for googling "restaurant industry publications" is an answer to someone asking this question.

I'm doing active work for a couple of companies that sell equipment to McD's and other fast foot joints. But we'll focus on McD's for the sake of this reply.

McDonald's is heavily invested in new technologies, but they are very conservative about deployment. If something like this did appeal to them, it would take a lot of field trials and monitoring before it went out. Remember that the corporation can specify certain equipment to produce their products, but in franchised stores those store owners need to do the actual purchase and maintenance of the equipment. They need buyin as well.

McDonald's also second-sources everything. If they say "this is the shake machine we recommend", there will be two competing companies making that type of machine. This is good business for a number of reasons. So something like this mega robot would never make it to the field without a duplicate style of machine being made by someone else.

As far as this robot goes, it's just too complex and too critical to base an entire restaurant upon. If it goes down, your entire operation is stalled for the duration of the repair. Doesn't matter if a technician is seated on a stool next to it 24 hours a day, you still can't guarantee when it will be running again. This type of technology just won't be able to compete with semi-skilled labor and simpler cooking devices for the mid to long-term.

I wonder how well it works. I could not find a video anywhere, which would be a marketing no brainer for such a cool machine.

When I met the Momentum Machine guys here in San Francisco, I was shocked that they were planning to open a restaurant chain instead of licensing the technology out to existing players. Opening restaurants? Making food? Very un-startupy, right?

But it turns out that if anyone can do it, these guys can. The brick-and-mortar restaurant business is massive, bigger than many technology sectors, and prime for disruption with new food and models: there's a $184 billion global fast food market, a $2.1 trillion global market, and just about everybody needs to eat.

This has the potential elements of greatness: serious, hardcore mechanical engineers as founders, with a background in the restaurant industry. More power to John and Alex -- can't wait to try my first one.

McDonalds actually operates something like 30% of its stores directly instead so that it eats it's own dogfood. It can try out new ideas in a production setting, etc.

My guess is that Momentum Machines is doing something similar. Think of it as a public-facing R&D center, not as unstartupy.

Plus, "startupy" is about designing to scale up. Having a physical store is not necessarily unstartupy. Operating it as a mom-and-pop restaurant would be, but operating it with machines seems distinctly startupy. New store? No problem, rent the space, install the machines, boom, done!

Ah, man. I've been planning on doing the same thing as these guys for years, but I haven't yet had the time or the financial freedom (still relatively young) or the luck of environment. But this is just plain awesome to see someone way ahead of me with a working prototype. I knew there were plenty of people with the same idea... I just didn't expect to see it become a reality so soon!

There's so much potential in this industry, when making burgers, pizza and cocktails are done to a high standard with machines, ordering is done on terminals, it could drive the costs down for social venues in the cities and leave human staff to focus purely on customer service.

The first company to produce a Redbox-like burger, fries & shake kiosk will make a mint. I can envision those in breakrooms of small businesses everywhere.

Remember, not every business is in the middle of a city with plenty of restaurant choices nearby. If the company I work for didn't have a cafeteria, I'd be in for at least a 3 mile drive to the closest fast food place if I forgot to bring lunch.

They should call it McSwineys!

The big issue with robot cooks isn't a machine that can cook food...those have been around for some time now. The real question is can the robots cook safe and healthful food with no human assistance? Any Board of Health will agree that the real challenge in cooking isn't the mechanical combination of the ingredients, it's inspecting the food and noticing potential problems that will stand out to any person.

Robots that can cook on their own have enormous benefits to society. The preparation of the food is made slightly cheaper and overall quality of the food improves (if a robot can make the perfect burger once, it can do it again and again). There's no need to worry about washed hands or cooks with colds, and for simple or repeat orders it's usually easier to interface with a machine instead of a person. But the real benefit to the world is freeing up the processing power of human minds for something other than flipping meat every X minutes.

