Burger robot poised to disrupt fast food industry
singularityhub.com
singularityhub.com
Their website doesn't appear to have changed since 2012 (when I first heard about and was excited to see that their restaurant was 'coming soon'. It is a shame that they haven't yet done so.
McDonald's corporate would rather build more stores, than reduce overhead for franchisees.
I've never had a problem with service time in most fast food restaurants, so I'm not sure this will improve experience for the customer. It'd be cool to see something like this applied to busy bars, where it could make any drink you wanted.
Food is 25-40% and the rest is rent/profit.
1. Up front payments: Parents and schools subsidized the manufacturing cost of human workers. With machine labor that cost is passed on to the buyer.
2. Energy: Employees feed themselves via their salary, or is often the case with subsidized food stamps. With machine labor the cost of energy falls entirely with the owner.
3. Replacement: If employees die or are otherwise unable to work do to catastrophic events, they can be replaced immediately with little on-boarding cost. If machines fail catastrophically the investment is lost(or needs to be backed up with insurance). Also, on-boarding the new machine requires specialized higher wage human labor.
4. Repair and modernization: As machines age they incure greater upkeep costs. They also become obsolete by newer machines. As employees age and become less capable of performing their duties, they can be let go, free of charge, for poor performance and replaced with a younger worker.
Much like was discovered with slavery and indentured servitude, ownership of labor and free labor can be fairly close in cost if you know how to really exploit workers effectively. Harvesting in agriculture is an interesting place to look at how competitive exploited human labor can be compared to machine automation.
Any business were machines having taking over, yet, is an example of that.
There is much more incentive to turn an $80K a year programming position into a $30K a year lower skilled position using point and click tools to achieve the same task as the margin differences are much much higher.
EDIT: You must remember that machine automation is not infinitely and immediately scalable the way software automation is. With agriculture, automation providers can only manufacture enough to meet current demand and cannot simply lower prices increase volume and market share because they have real raw material floors to their costs.
I'm not sure what it means for the people. In one way, fast food is the only obvious work available for them. That's the only reason they do it, nobody likes it otherwise. But on the other hand, perhaps it's only the most obvious choice available. Perhaps more drastic choices, perhaps involving moving to new cities, would become more attractive and hopefully get them out of wage slavery.
I'm grasping at straws. This is probably going to be bad for them.
We're much more likely to see things like doctors, lawyers and plumbers replaced with low skill workers that simply act out the last physical mile dictated by either fully automated decision making or software provided decision efficiency that allows for example, only one doctor to diagnose every patient at a hospital. The last physical mile is much more expensive than high level decision making to replace at scale.
Well, the vast majority of low-skill work has already been replaced by relatively simple machines -- harvesting wheat, digging holes, moving big heavy objects around. Now we're in a situation where the remaining low-skill jobs are things which are easy for a human but hard for a machine, like harvesting oranges, or (for that matter) making hamburgers.
Assume that it's not perfect, and you have about 2 weeks of downtime a year, plus 2 additional days of down time a week, just for service, small issues, etc.
So you'd have to buy a few to make it work, so their downtime didn't too significantly overlap, but that's $8/hr40hrs/wk50wk/yr*3shifts = $48000 per year.
So if it essentially does the work of 3 people (120 hours per week), then you can come out ahead on replacing one station with a robot (assuming you have 3-4, so downtime doesn't totally kill production).
Edit: I was thinking of something like this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baxter_(robot)
This may of course be on the low side, but I also figured in only working 250 days of the year. It's likely that uptime of a commercial product would be somewhat better than this.
My main point was that we're surprisingly close to the point where it's cheaper (in just a wage-versus-cost-of-ownership sense) to have robots replace more general purpose workers.
You're comparing the one-time acquisition cost of the robot to the ongoing cost of the worker; you are ignoring both the acquisition costs of workers and the maintenance costs of robots, and comparing unlike components of the robot and workers total costs as if they were the total costs of each.
