16 ms·

A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

95 points by johnwheeler 9y ago

Suncho 9y ago
By definition, all labor-saving technology costs jobs. That is, unless you do something to compensate for it, like produce more total stuff than you used to. And, of course, more total stuff will only get made if people are willing to spend more money to buy the additional stuff. There's only a problem if we're expecting people to get that money from... wait for it... jobs. So let's lower interest rates and make it easier for everyone to borrow money. That will boost spending and create jobs! What could possibly go wrong?
_jn 9y ago
Interestingly, this breaks Betteridge's law by giving an indeterminate response instead of the negative.
- mushinron4 9y ago
  To save others a seaerch: From Wikipedia -- Betteridge's law of headlines is one name for an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist, although the principle is much older. As with similar "laws" (e.g., Murphy's law), it is intended as a humorous adage rather than the literal truth.
mjevans 9y ago
If there is a tax (I believe there should be) on automation then my opinion is that it should be based on the profit and reduced by the percentage of 'traditional' (role specific) job hours that remain; counting service personnel the same as bus-boys/janitorial services. If the profit is under a given percentage then there shouldn't be any tax assessed.
- daveguy 9y ago
  Or if the revenue is under a given value. "Small businesses" shouldn't have to deal with that kind of regulation. I would say number of employees under a certain number, but that's kind of the point, right? I still think a simple progressive tax is better overall (no loopholes or additional taxes). If you can make mad cash efficiently, great, as long as you can't put on an "oil company" hat and avoid paying taxes on those profits.
- biot 9y ago
  How much are you personally willing to pay in tax for your refrigerator/freezer, your dishwashing machine, and your laundry machines?
  - lovemenot 9y ago
    This is a good question, but I suspect it's disingenuously framed, so as to stymie your parent. If she says "a lot", you reply "good luck to you, and you alone". If she replies "very little", you say "right, so your tax is going nowhere." Feels like possibly you are defending a local maximum.
true_tuna 9y ago
Yes. All the jobs. Drivers, luggage handlers. The salad cook is just another in the long line of manual jobs that can be done quicker, better, cheaper by a robot. So now what? What job do we guide our children into? What jobs are left as the fall through for kids who decline formal training? I don't know, but we need to answer that question quickly.
- Swizec 9y ago
  Robot repairperson. I hear the stand-in-line-as-a-service industry is growing as well. Anyone with a lot of free time can get paid to stand in line. It’s great! Who wouldn’t want such a bright future?
  - derefr 9y ago
    Do you think the average salesperson would be willing to sell an item to a telepresence robot carrying a credit card? If so, I'm not sure the waiting-in-line industry will survive much longer either.
- dvdhnt 9y ago
  > The salad cook is just another in the long line of manual jobs that can be done quicker, better, cheaper by a robot. Allow me to be sentimental for a moment. I agree that some jobs, perhaps even most, can be done "better" by a robot. At least, if we're defining better as more cheaply or "to spec". However, when I go to a nice restaurant, I go because I enjoy the Chef's style, their ability to express their art through cooking. Sure, a robot could do something like that, especially at chains like Burger King, but for my personal incentive to dine at a restaurant, it's unlikely a robot could do a "better" job than a human chef. That said, you're right, we need to avoid the foolishness of passing the buck when asking "what will our children do?" We can't agree on social issues now, how the hell will we agree when even more people are unable to contribute meaningfully?
  - umanwizard 9y ago
    So the maybe 10% of people who fetishize artisanry will still create demand for service jobs. But this is an edge case.
justinucd 9y ago
Automation replaces manual labor. As labor becomes more expensive and automated processes become more affordable, you'll see a shift in the food industry from basic labor to skilled labor (those who will develop and maintain the automated processes).
- danblick 9y ago
  Okay but that might be a little simplistic, because automation can also complement manual labor and create more demand for it. The example that comes to mind is about ATMs and bank teller jobs: when ATMs were introduced it actually increased the number of teller jobs because branch offices became cheaper and banks opened more of them. Discussed in: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.htm...
krisives 9y ago
Automate all the things and free up time for humanity to finish making AI maybe we can leave this rock in some form or another.
- musage 9y ago
  Humanity isn't unfree because of there's too much work to do, but because too much wealth is going to those who already have it. Automation, as we employ it, will seal the deal and remove most people along with the need (from the perspective of exploitation) for them. It will transform police states into what will be like solid steel to cotton candy. Also, leave this rock? It's the lushest place we know so far, by far, in a universe filled with millions of rocks. If we can't make it here, we can't make it anywhere else. Not that AI has anything to do with that, or anything we do with AI. But the chorus of non-sequiturs will keep on rising, and as the emperor, now dancing seductive-esque, drops the last item of clothing, the buzzword singularity will have arrived. A way to murder billions and call it the lesser of two evils, carefully framed, will be found, too.
wheresmyusern 9y ago
i love automation. there is something to be said for automated food. not only can money and time be saved, but there are other benefits as well. for example, storing the raw ingredients in your home can allow you to stockpile food for much longer than you could if you only bought the finished product. i have several food grade buckets filled with whole wheat flour and i enjoy freshly baked bread almost every day. with a few gamma lids (screw-top lid accessory for standard 5 gallon food grade buckets), and about 10% of my (normal sized) freezer space, i am able to eat fresh bread every day for five months without ever going to the store. with a bread machine, making the bread only requires a few seconds of my time. and the savings are unreal. perhaps im a little odd, but i would very much like to have some kind of system in my home where i could buy non-perishable food stuffs and store them in mass quantity, and simply press a button to turn them into a meal ready to eat.