These machines take a lot of the human labor out of food preparation, but at least one person will still need to be around to answer certain questions: Did this meat go bad before it was cooked? Were there rat droppings on the grill? Is there any chance that someone could get sick by eating this? Of course these things will take breakthroughs in machine vision technology and herculean data collection efforts. But once we get there, we can really cut costs and fight hunger with food factories.

Given that they're grinding meat on the spot, and that ground meat has a significantly higher risk of bacterial contamination than its non-ground equivalent, my guess is that this negates some of the risk. There still has to be a human involved to be sure, but I'd eat a burger from one of these any day of the week over the McDonalds equivalent (assuming I ate beef, of course, which i don't).

This assumes that lower production costs lead to lower prices; instead of higher profits for select few individuals.

I also don't see how being unemployed frees people up for something more worthwhile to do.

8 years ago i remember talking about how i wanted to do a fully automated pizza shop. with a atm like interface. i know nothing about the pizza business, and at the time labor was too cheap for pizzas to warrant building crazy complex machinery. now it could probably work, i think. I do wish there was a video of this hamburger machine in action.

EDIT: Apparently these machines exist for pizzas: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/13/nation/la-na-nn-pizz...

Well, how do you think frozen pizzas at the grocery store are made?

Well I wanted something gimmicky where the patron saw it being made "fresh"

Short segment on How It's Made: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k5WVYu5GXY&t=5m35s

Thanks for the link, that made my day.

This may seem like a bit of a brazen comment, but... what about french fries? A burger is boring, a burger and fries is a very American meal.

They point to elimination of tile floors, aprons, hair nets, and the like, but if the customer cannot get an order of fries from this robot, the restaurant will still have to have traditional kitchen infrastructure to make french fries.

Fries shouldn't be a difficult problem to solve. Donut Machines have been doing something similar for a long time (production line deep frying) and I imagine that Fries wouldn't be very similar if you wanted a consistent output.

We designed a continuous liquid-bath cooking machine that can turn out fries, etc. in a relatively small space. Does pasta too! It was a fun experiment.

The biggest problem was having demand that continues unabated; a machine like you're describing is used in industrial food production I believe.

The donut machines exist in every Krispy Kreme store, but I think you nailed it: the automation problem gets much harder when your food doesn't stay fresh more than 10 minutes. Going after the higher-end market will help these guys: people won't wait for McDonalds but they are more willing to wait for Five Guys or better.

Why should people wait? If they're automated wouldn't they also take orders from mobile devices? If those devices provided GPS location and if local traffic sensors gave road conditions then the food would be ready just as the customer arrived.

You've significantly upped the investment cost, which will make the burgers more expensive. Wouldn't it be better to have them be the same (more expensive) price, though a bit slower, and pocket the difference?

To automate everything and have it hot and ready is a really hard challenge. Fries take about four minutes to cook. A burger between one and three. While you can compute an average car order, any given set of cars will order significantly different amounts of food. Get it wrong and you are forcing people to wait (what we are trying to get away from) or wasting food (bumping up costs). This optimization was the thing McDonalds spent the most time optimizing when I worked there years and years and years ago.

On the other hand, I'd be happy with waiting if I could input my order and I knew my order would be correct.

The technology exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Znch-RfhRI

Now we have proof of concept of automated burger flippers, fry cooks, and, elsewhere, ordering from a kiosk instead of a person (I've seen this in the wild). What does that leave, someone to clean up and to stock the machines?

I see no reason clean up and stocking (for the most part) couldn't be automated as well!

Fry machines exist already, but the big point is that it makes sense to robotize as soon as you replace a whole staff position. If you have devices that can replace the whole "kitchen backoffice" and only have the front cashiers/servers, then it makes sense to do that. If some critical task (burgers or fries) requires the kitchen guy to stand there - then it's not useful to automate the rest, since savings are minimal.

No doubt this is the future of fast food. Been wondering for years why a big player like McDonalds wouldn't come out with such an automated process and came to the conclusion it must have something to do with the economic consequences this would bring along. The amount of minimum wage jobs this would destroy, would have a very devastating impact on the U.S. economy.

