Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Minimum-Wage-Crushing, Burger-Flipping Robot

 The Burning Platform writes:

Do you really think McDonalds will be paying burger flippers $15 per hour?

Liberal do-gooders are so funny when they attempt to control the world. Their latest media aided cause is doubling the pay of fast food workers so they can have a living wage. Fast food jobs are for teenagers and adult dullards. You can’t earn a living working as a fast food worker. It seems only liberals don’t get it. Obama and his minions can push for an increase in the minimum wage and doubling of fast food wages, but it will just result in more people joining his free shit SNAP army. You can bet that McDonalds, Wendys, Burger King and every other bottom line oriented corporation is experimenting with RoboBurgerBoy. Robots will be replacing more dullards over the coming years.

Meet the Robot That Makes 360 Gourmet Burgers Per Hour

By Brian Merchant


No human hand touched this burger.

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


(ht Travis Holte)

11 comments:

  1. Is it any suprise people are forced into trying to survive on a fast food job? The Fed and the government destroyed the rest of the economy. Now the government will destroy the jobs in the fast food industry.

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  2. can't the machine toast properly? it seems to be in charcoal generation mode. the stack in that photo looks most unappetizing due to that one obvious flaw.

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    Replies
    1. Dear, Anonymous @9:59 AM,

      Some people like their burgers burnt like that. It Is a customized burger after all.

      One the one hand, this robot assembly line seems like a great idea of progress, on the other hand, if minimum wage laws aren't eliminated soon there's going to all kinds of terrible misery and unemployment,

      Not to downplay that misery, the competition might run small diners out of business, short skirt watching would suffer, followed by a decrease in short skirt sales, where would such a ripple effect end?

      - PanarchistamericanHelot

      Delete
  3. "San Francisco-based robotics company debuted its burger-preparing machine last year."

    Too funny!

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  4. Informatoin???
    Sounds like they need a robotic proof-reader. Uh, wait! Isn't that what "Spell-check" is?

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  5. Where can I try one?!

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  6. There are actually people that support a higher minimum wage, even at $25/hour precisely because it will cause human jobs to be lost and promote this kind of machinery.

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  7. We buy burgers in a local Herfy's joint which is owned and operated by a Chinese couple and their two college-aged kids. The only way local fast food joins could survive is using such a family/co-op model so they don't have to pay salaries to individual family members,or they can inflate salaries as required by law, as an accounting shtick, beyond what they would pay a stranger.

    ~~YL

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  8. The following to infinity is an
    economy benchmarked to no time
    value on money to infinity, until
    they
    change over.

    http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=vxx&inst&freq=2&show=&time=20


    http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=sh&inst&freq=2&show=&time=20


    http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=pst&inst&freq=2&show=&time=20


    The Fed's hoping trickle down
    will suffice, that people will
    build an economy despite its being
    centric to TBTF.


    I personally wouldn't want to be
    the lender for any length of time
    even after rates should tick up
    some.

    We're locked out of the cheap
    borrowing game because of the
    wide net interest margin.

    Otherwise the logically larger
    demand for cheap credit would
    self-correct the system just as
    those who SOLD the banks'
    bubble could've/should've ended
    the crisis long ago.

    Those who put down 5/10%
    should have/should've had
    non-recourse, and the banks
    should have skin in the game.

    Mod's/Loss Sharing have been
    essentially holding borrowers' feet
    to the fire, those who SOLD the
    bubble facing a deer in the
    headlights policy of hand it over.

    Those who did sell and who
    haven't bought into the new
    artificial bubble, and I'm in the
    camp that thinks even that much
    is illusory, are simply spending
    less, where safe money's
    concerned, and waiting
    out the folly.

    The more fundamental crime
    against those who legitimately
    SOLD the bubble created by the
    banks was the theft of their
    "put up or shut up'ability."


    The bankers may have attended
    Wharton, but they preferred class
    in Atlantic City.

    This is perhaps fastest understood
    simply by watching "A Big Hand For
    The Little Lady."

    http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=big%20hand%20for%20the%20little%20lady&sm=1


    The whole thing's about self-dealing
    a self-made bubble to sell and an
    adversity to buy, and it's essentially
    thoroughly petty in its conception.

    Anyone so positioned and allow to
    do so can sell credit to produce
    widgets to one's own competitors
    in a field dominated by oneself, only
    to flood the widget market, and
    then call the loans.

    Disclosure/information above
    board's the main thing, and again,
    those who put down 5/10% should
    have/should've had non-recourse,
    and the banks should have
    skin in the game.


    Keynesians would say falling
    GNP led to a drop in money supply,
    vs. the monetarists' drop in money
    supply led to a fall in GNP.


    For some reason some Keynesians
    fail mentioning privatization
    where its occurrence is inappropriate.







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  9. what do the 1% think will happen when there are no more jobs that can be done by our minimally educated citizenry? who then will be able to afford to buy their machine-made products? it is a race to the bottom and nobody sees this. the dystopian future [extrapolated from current trends] in "Manna" looks more plausible by the day.

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