greglindahl 9y ago
My local coffee place has humans who operate an espresso machine, while Starbucks has baristas who push a button, and there are vending machines that produces espresso without having an operator. None of this excites a moral panic. Kitchen labor-saving devices have been being invented for hundreds of thousands of years. What's new? Think about wheat. Wheat used to be ground in stone mills operated by oxen or wind or water, which is much more labor-intensive than today's mills. Before that, the grinding process was even more labor-intensive.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  > What's new? Nothing new indeed, but when something creates fear you can be sure there's always going to be someone that is going to take advantage of it to enact laws, collect taxes and the like.
- Growlzler 9y ago
  Grinding wheat left byproducts of the stone burrs in the wheat product. This ground the enamel off peoples teeth leaving them nearly toothless by their mid-thirties. It wasn't till recently that "milling" became the norm in flour production. The wheat berry is not crushed in the milling process but is first burst and torn successively into every finer pieces. Some people have never tasted freshly milled flour made into bread. Total pity that...,
  - dannyw 9y ago
    Could you cite a source for grinding wheat leaving sufficient stone burr particles resulting in enamel damage? I could not find a source via Google.
    - greglindahl 9y ago
      Dental health and disease in ancient Egypt http://www.nature.com/bdj/journal/v206/n8/full/sj.bdj.2009.309.html http://www.nature.com/bdj/journal/v206/n8/full/sj.bdj.2009.3... I got there by googling [wheat enamel damage -gluten stone], there's lots more than just this one article
daveguy 9y ago
Until self check-out becomes faster and less obnoxious than having a skilled cashier do the job faster I don't think we need to worry at a large scale. We aren't going to be talking to robot waiters any time soon. If Carl's Jr. puts a glorified soda machine as my fast food interface I'll go to McDonald's where I can give my order in 10 seconds instead of fumbling with a machine for 2 minutes.
- Lazare 9y ago
  All the local McDonald's here have installed self-ordering kiosks. They're fast and seem very popular. I personally find it significantly easier and faster than waiting in line and talking to an actual human. (And this is coming from someone who hates self-checkout lines at grocery stores.) > We aren't going to be talking to robot waiters any time soon. Robot waiters? Probably not. But using our phones to order delivery, self-ordering kiosks, ipads on tables? The future is already here, and it's increasingly automated. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the latest employment numbers show a sharp dip in the employment among food service employees.)
  - r00fus 9y ago
    YMMV. I was not impressed by the machine - it presented way too many choices and didn't promote the UI to make the process easier than speaking to a human, in my view. Maybe after about 10 times when you've "learned the menu" you might find it easier.
    - gknoy 9y ago
      I'd LOVE an automated kiosk (or even person) that let me specify some numeric encoding of my entire order. I always order the same thing at In-n-Out, for example, and would love to say, "Give me a 557-343-901-043" -- or better yet, scan a QR code that had what I want to order. And they have just about the simplest menu ever! (one reason I love them) If I could do that at other fast food restaurants, or Starbucks, where you might want to order the same Very Specific thing, without having to go through the tedium of explaining it or entering it into a kiosk / web form every time, I bet it would be a huge thing. I will be surprised if Starbucks doesn't let you do this already, or isn't working on it.
sho 9y ago
I'm bullish on food robots in general, but I have to say that as a fan of caesar salad, the output of that robot fails to impress. It looks exactly like what it is - a bunch of ingredients randomly dropped in a bowl. The lettuce hasn't even been tossed with the dressing! I wouldn't pay for that, and IMO this robot has a long way to go before I'd agree it can make a "mean" salad.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  Yeah, robots for food preparation I have seen in Japan are way more impressive than this one. Calling this a robot is an insult to properly designed robots. I would expect the salad to be mixed properly before it delivers the dish, at least.
  - csydas 9y ago
    This one also didn't seem very clean in its operation - it was shooting stuff everywhere outside of the bowl and I didn't see any cleaning mechanism come through to mop up the mess. I'd be a bit more impressed on this if the end result didn't look like something made by one of PeeWee Herman's contraptions.
- wiz21c 9y ago
  I would add that if a bad cook can make an average salad, it doesn't make any easier to accept the fact that we make robots which can barely do better. In other words, instead of replacing the cook by a machine, we should train him to cook better. And we should train people to make the difference between a soulless dish and a good one. (I cook for myself and I can assure you that a machine can't cook; it can assemble ingredients, that's for sure but there's no creativity (and believe me, the simplest dish, if infused with creativity, can taste so much better))
  - jo909 9y ago
    The creativity has to happen at the "design" stage. The best restaurants strive for perfect _repeatable_ dishes, and no cook has to improvise with spices or ingredients on a normal shift.
Zigurd 9y ago
I'd bet my lease gets reviewed by an AI before I eat a robot-cooked meal. Food is variable and dirty and the downside risk of not being clean is pretty bad, even acknowledging that robots will always wash their hands. Maintenance, risk, and general exposure to meatspace, in every sense, means that knowledge workers will probably be the first to be automated out of a job.
- astrodust 9y ago
  What if the robot runs out of disinfectant and nobody notices or cares? Robots are only as clean as the company that owns and inspects them permits them to be.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    Giving the robot a disinfectant-level sensor, delivering an alert when it's low and refusing to operate if it can't do so cleanly, would be trivial compared to the rest of the endeavor, and will probably be required the FDA or equivalent, eventually.