In the future, underdog McDonalds asks for subsidies to keep human labor competitive

This is almost assuredly the future of all food. In 20 years (at the latest) I imagine some kind of make-all food crafting machine will be the de-facto standard in new homes and would have a very reasonable cost associated (maybe 10 - 20k) considering time saved.

But even then, that is only a hairs step away from 3d molecular printers just building amino acids and proteins up into the food you want anyway. Significantly fewer moving parts and things to break, too. I hope that happens in our lifetimes.

> But even then, that is only a hairs step away from 3d molecular printers just building amino acids and proteins up into the food you want anyway. Significantly fewer moving parts and things to break, too. I hope that happens in our lifetimes.

IMHO, "printing" food is a dream that will never happen. Much like flying cars. It sounds futuristic and all, but you just can't do it both cheaper (and better) than dropping a seed into the ground and waiting.

But we shall see, I guess :)

Pronutria is working on bacteria/algae that converts sunlight into protein. They talk about 10x reduction in the cost of protein, i.e. meat.

Another company(forgot it's name) is working on algae that manufactures sugar as an input for the biofuel industry. Their target is 4x cost reduction vs plant grown sugar.

If they succeed it would be interesting to see the dirsuption to the food industry.

> If they succeed it would be interesting to see the dirsuption to the food industry.

Meh, the status quo will just spend their tremendous capital on a hate campaign to paint algae grown proteins as artificial and bad because they aren't bloody cow butt.

I doubt very much that McDonald's has altruistic motives for not deploying these machines.

The throughput on the machines might be pretty good, but the ping time won't be. When you have four registers stacked five people deep and drive-thru wrapped around the store at peak periods, and drive-thru just took another six Big Macs, wiping out the dozen you had, you want to be able to tell your grill staff "give me a dozen macs now!" Not "sorry, your one cheeseburger will have to wait until the twelve Big Macs the previous two customers ordered ahead of you."

It is worth pointing out that the traditional problem of robots is control -- if just once, some bucket is 1mm off target, some robot arm which grabs it will grab it off-center and torque it, and when it drops it will spill, which ruins some nearby work area and requires the process to be shut down and manually corrected. That's the failure mode: error propagation.

Inability to anticipate load is a problem here, but it's not as dire as you're claiming -- the worst is that someone waits for a while longer, and this only applies if you don't have humans manning the registers -- after all, humans can indeed issue an order to a robot of "give me a dozen macs now!"; that is an order which robots can accept. I'm much more concerned with the fact that a totally-automated burger joint might not notice a hole in the wall forming due to water damage, or a rat making its way in through the aforementioned hole in the wall, following the smells of delicious burgers.

"Destroying jobs" with technology is not a bad thing. The world benefits from cheaper products, and we shouldn't keep people working in jobs where they are no longer needed just for the sake of letting them work. They should learn new skills, find other jobs, and contribute to society in other ways.

No company would hesitate to fire every one of their employees if they could get machines to do better work for cheaper. The only reason McDonald's hasn't done it yet is because they haven't found a cost-effective way to do it.

There's only so much work to do. Machines seems to be eating more jobs than innovation can create. Eventually, we will face massive (over 50%) unemployment, unless of course we change a thing or two in our way of life (such as 20 hours work weeks or such).

Machines are great, but we do need to mind the way we use them.

Sorta...

In the short term the less intelligent half will be massively unemployed until we get something like Gattaca going and then everyone can basically be researchers (or writers, etc).

The real question is what happens after the singularity.

> The real question is what happens after the singularity.

Probably more true than you realize. The most likely scenario for a technological singularity is an AI that writes a slightly more efficient AI, and so on until world domination if it's quick enough (which is likely).

So we better know exactly¹ what we want the AI to do, or it might for instance tile the solar system with molecular smileys to maximize a badly programmed notion of "happiness".

[1] With mathematical precision, no less.