For example, blacksmiths got replaced by automation. Highly skilled labor, replaced by machines + lower/unskilled labor.
Burger automation is the fantasy of automating all the way to the bottom of the skill pile. But I would put my money on new waves of automation that disrupt skilled labor. There may come a day when we reach the bottom of the pile and utopia/dystopia is realized, but I don't think that day is today.
Automatic dishwashers, laundry machines, vacuums, automatic car washes are all widely known examples of replacing low-skill labor with machines. There's also the enormous amount of low-skill labor that's been removed in agriculture and the building trade (think: digging ditches by hand, which they still do in 3rd world countries).
Even food preparation labor has been dramatically reduced already at home thanks to the microwave and the logistic possibility of shipping and storing frozen foods (not to mention the proliferation of restaurants).
Low-skill activities are almost always the easiest things to automate (that's why we call them "low skill"). Things that require fuzzy human judgement, like managing people, are hard—if not impossible—to automate.
The reason developing countries still dig ditches by hand is because it is still cheaper. The reason for that is not access to automation but the massive wage differential that makes that labor so cheap. Its the low cost of the labor that actually protects it from automation. So therefore it follows that expensive(high and mid skill labor which is even more scalable due to lower material costs since it can typically be automated without machines) will be the most profitable segment to either automate away or reduce to low skill labor.
I absolutely agree. One of the startups I'm CTO at builds software that enables exactly that; however, it also results in new jobs being created at a higher-level (similar to the situation with robots I suppose).
Many crops are harvested by machines, replacing some of the absolute lowest skilled jobs.
And how many tellers have been replaced by ATMs, factory works by industrial robots, or secretaries by computers?
Or it could mean management just stuffing the money into their pockets. Somehow I think this is the most likely outcome.
Company: Momentum Machines makes the most advanced culinary robots in the world. Our first device is capable of making gourmet quality hamburgers from start to finish with no human interaction. The efficiency savings of our technology alone can cut the price of high quality food in half, making it affordable for the first time to the vast majority of Americans. This fundamental shift in the cost equation is augmented by improved quality, precision, customizability, sanitation, and consistency to the restaurant industry, ultimately reinventing the customer experience.
Team and position: We are a team of Stanford and Berkeley educated engineers with roots in machine design, robotics, and restaurant operations. Currently, we are searching for an experts in embedded systems and computer vision as our team grows. Please feel free to email us at callings@momentummachines.com if you would like more information.
Middle management and entry to mid level white collar work are by far the most susceptible. Also, lower end knowledge jobs. Current trends show low skilled workers getting cheaper and raw materials getting more expensive so at least for the near term, low skill worker replacement appears highly unlikely.
Much like the late 90's mid and low level computer programers etc will likely be eliminated, or reduced to a low skill job, long before low skill workers are replaced by machines.
This company hopefully does the work to ID each bot-module needed for dishes that are just a combination of separate ingredients that require little preparation at the time you're assembling the dish.
Also, this thing is IDEAL for stadiums and high-density events. Every stadium should have one.
This will also be awesome for food trucks. Every military will probably invade for this.
THis device will succeed assuming it is real, but that doesnt mean it would replace fast food restaurants.
Replacing people with robots works great if you're replacing large numbers at the same factory, because firing workers and hiring robot repairmen still saves you a lot of money. If you're only going to replace one or two workers per site, though, it sounds pointless.
Stop and Shop supermarkets have Symbol guns running Windows CE, and an iOS/Android app. You scan as you shop. When you get to a register you scan the "End Order" barcode on the register, then scan your Stop & Shop card. That's it. Pay.
They even recently revved their software to speed up the process and reduce processing delays. I can check out an entire cart in about 40 seconds, and everything is already bagged the way I want it.
(Incidentally, I'm really tired of the "That's what people said about such-and-such" counterargument to any attempt to predict the future success or failure of a given technology. "Hey, I don't think there's a big market for home-based chemical vapour deposition systems" "Oh yeah, that's what they said about personal computers, hah!".)