    - astrodust 9y ago
      Yes, because no mechanical parts have ever malfunctioned, ever.
      - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
        Do you trust minimum-wage teens to follow procedure to the letter every time? In this arena at least, I feel like it's a wash between malfunctioning robots and stressed-out, underpaid workers.
        astrodust 9y ago
        I feel like they're more inclined to snitch if things get bad. Machines don't do that.
Judgmentality 9y ago
I feel like they took the salad bar and made it more complicated - the only real advantage I see is it might be more sanitary. It's certainly slower if there's a line of people waiting for their food.
- astrodust 9y ago
  How about instead of a robot to serve salads we make a robot that can probe for contamination? E-coli, listeria, and other nasty bacteria and viruses like hepatitis are no joke, yet most places have zero tools to test for those things.
Growlzler 9y ago
Robots can't taste. Something that no one really wants to take on for a number of reasons the first being that we haven't a clue how it works. Variables in a Caesar Salad occupy wide spreads. Blending taste is still an art that most Chefs have trouble achieving as will the machine intelligence that conquers taste. Wondering how machine intelligence will handle hunger pangs caused by the sudden thought of a Caesar Salad, ensconced with Pain au Levain Croutons, shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano and salted Anchovies on the side. Even the selection of the right sea salt affects the outcome of this wonderful concoction not to mention what mustard and Worcestershire Sauce is best used. The other problem stems from the camaraderie that such a meal requires (haven't even got to the wine pairing yet) to be wholly satisfying. Some people have problems with the origin of the language that really counts as in "companion" - stems from "one whom with you break bread with"...,
- JoshTriplett 9y ago
  I think you're romanticizing the concept of food preparation a bit much. You don't need to be able to taste, or feel hunger, to cook a good meal or choose a wine. I fully expect that a machine could not only do so, but ultimately do so more consistently than any but the most skilled of humans.
  - sethhochberg 9y ago
    I fear such a thing would lead to Starbucksization of food and beverage production. As mentioned in plenty of other comments here, Starbucks baristas mostly just push a button to get a shot of espresso from one of their machines. They optimize for consistency and "good enough" - and indeed the machine pulls the same shot, every time, from beans which are over-roasted for consistency and good enough for mass consumption and a predictable experience across thousands of stores. But that isn't what makes food and drink interesting. I enjoy going to a place because they pull a particularly great espresso shot and use it to prepare a macchiato in a way that I like according to proportions of milk and espresso that I think taste best... or a bar which has a particularly great wine collection according to my tastes... or a restaurant which has a fun twist on on a french classic which I like more than the original. Of course, each of these establishments could have a custom version of whatever algorithm you're envisioning which picks the perfect wines, pulls the perfect espresso shots, or prepares the perfect meal - but will they? Or will the platform that enables such extreme automation also enable such extreme commodification, like Starbucks vs a boutique coffee shop? I think it would.
aaron695 9y ago
> is aimed at reducing the risk of food-borne illness Given it's sell is solving a problem that doesn't need solving I'm guessing it was made to be cheaper but it's not hence the pivot.
astrodust 9y ago
Oh, great. Juicero but for salads.
0xbear 9y ago
Of course all of these robots will cost jobs. I’m reading “The Grapes of Wrath” right now, and it all happened before, except back then it was not robots, but tractors. Lots of people were flung into direst poverty imaginable, some died, some saw their kids die of malnutrition, which, IMO, is worse. It’ll be the exact same shit this time around except a lot more people will be affected, but fewer will die.
King-Aaron 9y ago
This isn't so much a robot, as a motorised hopper that just dispenses the thing the operator asks for.
hathym 9y ago
Instead of the 1000s words, I wished there was a picture of the f* salad
Rainymood 9y ago
Does anyone else think it's utterly annoying I can not pause the video (or gif) or whatever it is? I can't even skip forward. What is this, NYT?
- npgatech 9y ago
  That was painful. It is one of those things that you can't just stop watching (I was expecting Sally to spin the salad) and I waited..and waited...waited. Horrible user experience. - Can't tell how long the clip/gif is - Can't skip ahead - Can't go fullscreen - No sound WTF.
vortico 9y ago
Why is the UI on these things so atrocious? It took him a number of key presses just to select from a list of 6 and many more to finalize the purchase. Why not have a bunch of large tactile buttons at the bottom of the screen like all normal vending machines do? I don't want to wait in line for 3 minutes while some technophobe tries to figure out how to nagivate a pressure touchscreen with 12 menus deep. It's not his fault, it's the fault of the UI designers who think all they have to work with is a bunch of pixels and X/Y coordinates of presses. There's more to UI than that.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- gm-conspiracy 9y ago
  Have you ever been to a Sheetz gas station? They seem to have a good UI (although they started working on it over 20 years ago). https://www.cstoredecisions.com/2011/03/10/in-touch-with-foodservice/ https://www.cstoredecisions.com/2011/03/10/in-touch-with-foo...
  - phyllostachys 9y ago
    As their menu has grown it has been getting a little harder to figure out where things are but moving around the menu is really easy. I suspect the latter helps with the former. Also, what's wrong with a ham and cheese sandwich with mayo and Cesar dressing (in the article)? That's one thing that is great about the Sheetz UI is that I can add buffalo sauce, ranch/mayo, and bacon to nearly every sandwich, which is delicious. My all-time favorite is a bacon, lettuce, mayo, and buffalo sauce cheeseburger or chicken sandwich on a pretzel bun.