Here's what they need to do to create an automated restaurant...

Combine:

- Their invention, the robot burger maker

- iPads at every table to order (payment via stripe or similar service) : http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-01/may-the-tabl...

- Robot waiter : http://www.sfgate.com/business/tech/slideshow/Robots-work-re...

But you'd still need people for cleaning, maintenance & troubleshooting.

My long bet says that we'll see the "Totally Automated" restaurant (exception being original construction, and periodic "high level" engineering) - I.E. A restaurant that can do basic maintenance, self repair, cleaning, food cooking (the trivial portion), receiving) - in about 25 years.

The cleaning/cooking/receiving part will be up and operating in about 15 years.

Welcome to the kitchen of the future. By the year 2000, all of mom's cooking and cleaning duties will be performed by Rosie the maid.

One question I have is this: if we let robots produce our fast food, what guarantees of food hygiene do we have? I imagine it can be pretty difficult to get a robot to self-clean all of the relevant parts, and it's not hard to imagine critters getting inside and making a nice home for themselves.

The picture in the article does nothing to convince me that a burger produced by this machine will not give me food poisoning.

On the flip side, if you eliminate people, you eliminate a major source of contamination.

I think removing the teenager sneezing in the food and coming to work the day after having mono and not washing his hands will more than make up for it.

I worked in fast food growing up and it seems hard to imagine a machine would be a huge cost saver because the actual burger production was rarely a problem.

Most of the work is in the pre-prep, cleaning, stocking in preparation for the lunch rush. The machine would be nice during a rush but I have a hard time seeing it actually replacing an employee unless the robot also knows how to use a mop.

This thing sounds almost purpose-built to enable a gourmet burger food truck business -- a restaurant niche where revenue is largely tied to how quickly a fixed number of staff can churn out food.

There's also plenty of inherent down time for that same small staff, technical entrepreneur or centralized maintenance crew, to clean/maintain the machines.

One could set up a 'fleet' of such trucks and a centralized 'headquarters' with cleaning, stocking, and technical staff to handle any necessary maintenance and repair, as well as centralized and scalable data-driven inventory management and routing.

So long as the first restaurant is called Cafe Alpha and is staffed by an overenthusiastic female android, I'm happy.

(Go read Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou to get the joke ;)

I saw this machine in action at an event at the hardware accelerator they're part of. The guys behind it are cool and they have solved a number of problems so far.

But I do not think they have solved all of them. When I saw it the rate of production was far below 340/hr, and the machine wasn't doing all of the assembly. So I think the headline's use of the present tense is very misleading.

The machine may automate the slicing, cooking, and stacking, but cleaning seems like a major concern. The chutes with vegetables, cooking surfaces, and especially the meat grinders would all need close attention on an daily (or even hourly) basis.

What Americans really need right now is the ability to eat burgers faster and cheaper...

http://singularityhub.com/2011/07/19/fat-america-keeps-getti...

Duh.

I have always wanted one of these sushi robots: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q...

The technology here could easily have been done 50-70 years ago (And it probably was)

I think it's not about robots but the spread of ideas and commerce is now much easier with the internet.

Am I the only one looking at the image and imagining chain grease flicking onto the burgers... Yuck.

Afterthought: I suppose that might be better than humans handling my food.

They could lubricate the chain with lard.

Yum!

Food machinery is greased with nontoxic oil.

Gun oil like Ballistol is often used.

I almost feel bad for all the people without education. Robots are killing their jobs, one niche at a time.

Why almost?

I wonder if we could build machines to educate these people, too.

There are also highly educated people that are losing jobs because what they do is so repetitive and can be done more efficiently with a robot or program.

It's happening to stock traders I've heard. I don't have much sympathy for them. I can't think of any other major educated group that's losing jobs because of technology.

I can't wait till robot can do every job so that we can all just kick back and let the robots serve us beers on the beach. Your framing it all wrong by saying "robots are killing their jobs" in reality their jobs are still getting done, just more efficiently. This lowers the cost of the product and frees up individual to do more rewarding jobs.

