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> I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Whenever I hear statements like this, I cannot h

> I can not imagine any jobs that an average, unskilled human can do, that a machine won't soon be able to do. Whenever I hear statements like this, I cannot help but think that the person making the statement has never done a week of work as "unskilled labour" themselves. (No offense intended.) Be it flipping burgers or building houses, there is improvisation both when it comes to high-level intelligence and in the ranges of motion the human limbs go through that make robots a complete non-starter. Adding to that, a cheap robot arm that can lift as much as a four-year-old is $20k purchase price, plus another $20k for the controller/AI system, and probably $2k-$3k a year in maintenance. Figure four year depreciation when run 8 hours each day, you're looking at a yearly cost of $12k. That's compared to ~$15k for someone working full time on minimum wage. Take into account the huge process of switching your business over to robots, and it just doesn't look good. Also, we don't need AI to take a customers order, you just need a touchscreen, or even just an app. The tech has been here for more than a decade. Why don't restaurants do this?

monk_e_boy 10y ago
They are rolling out touch screen ordering for our local macdonalds. I don't think they fire anyone, but throughput is higher (so I guess that is one or two less jobs per customer served)
- vkou 10y ago
  They've rolled out touch screen grocery checkout... Pretty much everywhere over the last decade. My local QFC used to employ a dozen cashiers - now, they employ 4. What jobs have been created by this automation? This certainly didn't create 8 (times the # of stores) jobs for software engineers - otherwise, this wouldn't have been profitable for QFC. Does anyone seriously think that those 8 people went on to do work that paid better, or was more valuable then putting groceries into plastic bags? If so, why haven't they done that before they were put out of work by a machine? Do engineers not see a connection between this, and the fact that they get to step over human excrement on their way to work?
  - serge2k 10y ago
    I hate those self checkout machines. They are slow and constantly try to error out and alert a human to help me. I'm capable of bagging groceries, just let me do it. still, there is rarely a line.
    - jdmichal 10y ago
      I have a special hatred for self-checkout machines that attempt to monitor your bagging without an escape mechanism. Let loss prevention do their damn job and let me give you my money already. At least I can still vote with my feet and always go to a cashier in these places. Someday I probably won't be able to.
      - vkou 10y ago
        That sounds like hell. A buggy machine talking down to me hits quite a few of my buttons, but at least it doesn't interrupt my checkout process when it thinks I'm stealing groceries. (And given how often the alarm goes off, the loss prevention guys just ignore it.)
      - unclenoriega 10y ago
        There was a Planet Money segment about these. (I think it was Planet Money.) Apparently, there's a setting on these machines for the balance between convenience and loss prevention. It's up to the stores to set it where they want.
    - megablast 10y ago
      They are incredibly simple to use if you follow the 3 instructions. But hey, people can't even signal when turning reliable, of course a lot of people are going to have problems with these machines.
      - tossedaway334 10y ago
        WORKS4ME, bug report marked CLOSED
      - 10y ago
mars4rp 10y ago
the price of robots keeps going down and price of humans keeps going up, somewhere in near future it doesn't make sense to hire a human for a min wage job. we are not there but we will be. Restaurants are doing that, go download Starbucks or Yelp app and you see.
6d6b73 10y ago
"The tech has been here for more than a decade. Why don't restaurants do this?" I'm in automation, so maybe I can answer this. Small businesses don't have necessary capital to implement automation solutions. While they know that in a long term this would be good idea, they have a hard time doing it. Large corporations are slower to implement any major change, and sometimes they are limited by contracts they have with their clients. Few times when I proposed automation solution to business doing with the gov, the response was "We have contract that requires us to employ these people. We want to automate but we can't". But once competition automates, all bets are off everyone must automate or perish.
- VLM 10y ago
  The restaurant business is all about signalling and having the right people doing the right imaginative artisinal ultra-trendy hand labor. Its very much like the prostitution industry or pr0n. None of those are going to automate any time soon.
  - funkymike 10y ago
    There's a big difference between McDonald's and a high end restaurant, even if you just order a hamburger. McDonald's has already been working on automation. Have you noticed that humans no longer dispense drinks there? They are also working on getting rid of the human order takers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34T3IkAtOrc&ab_channel=McDonald%27s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34T3IkAtOrc&ab_channel=McDon... For restaurants where one of the main draws is price I think automation is inevitable as a cost saving measure.
    - laughfactory 10y ago
      Agreed. There will probably always be specialty and high end restaurants, where it's more about the experience (in some way). If you want mass produced, a robot is great for that. But they're not so great for limited runs. Which is to say that general purpose robots (for any application) are a long way off. I think we'll adapt as a race, but it'll be mighty uncomfortable for some (say those reliant on low skilled jobs, truck drivers, fast food workers, etc.). It's not to say that the way things will get done will even look the same as the transition occurs. I suspect many things will look different. For instance, rather than speaking your order to a person at McDonald's, you make your selections from a menu and a machine creates it, and then you pick it up and take it back to your table. Redbox already does this for movie rental. Think about how they've changed what we expect of renting movies... Same for home construction, particularly of the cookie cutter variety. Rather than a crew of people going through the motions to excavate a hole, lay a foundation, frame the house, put up drywall, paint, etc., Maybe it'll just be 3D printed with a huge machine (this tech actually exists, if in its infancy). Or maybe we'll switch to brick houses because they make brick laying robots (not humanoid, more like boxes which can move around). The next decade or two will be interesting!
nickparker 10y ago
I think your analysis is based on shallower automation than we'll actually see. Let's assume your robot arm example is about a frycook at a burger joint. I agree a robot arm isn't an effective way to replace the frycook, but a specialized system like Momentum Machines is developing[1] will be. The automated fast food joint isn't a regular one with robot arms instead of people, it's a box the size of a small office that takes raw ingredients from a stockpile inside of it and creates fully assembled burgers, fries, chicken strips, and onion rings without any human interaction. Automation hardware will strike a middle ground between specialization and reuse. Eg the deep fryer will be able to cook several different meals, but it will still only have 1-2 degrees of freedom for putting stuff in and taking it out. Similar story for the grilling surface, veggie chopping system, and the plating / packaging mechanism. This is much cheaper, faster, and more reliable than truly general purpose robot arms. More importantly though, it takes dramatically less space than a conventional restaurant, so you can plop your company's food-making-box down in Times Square and actually make a profit, while everyone else is stuck four blocks away to break even on the real estate. The stories will be different in different sectors, but in general I think the coming automation wave is a bunch of quantitative changes coming together to form qualitative ones like this. You could probably build a burger-maker a decade ago too, but the hardware and design know-how necessary have gotten orders of magnitude cheaper and more abundant, and so now it's actually happening. [1]: http://momentummachines.com/ http://momentummachines.com/
- robalfonso 10y ago
  I keep telling people the Mcdonalds of the future isn't going to be the same large box with robots running around - it will be much smaller, because robots can use every inch of the kitchen area unlike humans. I think this also has some interesting implications for real estate long term - if every mcdonalds needs 50% of the space they currently occupy over time that real estate will be put back in the market, multiply that by every organization doing that and it has some follow in implications that I can't forsee but find very interesting.
  - K0SM0S 10y ago
    Very true, never thought of it this way. Add to that the fact that robots don't have the same needs (can operate with little air/heat/light, don't even need to get out of the room, much less safety concerns in general and practically 0% comfort). You could build kitchens in basements or beneath roofs and save 100% of the floor surface for customers.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
vkou 10y ago
Why would you run your robot arm for only 8 hours a day? Does it also ask for sick days, weekends, holidays, and maternity leave? Why does it irreparably break after 4 years? Even if all of those assumptions hold today, what makes you think the the robot arm of a decade from now won't cost $20,000, but, with minor maintenance, operate for a decade?