- merraksh 9y ago
  I don't want to wait in line for 3 minutes while some old guy tries to figure out Please rewrite, this is borderline discriminatory and quite offensive. Some "old guys" can be as capable to handle such UI as some "young guys". Disclaimer: half-old guy. [EDIT] thanks for replacing "old guy" with "technophobe".
_Codemonkeyism 9y ago
This does create the illusion of just in time salads, but how is it different from prepackaged salads? I assume such a machine in large sits in every salad factory.
- trevyn 9y ago
  Repeatable, reliable, easy customization options. This is a bigger thing for prompting return visits than it might seem at first glance — this is why people develop an affinity for, e.g. Starbucks; they develop a personalized product that they think of as part of their identity.
- sleepychu 9y ago
  Configurability? I want that sald with this topping Freshness? If the buisiness is preparing the vegetables in the kitchen before providing them to the machine then the salads might taste fresher than factory packaged salads >1 day old.
  - mmcconnell1618 9y ago
    I'd want to know the "refresh" schedule for the ingredients. If the machine gets new veg every Tuesday then that's the best day for a really fresh salad. I would hope the location is high enough traffic to justify daily ingredient changes.
- shubb 9y ago
  I wonder how many technology things are the shiny appearance of magic ontop of the old and mundane. I guess we should look at any New Thing, and say, what existing boring thing is this really?
- tw1010 9y ago
  I think the customization aspect is overrated. In a blind taste test I bet prepackaged salads and hand made ones would fare about as well. Just like how cheap and expensive wine are indistinguishable under a blindfold. And that's what's so funny about this story. Two hundred years ago all salads were hand made. Then we invented machines to automate it. But then automated food got a somewhat arbitrary and unjustified stigma about it, which allowed for hand made salads to become a thing again. Similar to how an artificial social stigma was constructed against "fake" furr, in preference to animal furr. There is virtually no visual difference, but rich people wanted to maintain the signaling-value of the more expensive "real" furr and did so by sneering at the cheap-to-manufacture fake stuff, which propagated out in the rest of society in the form of adverts and the like. And of course the same thing will happen here too. Now robots can make "hand made" caesar salads. But eventually the same social constructions will be created against that and in preference to man-made "hand crafted" caesar salads. Under a blind taste test man-made and robot-made foods will be indistinguishable but without the blindfold there will be enough culture and clever rethoric created to trick the senses, and we'll be back to where we were a few years ago.
beegeezuz 9y ago
I'm sick of these "it's gonna cost jobs!!!!". FFS take a chill pill.
bambax 9y ago
> Salad bars are magnets for bacteria and viruses. Even if the sprouts and ranch dressing aren’t tainted, the serving utensils may be. The Silicon Valley start-up Chowbotics has devised what it says is a partial solution. A solution to what? What exactly is the problem? Just because bacteria (and "viruses"? really?) may or may not be found in salad bars doesn't make it an emergency. Exactly how many people get sick, or die, because they ate at a salad bar? It seems the problem is invented to justify the product.
- Boothroid 9y ago
  Having had a case of food poisoning of a level where my kidneys were near the point of shutting down before I got treatment, I'm all for any new approaches that can reduce the chances of tranmission.
- orbifold 9y ago
  There was a case in Germany a couple of years ago, a relatively large number of people got a very deadly and rare bacterial infection. The cases were distributed all over the country. In the end it turned out that the origin was contaminated sprouts from one sprout factory. This robot only eliminates one part of the risk.
- MrFoof 9y ago
  Let's replace "salad" with "burrito" and just look at Chipotle in isolation... * In March and April 2008, 22 customers were infected with hepatitis A from a Chipotle restaurant in California. * In April 2008, over 400 people were infected with norovirus from a Chipotle restaurant in Ohio. * In February 2009, an outbreak of campylobacteriosis was traced to a Chipotle restaurant in Minnesota. * In July 2015, five people were infected with E. coli traced back to a Chipotle restaurant in Seattle, Washington. * In August 2015 nearly 100 people were infected with norovirus from a Chipotle restaurant in Califorina. * In August 2015, 64 people were infected with Salmonella traced back to Chipotle restaurants in the Minneapolis area. * In October 2015, 52 people were infected with E. coli traced back to Chipotle restaurants, with 20 requiring hospitalization. * In November 2015, 5 people were infected with E. coli traced back to Chipotle restaurants in Oklahoma and Kansas. * In December 2015, ultimately 141 people (80 directly) in Massachusetts were infected with norovirus traced back to a Boston, Massachusetts area Chipotle restaurant. * In July 2017, more than 130 people were infected with norovirus traced back to a Chiptole restaurant in Virginia.
amelius 9y ago
We should stop worrying whether AI will cost jobs, but instead think about who reaps the benefits of thousands of years of technological progress, and how those benefits can be distributed more fairly.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- zipwitch 9y ago
  Exactly. Comments about"costing jobs" always miss the point, partially or wholly. _Jobs are a cost._ They are what it takes to create _wealth_. At issue is how to best create and distribute wealth.
  - MuffinFlavored 9y ago
    I disagree a little bit. We are all typing this from our comfy environments, able to pay for Internet, etc. What about when jobs start to disappear and the economy as we know starts to change for the worse? Either by affecting us directly, or the markets which we are a part of, I don't think this will be a positive thing.
dogruck 9y ago
There is a misconception that the list of tasks that we need humans to work on is roughly equal to the number of humans that we currently have available. Instead, I think if we eliminated many of the current tasks from our global priority queue (such as chopping salads) then we will soon discover new tasks.
jeremyjh 9y ago