It should free up individuals to do more rewarding jobs, but unfortunately we still live in a capitalist society. The only individuals that benefit from increased automation are the capitalists that own the robots, not the members of the working class that are losing their jobs.

Good point

looking at it from the perspective of the working class automation is scary in the short term, just like the invention of automated farming equipment was scary in 1870, 70-80 percent of the US population was employed in agriculture

Now approximately 2-3 percent of the population is directly employed in agriculture, is flipping burgers really that different?

I know the perfect way to gain 100% employment outlaw all farming machines, but you can see the flaws in that solution. Everyone is hurt by higher cost food and the opportunity cost of all the work that is more complex

True the people that put up the money and took the risk of engineering innovative ways of doing things better see the largest benefits, but the person that gets the innovation wrong many times goes broke.

The "working class" needs to realize that the nature of work is changing and the assembly line education we were all feed is not going to cut it in a fast pace economy we are living in today.

> I know the perfect way to gain 100% employment outlaw all farming machines, but you can see the flaws in that solution.

The capitalist system requires a reserve army of labor so 100% employment cannot coexist with the capitalist mode of production. The only reason outlawing farming machines could allow for 100% unemployment is that it would replace the capitalist mode of production with the foraging mode of production.

> True the people that put up the money and took the risk of engineering innovative ways of doing things better see the largest benefits.

The people that receive the most benefits are the capitalists who control the means of production. Our most talented engineers are being exploited by the capitalists, so they aren't the ones receiving the benefits of production. Some capitalists might just so happen to be engineers but that is not the basis of their social relationship to the means of production.

> The "working class" needs to realize that the nature of work is changing and the assembly line education we were all feed is not going to cut it in a fast pace economy we are living in today.

With this statement you are taking the elitist position that us workers need to be told what we need to "realize" and that we deserve to suffer because what we are doing "is not going to cut it." Workers are in this precarious position entirely because the capitalist class has undeserved control over the means of production. The workers should take control of the means of production and use it to satisfy human needs rather then profit. With communal ownership of the means of production, automation technology will benefit the entire race rather then a minority of greedy capitalists.

Dude, it's not a matter of "workers against capitalists". We are all both workers and capitalists. When we rent out our apartments because we're abroad for a semester we're capitalists. No one has a monopoly on the means of production. If you think you can do better then give it a try. No one is forcing you to work for them. Employers and workers are in a symbiotic relationship, whether they realize it or not.

It seems like you listen to a lot of the propaganda used to separate people into classes that keep them believing that they shouldn't even try. We're living in an age where anyone with an Idea and a little bit of savings can bring a project to fruition.

Stop watching Americana Idol, learn from all the free resources online and lift yourself up from the bootstraps. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something about it!

Stop listening to the self-defeating prophecy feed to you by people trying to separate society for political gain. It's easy to write yourself off, give up, and take the drone job.

Solution: Open Source Everything - Pure Free Market Competition - Less Government Interference.

Cheers

> It seems like you listen to a lot of the propaganda used to separate people into classes that keep them believing that they shouldn't even try.

In the earliest human societies nobody was more entitled to the worlds natural resources then anybody else. According to Heckewelder in Iroquios society "whatever liveth on the land, whatever groweth out of the earth, and all that is in the rivers and waters, was given jointly to all".

Classes emerged when one group of people decided that they were more entitled to the Earth's natural resources then everyone else. These people made these natural resources into their private property and in order to get wealth out of those natural resources they made human workers into their private property as well. These owners became the ruling class and their subjects became the slave class.

Slavery existed in human society for several millennia until it was partially replaced by feudalism. In feudal societies, there was still a ruling class that controlled the natural resources and violently suppressed anyone who opposed them, except that their serfs had a little bit more autonomy and they were tied to the land rather then their masters.