monk_e_boy 10y ago

They are rolling out touch screen ordering for our local macdonalds. I don't think they fire anyone, but throughput is higher (so I guess that is one or two less jobs per customer served)

vkou 10y ago
They've rolled out touch screen grocery checkout... Pretty much everywhere over the last decade. My local QFC used to employ a dozen cashiers - now, they employ 4. What jobs have been created by this automation? This certainly didn't create 8 (times the # of stores) jobs for software engineers - otherwise, this wouldn't have been profitable for QFC. Does anyone seriously think that those 8 people went on to do work that paid better, or was more valuable then putting groceries into plastic bags? If so, why haven't they done that before they were put out of work by a machine? Do engineers not see a connection between this, and the fact that they get to step over human excrement on their way to work?
- serge2k 10y ago
  I hate those self checkout machines. They are slow and constantly try to error out and alert a human to help me. I'm capable of bagging groceries, just let me do it. still, there is rarely a line.
  - jdmichal 10y ago
    I have a special hatred for self-checkout machines that attempt to monitor your bagging without an escape mechanism. Let loss prevention do their damn job and let me give you my money already. At least I can still vote with my feet and always go to a cashier in these places. Someday I probably won't be able to.
    - vkou 10y ago
      That sounds like hell. A buggy machine talking down to me hits quite a few of my buttons, but at least it doesn't interrupt my checkout process when it thinks I'm stealing groceries. (And given how often the alarm goes off, the loss prevention guys just ignore it.)
    - unclenoriega 10y ago
      There was a Planet Money segment about these. (I think it was Planet Money.) Apparently, there's a setting on these machines for the balance between convenience and loss prevention. It's up to the stores to set it where they want.
  - megablast 10y ago
    They are incredibly simple to use if you follow the 3 instructions. But hey, people can't even signal when turning reliable, of course a lot of people are going to have problems with these machines.
    - tossedaway334 10y ago
      WORKS4ME, bug report marked CLOSED
    - 10y ago

mars4rp 10y ago

the price of robots keeps going down and price of humans keeps going up, somewhere in near future it doesn't make sense to hire a human for a min wage job. we are not there but we will be. Restaurants are doing that, go download Starbucks or Yelp app and you see.