I don't think there is any easy fix for this. The capital is only interested in building robots if they save human labor costs. If they save human labor only to pay those same costs in taxes for basic income then they should have invested in something else. For the most part, the deployment of capital into robots can only happen if it is going to displace people.
cm2187 9y ago
A domestic robot is probably as big of a market as self driving cars. Not that this is close. But a robot that would clean, wash, iron, prepare food, do some basic plumbing and painting, replace bulbs, receive parcels, yell at the dog if it misbehaves, etc... I start to think that I will own one in my lifetime.
misja111 9y ago
This might cost some jobs but not very many. There have been all kinds of automated food solutions in existence for many decades. They serve a niche in the market for people that just want to grab and eat something quickly. But most people prefer the experience of having humans create and serve their food when they go to a restaurant.
- dagw 9y ago
  most people prefer the experience of having humans create and serve their food when they go to a restaurant. Serve sure, but how many people care about what goes on beyond the closed doors of the restaurant kitchen as long as food is up to standard. Would you really care if your steak was 'hand fried' by a line chef or fired by some kind of meat frying robot as long as it was of high quality done to your liking. The 'problem' however (at least short term) is that line chefs are pretty cheap and advanced robots are pretty expensive.
AndrewOMartin 9y ago
I predict that once a machine is invented that can automatically make a coffee, anyone employed making coffee will lose their jobs too.
FussyZeus 9y ago
Maybe this particular robot won't cost jobs (though I have doubts about that, but we'll grant it) but other robots will. I don't understand how there's even a sort-of discussion between the author and their audience about "Do robots cost jobs" of course they bloody do, that's the point, those robots are sold to the businesses that buy them on the idea that they're going to reduce labor costs, that's the point. Restaurants have been serving us filthy salads out of bars for decades, do you think they suddenly had an attack of conscience about it? Of course not, having that machine means a whole host of things the employees don't have to do, that's why they bought it. It may not cost anyone a job right now, but it will be contributing to that down the line.
Ensorceled 9y ago
Ummmmm, that's not a "mean" caesar salad. It's competitive with a supermarket premade but doesn't compare to a restaurant or homemade caesar salad. This isn't any different than a vending machine or those coke dispensers with a touch screen flavour picker. The real job loss will be when this is a real robot that is fresh tearing the romaine and whisking the dressing after you press the buttons and delivering an actual caesar salad.
- shostack 9y ago
  Not disagreeing on the perceived quality of this salad...but does that really change the issue at hand? I would think that while it may be challenging, I don't see it as unthinkable that we could have a robot tear leaves of romaine and spinning a whisk.
  - Ensorceled 9y ago
    Right. But this machine is functionally equivalent to a coffee vending machine: punch espresso drink, medium, cappuccino and put your cup under the nozzle. Those machines haven't replaced anybody at Starbucks -- they simply made the lives of the receptionist at my Toyota Dealership easier. These examples need to be game changers to convince people, a fancy vending machine isn't going to scare anybody. A replacement fry cook, sous chef or truck driver will.
philipodonnell 9y ago
Sometimes automation is about taking the difficult, time-consuming, manual parts of a process and making them faster and easier, which saves time and less time=less jobs=article in NYT. And sometimes automation is about taking the easiest, lowest skill part of a process and making it slower and more difficult, which somehow still results in an NYT article. I mean all it does is assemble the freaking salads from pre-chopped ingredients. That's it. That's the _easiest_ part of preparing a salad.
snappyTertle 9y ago
Robots making food will lower the cost of food, giving more people access to better nutrition. This will also free up labor and capital to do other things. Machines helped make farming more productive so humans no longer have to live on farms, and dedicate their lives to the next meal on their table. If we were worried about jobs back then, we would've outlawed tractors and other machines. If we really want to create jobs, we would go back to manual labor to make produce our food.
- linkmotif 9y ago
  > This will also free up labor and capital to do other things. Yes we definitely need more people on disability watching Maury
- falcolas 9y ago
  That "freed up [food service] labor" was already at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to skill and pay. Where else would that "free" labor be readily applicable that they don't fall into reliance on social safety nets?
- busterarm 9y ago
  I'm skeptical. This is painfully slow and handles 1 person at a time. Any midtown/downtown NY salad bar can turnover 10 peoples' salads in the time this machine took to make 1. There's no way this machine's operating cost is better than that. Sure, you could scale up these machines, but then the human-staffed salad bars are winning on floor space (and rent). It looks like you could only fit 2-3 of these machines in the footprint of the average NY salad spot. The only place this might win is where salad consumption is infrequent, in which case for food safety reasons, you probably don't want to be eating the salad there anyway.
- VeejayRampay 9y ago
  I don't think it will not lower the cost of food. In my opinion, the savings won't go towards pricing, they will go towards the owners' bank accounts (or shareholders). See Foxconn and the whole fleet of robots in their factories.
- 9y ago
Adamantcheese 9y ago
Is it just me or does reading what basically boils down to "Don't go outside, eat this premade salad and 'boost your productivity'" sound somewhat depressing? I don't think that being inside all day eating low quality food under fluorescent lights is going to boost my productivity at all. I would honestly want to go to a restaurant and get an actual salad at lunch.
knappa 9y ago
General robot job replacement related issues aside, this robot only holds enough for 50 salads and, based on the video, seems painfully slow. It doesn't seem ready for a lunchtime rush.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

