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Meet "Smart Restaurant": The Minimum-Wage-Crushing, Burger-Flipping Robot
With a seemingly endless line of talking-heads willing to ignore essentially every study that has been undertaken with regard the effects of raising the minimum-wage; and propose what is merely populist vote-getting 'benefits' for the ever-increasing not-1% who benefitted from Ben Bernnake's bubbles - we thought the following burger-flipping robot was a perfect example of unintended consequences for the fast food industry's workers. With humans needing to take breaks, have at least 4 weekend days off per month, and demanding ever-increasing minimum-wage for a job that was never meant to provide a 'living-wage', Momentum Machines - a San Francisco-based robotics company has unveiled the 'Smart Restaurants' machine which is capable of making ~360 'customized' gourmet burgers per hour without the aid of a human. First Jamba Juice, then Applebees, next McDonalds...
As Brian Merchant ( @bcmerchant ) explains (via The Burning Platform blog),
Meet the Robot That Makes 360 Gourmet Burgers Per Hour
No human hand touched this hamburger. It was made entirely by robots
.
One robot, rather—a 24 square foot gourmet-hamburger-flipping behemoth built by Momentum Machines. It looks like this:
The San Francisco-based robotics company debuted its burger-preparing machine last year. It can whip up hundreds of burgers an hour, take custom orders, and it uses top-shelf ingredients for its inputs. Now Momentum is proposing a chain of ‘smart restaurants’ that eschew human cooks altogether.
Food Beast points us to the Momentum’s official release, where the company blares:
“Fast food doesn’t have to have a negative connotation anymore. With our technology, a restaurant can offer gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices. Our alpha machine replaces all of the hamburger line cooks in a restaurant. It does everything employees can do except better.”
And what might this robotic burger cook of the future do better than the slow, inefficient, wage-sucking line cooks of yore?
- It slices toppings like tomatoes and pickles only immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible.
- …custom meat grinds for every single customer. Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground after you place your order? No problem.
- It’s more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour.
Furthermore, the “labor savings allow a restaurant to spend approximately twice as much on high quality ingredients and the gourmet cooking techniques make the ingredients taste that much better.” Hear that? Without all those cumbersome human workers, your hamburger will be twice as good. For the same cost.
I don’t doubt this is where we’re heading; robots are making inroads in manufacturing, farming, and they’re doing more domestic work around the house, too. Yeah, robots are taking our jobs, and it’s not a question of if, but when and how. Economists often treat the service industry as some last bastion of downsize-proof labor, but, clearly, robots will make sandwiches and take orders, too.
A future where we can get gourmet burgers, cheaply and on the quick, sounds pretty nice. But that future will also have structural unemployment, unless we start taking major strides to rethink and reform how we work in a world where robots are doing much of the heavy lifting. If we can, with robots flipping all the burgers, and the right social policies, maybe at least a semi-techno-utopia is on the way…
Of course, in a world of de minimus capital costs (courtesy of an apparently job-creating-mandated Fed), why wouldn't the McDonalds of the world adopt such a strategy. The outcome, as we explained before, is all too obvious...
What happens after that should be clear to everyone: more unemployment, lower wages for the remaining employees, worse worker morale, but even higher profits to holders of capital. And so on. Because in a world in which technology makes the unqualified worker utterely irrelevant, this is what is known as "progress."
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How can this be an authentic burger flipper when it has neither acne or a badge with stars on it as confirmation of the minimum wage?
They turned the whopper from Nuclear war game player into a whopper building robot... Damn u all to hell
So, how long after these machines start replacing burger flippers will it be before the manufacturer starts outsourcing its manufacturing?
negotiations in progress
Racist company, machine should be in black or be wearing a burka!
Great, we can produce hamburger machines, but we can't come up with alternative methods for transportation and implement alternative fuel systems.
Nothing to do with minimum wage. Has everything to do with technological advancements. Which like, as I predicted years ago, by making cell phones legal to use while driving you will soon have vehicles come from the factory with in dash entertainment centers increasing deaths by distracted drivers. Which of course leads to public demand that laws be made making vehicles crash worthy enough to withstand stupid.
People care nothing for human consequences as long as they placated by cheap, convienent and entertaining.
Not against technology. Just get a bit concerned when technology outpaces humans intellectual capability of using it wisely.
Not to worry however. Sooner or later a rouge state or mad group will obtain a nuclear bomb. They will get it across the border. There will be enough toast to put McD's out of business.
This will be far to costly for consumables because it starts with fresh ingredients. Maybe version 2 will use pink slime as an input.
Lose one burger flipper, gain one telephone support tech, one overtheroad repair rtech and two night clean-the-machine-minimum-wage-fast-food-employees.
These robots are being exploited! We need a living wage for them.
This thing looks pretty neat. I'm a big fan of robots and automation so I guess I don't fit in with the slamming of using something like this. I understand the human aspect of it with lost jobs and that is a shame yet that doesn't change the fact this is a neat invention and the food will probably come out better cooked/prepared using it.
I think the key is for people to make the case of why they should still have a job flipping burgers and are better than using this machine. If you can make your case of why you're better suited than a machine then you will still have the job. Just saying "it's no fair. I need to work!" while doing an inferior job than the machine will isn't much of an incentive to a company however harsh that may sound.
I don't want no 'baked' burger LeRoy. Check out the info graphic. It claims their oven will bake better burgers than a griddle.
Great news, it's about time people get serious about education. You don't learn, you get obsolete.
Remember this: union wage contracts are pegged to the min. wage. When the min. wage goes up, union wages go up; when union wages go up union dues increase allowing union MANAGEMENT to buy more politicians-like 0bozo & Co.