Anyway, self-checkout systems are instrinsically less prone to failure since they don't have all those things I mentioned like moving parts and messy substances to foul them up, and a single failure doesn't shut the entire supermarket down.
I don't just order burgers. Fries, drinks, ice cream, chicken, salads, wraps, and many more, are the typical items on a fast food menu. Perhaps in really busy stores there is a person dedicated to burgers and nothing else, but would this really reduce the amount of labor you would need? I suspect not (I have no data to back that up).
Sooner or later all of this will be automated - this machine, by itself, isn't going to make much of a dent in my opinion.
The company even addresses the issue on its website: "The issue of machines and job displacement has been around for centuries and economists generally accept that technology like ours actually causes an increase in employment. The three factors that contribute to this are 1. the company that makes the robots must hire new employees, 2. the restaurant that uses our robots can expand their frontiers of production which requires hiring more people, and 3. the general public saves money on the reduced cost of our burgers. This saved money can then be spent on the rest of the economy. We take these issues very seriously so please feel free to tell us how we can help with this transition."
We don't need to take them at their word because something like this is inevitable anyway. We just need to enjoy the burgers!
A thousand years ago, perhaps even a hundred years ago, 90% of jobs could quite easily be performed by someone with a two-digit IQ, because they were manual labour. But as we replace manual workers with robot repairmen we run into the problem that some people who were smart enough to be manual labourers just aren't smart enough to be robot repairmen.
Eventually we reach the point (which I think we're already pushing against) where the number of jobs which can be performed by people with (say) two-digit IQs is less than the number of people with two-digit IQs. What do we do then? Put them all on welfare and wait for our cities to burn down? Invent bullshit make-work jobs to keep them busy? Other more controversial solutions which I dare not mention?
So the labor costs will not lower significantly, but the quality will increase.
I guess refilling and cleaning will remain for some time.
24 square feet sounds impressive though.
Have you looked inside a mcdonalds kitchen lately? They've automated quite a bit of it already.
I don't forsee a machine handling the entire process anytime soon. There are too many edge cases.
(And I remember quite a bit of expletive-laden rage at the automation we did have when I worked there.. when it breaks, it's annoying. Fry dispenser not loading baskets, things getting stuck in the bun toaster and holding up the whole line, timer buttons on the holding cabinets failing so you can't tell what's been there for how long..)
Assuming a reasonably busy location where there is no such thing as a "slow time" (airport, central metro area, etc), that means you have to pay six people around $8 an hour for 8 hours. Works out to $384/day on kitchen labor, give or take.
$2688/week, $139,776/yr. (And that's before taxes, local wage variances and so on - this is a very rough, very conservative estimate)
There's no way this thing will cost less than $150k - a shake/ice cream machine costs aroud 50-75k for a much, much more simple set of parts (liquid pumps, an auger, and a compressor). And that's before you get into maintenance costs and the cost of having a single point of failure.
Example: One of your kitchen guys gets sick, you can usually call in a replacement, shift someone from elsewhere in the store, or just run one person down and deal with it. The Burgermaker 9000, on the other hand, say the tomato slicer breaks? You're down. Completely and totally.
Combine that with the insane time to break even and see even a penny of ROI.. it ain't happening. Not anytime soon.
The reality is that the more the income gap grows between the servers and those served, the less profitable automation becomes. There is a reason low wages jobs are growing, not shrinking in the US.
Can anyone verify that?
http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4616233_mcdonalds-make-burgers....
Then generally they were placed in warming bins unless it was rush when they were immediately needed for burgers.
It was a horrible job, mostly because I am a diligent employee even at a McDonald's, my fellow employees were not, and the assistant manager was dealing meth to many of them. He was the franchise owner's son.
If you do ever end up down here, it may also be helpful to know that Burger King is known as Hungry Jack's.