95 points by johnwheeler 9y ago

By definition, all labor-saving technology costs jobs. That is, unless you do something to compensate for it, like produce more total stuff than you used to. And, of course, more total stuff will only get made if people are willing to spend more money to buy the additional stuff. There's only a problem if we're expecting people to get that money from... wait for it... jobs. So let's lower interest rates and make it easier for everyone to borrow money. That will boost spending and create jobs! What could possibly go wrong?

_jn 9y ago

Interestingly, this breaks Betteridge's law by giving an indeterminate response instead of the negative.

mushinron4 9y ago
To save others a seaerch: From Wikipedia -- Betteridge's law of headlines is one name for an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist, although the principle is much older. As with similar "laws" (e.g., Murphy's law), it is intended as a humorous adage rather than the literal truth.

mjevans 9y ago

If there is a tax (I believe there should be) on automation then my opinion is that it should be based on the profit and reduced by the percentage of 'traditional' (role specific) job hours that remain; counting service personnel the same as bus-boys/janitorial services. If the profit is under a given percentage then there shouldn't be any tax assessed.

daveguy 9y ago
Or if the revenue is under a given value. "Small businesses" shouldn't have to deal with that kind of regulation. I would say number of employees under a certain number, but that's kind of the point, right? I still think a simple progressive tax is better overall (no loopholes or additional taxes). If you can make mad cash efficiently, great, as long as you can't put on an "oil company" hat and avoid paying taxes on those profits.
biot 9y ago
How much are you personally willing to pay in tax for your refrigerator/freezer, your dishwashing machine, and your laundry machines?
- lovemenot 9y ago
  This is a good question, but I suspect it's disingenuously framed, so as to stymie your parent. If she says "a lot", you reply "good luck to you, and you alone". If she replies "very little", you say "right, so your tax is going nowhere." Feels like possibly you are defending a local maximum.

true_tuna 9y ago

Yes. All the jobs. Drivers, luggage handlers. The salad cook is just another in the long line of manual jobs that can be done quicker, better, cheaper by a robot. So now what? What job do we guide our children into? What jobs are left as the fall through for kids who decline formal training? I don't know, but we need to answer that question quickly.

Swizec 9y ago
Robot repairperson. I hear the stand-in-line-as-a-service industry is growing as well. Anyone with a lot of free time can get paid to stand in line. It’s great! Who wouldn’t want such a bright future?
- derefr 9y ago
  Do you think the average salesperson would be willing to sell an item to a telepresence robot carrying a credit card? If so, I'm not sure the waiting-in-line industry will survive much longer either.
dvdhnt 9y ago
> The salad cook is just another in the long line of manual jobs that can be done quicker, better, cheaper by a robot. Allow me to be sentimental for a moment. I agree that some jobs, perhaps even most, can be done "better" by a robot. At least, if we're defining better as more cheaply or "to spec". However, when I go to a nice restaurant, I go because I enjoy the Chef's style, their ability to express their art through cooking. Sure, a robot could do something like that, especially at chains like Burger King, but for my personal incentive to dine at a restaurant, it's unlikely a robot could do a "better" job than a human chef. That said, you're right, we need to avoid the foolishness of passing the buck when asking "what will our children do?" We can't agree on social issues now, how the hell will we agree when even more people are unable to contribute meaningfully?
- umanwizard 9y ago
  So the maybe 10% of people who fetishize artisanry will still create demand for service jobs. But this is an edge case.

justinucd 9y ago

Automation replaces manual labor. As labor becomes more expensive and automated processes become more affordable, you'll see a shift in the food industry from basic labor to skilled labor (those who will develop and maintain the automated processes).

danblick 9y ago
Okay but that might be a little simplistic, because automation can also complement manual labor and create more demand for it. The example that comes to mind is about ATMs and bank teller jobs: when ATMs were introduced it actually increased the number of teller jobs because branch offices became cheaper and banks opened more of them. Discussed in: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.htm...

krisives 9y ago

Automate all the things and free up time for humanity to finish making AI maybe we can leave this rock in some form or another.

musage 9y ago
Humanity isn't unfree because of there's too much work to do, but because too much wealth is going to those who already have it. Automation, as we employ it, will seal the deal and remove most people along with the need (from the perspective of exploitation) for them. It will transform police states into what will be like solid steel to cotton candy. Also, leave this rock? It's the lushest place we know so far, by far, in a universe filled with millions of rocks. If we can't make it here, we can't make it anywhere else. Not that AI has anything to do with that, or anything we do with AI. But the chorus of non-sequiturs will keep on rising, and as the emperor, now dancing seductive-esque, drops the last item of clothing, the buzzword singularity will have arrived. A way to murder billions and call it the lesser of two evils, carefully framed, will be found, too.

wheresmyusern 9y ago

i love automation. there is something to be said for automated food. not only can money and time be saved, but there are other benefits as well. for example, storing the raw ingredients in your home can allow you to stockpile food for much longer than you could if you only bought the finished product. i have several food grade buckets filled with whole wheat flour and i enjoy freshly baked bread almost every day. with a few gamma lids (screw-top lid accessory for standard 5 gallon food grade buckets), and about 10% of my (normal sized) freezer space, i am able to eat fresh bread every day for five months without ever going to the store. with a bread machine, making the bread only requires a few seconds of my time. and the savings are unreal. perhaps im a little odd, but i would very much like to have some kind of system in my home where i could buy non-perishable food stuffs and store them in mass quantity, and simply press a button to turn them into a meal ready to eat.

greglindahl 9y ago

My local coffee place has humans who operate an espresso machine, while Starbucks has baristas who push a button, and there are vending machines that produces espresso without having an operator. None of this excites a moral panic. Kitchen labor-saving devices have been being invented for hundreds of thousands of years. What's new? Think about wheat. Wheat used to be ground in stone mills operated by oxen or wind or water, which is much more labor-intensive than today's mills. Before that, the grinding process was even more labor-intensive.

ekianjo 9y ago
> What's new? Nothing new indeed, but when something creates fear you can be sure there's always going to be someone that is going to take advantage of it to enact laws, collect taxes and the like.
Growlzler 9y ago
Grinding wheat left byproducts of the stone burrs in the wheat product. This ground the enamel off peoples teeth leaving them nearly toothless by their mid-thirties. It wasn't till recently that "milling" became the norm in flour production. The wheat berry is not crushed in the milling process but is first burst and torn successively into every finer pieces. Some people have never tasted freshly milled flour made into bread. Total pity that...,
- dannyw 9y ago
  Could you cite a source for grinding wheat leaving sufficient stone burr particles resulting in enamel damage? I could not find a source via Google.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Dental health and disease in ancient Egypt http://www.nature.com/bdj/journal/v206/n8/full/sj.bdj.2009.309.html http://www.nature.com/bdj/journal/v206/n8/full/sj.bdj.2009.3... I got there by googling [wheat enamel damage -gluten stone], there's lots more than just this one article

daveguy 9y ago

Until self check-out becomes faster and less obnoxious than having a skilled cashier do the job faster I don't think we need to worry at a large scale. We aren't going to be talking to robot waiters any time soon. If Carl's Jr. puts a glorified soda machine as my fast food interface I'll go to McDonald's where I can give my order in 10 seconds instead of fumbling with a machine for 2 minutes.