The industrial revolution changed everything. In industrial societies people were able to work in other sectors of the economy besides the primary sector, which allowed some people to live free of the tyranny of the landlords. However, new forms of private property emerged corresponding to the new sectors of the economy. In the manufacturing sector, there was private property in the means of production and the instruments of labor, and in the knowledge sector there was intellectual private property.

The private ownership of our natural resources also still exists. As an example, Gina Rinehart, the world's richest woman, is a mining tycoon who inherited her control of Australia's natural mining resources. Classes have existed throughout written history and with people like Gina Rinehart they apply today as much as ever before.

> Open Source Everything

You want to eliminate the form of private property that exists in your sector of the economy: intellectual property. This is good, but what are you going to do for people working in the primary and secondary sectors of the economy? Do you want farmers to continue to subjected to the tyranny of the landlords and do you want for manufacturing workers to continue to be completely alienated from their workplace?

> Stop watching Americana Idol, learn from all the free resources online and lift yourself up from the bootstraps.

What is with this ad hominem attack? I don't even know what "Americana Idol" is. I spend most of my time studying mathematics and writing computer programs.

While I completely agree that we can't stop progress and automation, our economy is built on the fact that most people work and make money. Unless we move towards socialism for the basic needs like food and shelter (which I personally am ok with), we're looking at a huge population of unemployed starving angry idiots, very very soon.

The "working class" has absolutely no choice in this matter, so blaming it on them by saying 'they need to realize x or y' is quite besides the point. Skill sets and education are largely besides the point too. While it is nice to shuffle around people's skill sets and adapt them to other professions in the short term, in the long run many of those 'skilled' professions will largely be automated too. Even if those workers were capable of acquiring the fabled 'transversal skills' necessary to do the surviving jobs (which many of them most definitely are not), the increase in labor surplus will mean more people will stay permanently jobless.

Hence, a more collective ownership of the (automated) means of production is what counts. That sounds awfully marxist though, so good luck trying to convince people of that.

I personally would love to believe we're going to end up in a leisure society with a guaranteed minimum income supplemented by some tradeable activities we personally find meaningful (utopia, hooray), it seems more likely we're set for rentier capitalism with a large underclass of jobless vagrants though.

> Even if those workers were capable of acquiring the fabled 'transversal skills' necessary to do the surviving jobs (which many of them most definitely are not), the increase in labor surplus will mean more people will stay permanently jobless.

Great! Jobs are a means to an end for many people. The more jobs that get replaced by automation the more prices will fall, and the less you have to work to buy the things you want.

All the resources can never get into the hands of the producers without resorting to violence. Because if it did they would have no one to sell to and they would no longer be producers.

> The more jobs that get replaced by automation the more prices will fall.

I am not as concerned with cheapening junk food as you are. I want to satisfy human needs through tasks like feeding the poor, healing the sick, sheltering the homeless, and educating the illiterate that aren't getting done today because they aren't profitable enough.

The ruling class owns the means of production and the robots that are replacing people's jobs are using these productive forces entirely for their own benefit. In a system whereby the means of production are owned by the poor and working classes, workers can scientifically manage production to satisfy human needs rather then personal profit.

The capitalists wouldn't benefit unless we benefited. We would have no incentive to buy their products unless they are cheaper than the products of the other companies. So we benefit too, through lower prices.

> The capitalists wouldn't benefit unless we benefited.

That is why there are periodic crises of capitalism, such as the current crisis that first started in 2008. The capitalists are cutting wages so low to undercut their competitors that consumers aren't getting enough money in wages to buy those same products.

Except we don't (yet) live in socialism powered by robots. These poor unskilled ex-workers can't have their beers on the beach.

Long-term, it will come to that. Humans will actually do creative, inventive jobs, while robots do all the dirty work. That's until AIs take our creative, inventive jobs. Then we're just going to be their pets.

I'm trying to come up with a one off of the expression "A rising tide raises all boats".

As automation increases, the expected education level for entry into lucrative fields will increase equally. We will all be affected by this.

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