6d6b73 10y ago

"The tech has been here for more than a decade. Why don't restaurants do this?" I'm in automation, so maybe I can answer this. Small businesses don't have necessary capital to implement automation solutions. While they know that in a long term this would be good idea, they have a hard time doing it. Large corporations are slower to implement any major change, and sometimes they are limited by contracts they have with their clients. Few times when I proposed automation solution to business doing with the gov, the response was "We have contract that requires us to employ these people. We want to automate but we can't". But once competition automates, all bets are off everyone must automate or perish.

VLM 10y ago
The restaurant business is all about signalling and having the right people doing the right imaginative artisinal ultra-trendy hand labor. Its very much like the prostitution industry or pr0n. None of those are going to automate any time soon.
- funkymike 10y ago
  There's a big difference between McDonald's and a high end restaurant, even if you just order a hamburger. McDonald's has already been working on automation. Have you noticed that humans no longer dispense drinks there? They are also working on getting rid of the human order takers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34T3IkAtOrc&ab_channel=McDonald%27s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34T3IkAtOrc&ab_channel=McDon... For restaurants where one of the main draws is price I think automation is inevitable as a cost saving measure.
  - laughfactory 10y ago
    Agreed. There will probably always be specialty and high end restaurants, where it's more about the experience (in some way). If you want mass produced, a robot is great for that. But they're not so great for limited runs. Which is to say that general purpose robots (for any application) are a long way off. I think we'll adapt as a race, but it'll be mighty uncomfortable for some (say those reliant on low skilled jobs, truck drivers, fast food workers, etc.). It's not to say that the way things will get done will even look the same as the transition occurs. I suspect many things will look different. For instance, rather than speaking your order to a person at McDonald's, you make your selections from a menu and a machine creates it, and then you pick it up and take it back to your table. Redbox already does this for movie rental. Think about how they've changed what we expect of renting movies... Same for home construction, particularly of the cookie cutter variety. Rather than a crew of people going through the motions to excavate a hole, lay a foundation, frame the house, put up drywall, paint, etc., Maybe it'll just be 3D printed with a huge machine (this tech actually exists, if in its infancy). Or maybe we'll switch to brick houses because they make brick laying robots (not humanoid, more like boxes which can move around). The next decade or two will be interesting!

nickparker 10y ago

I think your analysis is based on shallower automation than we'll actually see. Let's assume your robot arm example is about a frycook at a burger joint. I agree a robot arm isn't an effective way to replace the frycook, but a specialized system like Momentum Machines is developing[1] will be. The automated fast food joint isn't a regular one with robot arms instead of people, it's a box the size of a small office that takes raw ingredients from a stockpile inside of it and creates fully assembled burgers, fries, chicken strips, and onion rings without any human interaction. Automation hardware will strike a middle ground between specialization and reuse. Eg the deep fryer will be able to cook several different meals, but it will still only have 1-2 degrees of freedom for putting stuff in and taking it out. Similar story for the grilling surface, veggie chopping system, and the plating / packaging mechanism. This is much cheaper, faster, and more reliable than truly general purpose robot arms. More importantly though, it takes dramatically less space than a conventional restaurant, so you can plop your company's food-making-box down in Times Square and actually make a profit, while everyone else is stuck four blocks away to break even on the real estate. The stories will be different in different sectors, but in general I think the coming automation wave is a bunch of quantitative changes coming together to form qualitative ones like this. You could probably build a burger-maker a decade ago too, but the hardware and design know-how necessary have gotten orders of magnitude cheaper and more abundant, and so now it's actually happening. [1]: http://momentummachines.com/ http://momentummachines.com/

robalfonso 10y ago
I keep telling people the Mcdonalds of the future isn't going to be the same large box with robots running around - it will be much smaller, because robots can use every inch of the kitchen area unlike humans. I think this also has some interesting implications for real estate long term - if every mcdonalds needs 50% of the space they currently occupy over time that real estate will be put back in the market, multiply that by every organization doing that and it has some follow in implications that I can't forsee but find very interesting.
- K0SM0S 10y ago
  Very true, never thought of it this way. Add to that the fact that robots don't have the same needs (can operate with little air/heat/light, don't even need to get out of the room, much less safety concerns in general and practically 0% comfort). You could build kitchens in basements or beneath roofs and save 100% of the floor surface for customers.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

vkou 10y ago

Why would you run your robot arm for only 8 hours a day? Does it also ask for sick days, weekends, holidays, and maternity leave? Why does it irreparably break after 4 years? Even if all of those assumptions hold today, what makes you think the the robot arm of a decade from now won't cost $20,000, but, with minor maintenance, operate for a decade?