Lazare 9y ago
All the local McDonald's here have installed self-ordering kiosks. They're fast and seem very popular. I personally find it significantly easier and faster than waiting in line and talking to an actual human. (And this is coming from someone who hates self-checkout lines at grocery stores.) > We aren't going to be talking to robot waiters any time soon. Robot waiters? Probably not. But using our phones to order delivery, self-ordering kiosks, ipads on tables? The future is already here, and it's increasingly automated. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the latest employment numbers show a sharp dip in the employment among food service employees.)
- r00fus 9y ago
  YMMV. I was not impressed by the machine - it presented way too many choices and didn't promote the UI to make the process easier than speaking to a human, in my view. Maybe after about 10 times when you've "learned the menu" you might find it easier.
  - gknoy 9y ago
    I'd LOVE an automated kiosk (or even person) that let me specify some numeric encoding of my entire order. I always order the same thing at In-n-Out, for example, and would love to say, "Give me a 557-343-901-043" -- or better yet, scan a QR code that had what I want to order. And they have just about the simplest menu ever! (one reason I love them) If I could do that at other fast food restaurants, or Starbucks, where you might want to order the same Very Specific thing, without having to go through the tedium of explaining it or entering it into a kiosk / web form every time, I bet it would be a huge thing. I will be surprised if Starbucks doesn't let you do this already, or isn't working on it.

sho 9y ago

I'm bullish on food robots in general, but I have to say that as a fan of caesar salad, the output of that robot fails to impress. It looks exactly like what it is - a bunch of ingredients randomly dropped in a bowl. The lettuce hasn't even been tossed with the dressing! I wouldn't pay for that, and IMO this robot has a long way to go before I'd agree it can make a "mean" salad.

ekianjo 9y ago
Yeah, robots for food preparation I have seen in Japan are way more impressive than this one. Calling this a robot is an insult to properly designed robots. I would expect the salad to be mixed properly before it delivers the dish, at least.
- csydas 9y ago
  This one also didn't seem very clean in its operation - it was shooting stuff everywhere outside of the bowl and I didn't see any cleaning mechanism come through to mop up the mess. I'd be a bit more impressed on this if the end result didn't look like something made by one of PeeWee Herman's contraptions.
wiz21c 9y ago
I would add that if a bad cook can make an average salad, it doesn't make any easier to accept the fact that we make robots which can barely do better. In other words, instead of replacing the cook by a machine, we should train him to cook better. And we should train people to make the difference between a soulless dish and a good one. (I cook for myself and I can assure you that a machine can't cook; it can assemble ingredients, that's for sure but there's no creativity (and believe me, the simplest dish, if infused with creativity, can taste so much better))
- jo909 9y ago
  The creativity has to happen at the "design" stage. The best restaurants strive for perfect _repeatable_ dishes, and no cook has to improvise with spices or ingredients on a normal shift.

Zigurd 9y ago

I'd bet my lease gets reviewed by an AI before I eat a robot-cooked meal. Food is variable and dirty and the downside risk of not being clean is pretty bad, even acknowledging that robots will always wash their hands. Maintenance, risk, and general exposure to meatspace, in every sense, means that knowledge workers will probably be the first to be automated out of a job.

astrodust 9y ago
What if the robot runs out of disinfectant and nobody notices or cares? Robots are only as clean as the company that owns and inspects them permits them to be.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  Giving the robot a disinfectant-level sensor, delivering an alert when it's low and refusing to operate if it can't do so cleanly, would be trivial compared to the rest of the endeavor, and will probably be required the FDA or equivalent, eventually.
  - astrodust 9y ago
    Yes, because no mechanical parts have ever malfunctioned, ever.
    - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
      Do you trust minimum-wage teens to follow procedure to the letter every time? In this arena at least, I feel like it's a wash between malfunctioning robots and stressed-out, underpaid workers.
      - astrodust 9y ago
        I feel like they're more inclined to snitch if things get bad. Machines don't do that.

Judgmentality 9y ago

I feel like they took the salad bar and made it more complicated - the only real advantage I see is it might be more sanitary. It's certainly slower if there's a line of people waiting for their food.

astrodust 9y ago
How about instead of a robot to serve salads we make a robot that can probe for contamination? E-coli, listeria, and other nasty bacteria and viruses like hepatitis are no joke, yet most places have zero tools to test for those things.

Growlzler 9y ago

Robots can't taste. Something that no one really wants to take on for a number of reasons the first being that we haven't a clue how it works. Variables in a Caesar Salad occupy wide spreads. Blending taste is still an art that most Chefs have trouble achieving as will the machine intelligence that conquers taste. Wondering how machine intelligence will handle hunger pangs caused by the sudden thought of a Caesar Salad, ensconced with Pain au Levain Croutons, shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano and salted Anchovies on the side. Even the selection of the right sea salt affects the outcome of this wonderful concoction not to mention what mustard and Worcestershire Sauce is best used. The other problem stems from the camaraderie that such a meal requires (haven't even got to the wine pairing yet) to be wholly satisfying. Some people have problems with the origin of the language that really counts as in "companion" - stems from "one whom with you break bread with"...,