I think the robot is GREAT!
Please Sir, can we at least manufacture the robot in the good ol' USA
Don't be ridiculous, Sonny.
And then one day...they'll just start grinding up the useless eaters of the defunct Free Shit Army in order to feed the rest of us. We already know how this ends up folks...
Soilent Green is Peeeeoooople!!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zAFA-hamZ0
LOL
So hey, who's buying silver today?! I fuckin' love that stuff!!! It's on sale every damn day it seems...until one day it will not be, and you know what that's gonna mean...so keep on stackin', folks!
The more machines, the more people needed to keep them running. I was going to work the other day where I work with CCNPs who couldn't configure a switch to save their lives. Stopped at the local fill-er-up, avoiding the lanes with the yellow bags over the nozzle saying "out of service". But this time I noticed something. A guy in a white service truck in one of those lanes with the yellow bags, and he was calibrating the pump by pumping gas into this portable can. I walked up and asked him "hey, do you work for this station or a contractor"? He said he works for one of the biggest service companies in the nation that handles all the stations. I asked him if their was a cerification for servicing these computer pumps, card readers, and internet lines they run on. He said yeah, it's a fairly easy cert to get and get trained on. I asked him if there was any shortage of work, seeing as how there are these yellow out of service bags at nearly every station I pull in to. He said nah, there's more work than anyone wants, overtime too. Smart kid. I don't think he'll be wanting for work any time soon.
Silver For The People
It's going to be pretty great when the robot burger making machines become self-aware and proceed to start up a union.
if you can make it you can break it. What happens when the blade is too dull to slice the tomatoe? What happens when three green tomatoes make it into the machine? What happens when the meat is spoiled due to poor food handling and no one smells it before it is served or feels it is slimy? If man builds it it can fail plain and simple. Wait until the county health inspector puts his hand out to approve your health certification only after you take the machine completely apart so he can see all surfaces that touch food. Think I am kiddin then you have never dealt with a health inspector. I have. Cute and sexy. Companies make money by hiring people who are willing to bust ass and do the work of one and a half people. Those the make into managers and trainers. There is no substitute for hard work and the willingness to tough it out. The world owes no one a living. As to hunting for your food good luck. Average age of American hunter is 47. Who is going to teach you? Who is going to share their best hunting spots with you. It is a brave new world if you think you are going to hunt to feed your family. I have been hunting for 45 years and I learn something new every time I go to the field. It is no different for farming or growing a garden. It is all work. We as Americans have no clue how blessed we are to have so much free time, not the unemployed but the employed. Work is a four letter word and always will be. I met the family that designed the machine that wrapped butter and margerine quarters. They became multi millionaires. Want to wrap them by hand? If machines make burgers then they need to design one that cleans and waxes floors with no human help. I flipped burgers two years in college. Fun job. Made friends and took care of customers. It is called work.
This is all well and good but,,,
What about those of us who enjoy the risk taking aspect of ordering a burger touched by the fingers of a minimum wage earner who may not have washed their hands after leaving the restroom, or failed to properly cover their nose before that ill-timed sneeze....?
What's become of the love of the real and legitimate thrill-seeking and risk taking that only comes from jumping out or a perfectly good airplane, or eating at the neighborhood McDonalds...?????
Perhaps Momentum Machines should concentrate on making a machine to replace a Senator. Should not be too difficult - only two moving parts - mouth and anus, both interchangeable.
Wouldn't actually have to produce anything either
+1000 - excellent!
"If we can, with robots flipping all the burgers, and the right social policies, maybe at least a semi-techno-utopia is on the way…"
Robotics and artificial intelligence is the wave of the future. Wait until AI starts taking over management positions. AI will even be able to take over the CEO position, making better decisions than a human CEO.
So, the job security of the future lies with positions tasked with keeping the AI machines piped full of electricity, and positions tasked with preventing the cleaning crew from accidentally unplugging server racks while periodically mopping the datacenter floors?
Darn, and here I thought the jobs of the future would be in developing and refining nutrionally complete and accurate ceramic and polymer matrixes that would allow us to 3d print a tasty representation of a fully cooked burger patty, or a perfectly refrigerated pickle slice, so that the NEXT generation of automated burger-making machines would not need to maintain any semblance of organically sourced bio-inputs whatsoever....
I am already investing 5-10 years AHEAD of this latest labor-killing development, Bitchez.
Edible, printable, polymeric ground "meat" compounds - the wave of the future-future, and I'll bet Monsanto is already monopolizing the patents on the processes necessary to determine the correct and accurate "flavors" inherent to a variety of different slices of cheese-food.
Hmm... wait- most of those patents were actually being locked down 40+ years ago during the 70's, weren't they?
DAMN - I am already 4 decades too late for the next wave of the future-future.
I am the world's worst investor - better just go buy more guns, gold, and toilet paper.
soylent green will be served this way.
Dear Tyler, Yes. It does make the unqualified worker irrelevant. But the bigger question that needs to be asked is why is it that schools keep teaching useless skills to students? You would think that once kids have the basic of reading and writing, that schools would focus on things like, critical thinking, design skills, economics, entrepreneurship, health, etc so that there nearly everyone would be focused on creating value rather than working in dead end jobs. Once again highlighting the dangers of depending on government for one's education. Can you say "home schooling"!
'Gourmet burgers' is a contradictio in terminis.
please, please raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour - so I can get my better, robot-made burger sooner rather than later
While the robots will come regardless, here's a review of studies of minimum wage changes that finds a statistically insignificant but positive impact of wage increases on poverty levels. http://arindube.com/2014/01/14/separating-signal-from-noise-a-review-of-...