JoshTriplett 9y ago
I think you're romanticizing the concept of food preparation a bit much. You don't need to be able to taste, or feel hunger, to cook a good meal or choose a wine. I fully expect that a machine could not only do so, but ultimately do so more consistently than any but the most skilled of humans.
- sethhochberg 9y ago
  I fear such a thing would lead to Starbucksization of food and beverage production. As mentioned in plenty of other comments here, Starbucks baristas mostly just push a button to get a shot of espresso from one of their machines. They optimize for consistency and "good enough" - and indeed the machine pulls the same shot, every time, from beans which are over-roasted for consistency and good enough for mass consumption and a predictable experience across thousands of stores. But that isn't what makes food and drink interesting. I enjoy going to a place because they pull a particularly great espresso shot and use it to prepare a macchiato in a way that I like according to proportions of milk and espresso that I think taste best... or a bar which has a particularly great wine collection according to my tastes... or a restaurant which has a fun twist on on a french classic which I like more than the original. Of course, each of these establishments could have a custom version of whatever algorithm you're envisioning which picks the perfect wines, pulls the perfect espresso shots, or prepares the perfect meal - but will they? Or will the platform that enables such extreme automation also enable such extreme commodification, like Starbucks vs a boutique coffee shop? I think it would.

aaron695 9y ago

> is aimed at reducing the risk of food-borne illness Given it's sell is solving a problem that doesn't need solving I'm guessing it was made to be cheaper but it's not hence the pivot.

astrodust 9y ago

Oh, great. Juicero but for salads.

0xbear 9y ago

Of course all of these robots will cost jobs. I’m reading “The Grapes of Wrath” right now, and it all happened before, except back then it was not robots, but tractors. Lots of people were flung into direst poverty imaginable, some died, some saw their kids die of malnutrition, which, IMO, is worse. It’ll be the exact same shit this time around except a lot more people will be affected, but fewer will die.

King-Aaron 9y ago

This isn't so much a robot, as a motorised hopper that just dispenses the thing the operator asks for.

hathym 9y ago

Instead of the 1000s words, I wished there was a picture of the f* salad

Rainymood 9y ago

Does anyone else think it's utterly annoying I can not pause the video (or gif) or whatever it is? I can't even skip forward. What is this, NYT?

npgatech 9y ago
That was painful. It is one of those things that you can't just stop watching (I was expecting Sally to spin the salad) and I waited..and waited...waited. Horrible user experience. - Can't tell how long the clip/gif is - Can't skip ahead - Can't go fullscreen - No sound WTF.

vortico 9y ago

Why is the UI on these things so atrocious? It took him a number of key presses just to select from a list of 6 and many more to finalize the purchase. Why not have a bunch of large tactile buttons at the bottom of the screen like all normal vending machines do? I don't want to wait in line for 3 minutes while some technophobe tries to figure out how to nagivate a pressure touchscreen with 12 menus deep. It's not his fault, it's the fault of the UI designers who think all they have to work with is a bunch of pixels and X/Y coordinates of presses. There's more to UI than that.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gm-conspiracy 9y ago
Have you ever been to a Sheetz gas station? They seem to have a good UI (although they started working on it over 20 years ago). https://www.cstoredecisions.com/2011/03/10/in-touch-with-foodservice/ https://www.cstoredecisions.com/2011/03/10/in-touch-with-foo...
- phyllostachys 9y ago
  As their menu has grown it has been getting a little harder to figure out where things are but moving around the menu is really easy. I suspect the latter helps with the former. Also, what's wrong with a ham and cheese sandwich with mayo and Cesar dressing (in the article)? That's one thing that is great about the Sheetz UI is that I can add buffalo sauce, ranch/mayo, and bacon to nearly every sandwich, which is delicious. My all-time favorite is a bacon, lettuce, mayo, and buffalo sauce cheeseburger or chicken sandwich on a pretzel bun.
merraksh 9y ago
I don't want to wait in line for 3 minutes while some old guy tries to figure out Please rewrite, this is borderline discriminatory and quite offensive. Some "old guys" can be as capable to handle such UI as some "young guys". Disclaimer: half-old guy. [EDIT] thanks for replacing "old guy" with "technophobe".

_Codemonkeyism 9y ago

This does create the illusion of just in time salads, but how is it different from prepackaged salads? I assume such a machine in large sits in every salad factory.

trevyn 9y ago
Repeatable, reliable, easy customization options. This is a bigger thing for prompting return visits than it might seem at first glance — this is why people develop an affinity for, e.g. Starbucks; they develop a personalized product that they think of as part of their identity.
sleepychu 9y ago
Configurability? I want that sald with this topping Freshness? If the buisiness is preparing the vegetables in the kitchen before providing them to the machine then the salads might taste fresher than factory packaged salads >1 day old.
- mmcconnell1618 9y ago
  I'd want to know the "refresh" schedule for the ingredients. If the machine gets new veg every Tuesday then that's the best day for a really fresh salad. I would hope the location is high enough traffic to justify daily ingredient changes.
shubb 9y ago
I wonder how many technology things are the shiny appearance of magic ontop of the old and mundane. I guess we should look at any New Thing, and say, what existing boring thing is this really?
tw1010 9y ago
I think the customization aspect is overrated. In a blind taste test I bet prepackaged salads and hand made ones would fare about as well. Just like how cheap and expensive wine are indistinguishable under a blindfold. And that's what's so funny about this story. Two hundred years ago all salads were hand made. Then we invented machines to automate it. But then automated food got a somewhat arbitrary and unjustified stigma about it, which allowed for hand made salads to become a thing again. Similar to how an artificial social stigma was constructed against "fake" furr, in preference to animal furr. There is virtually no visual difference, but rich people wanted to maintain the signaling-value of the more expensive "real" furr and did so by sneering at the cheap-to-manufacture fake stuff, which propagated out in the rest of society in the form of adverts and the like. And of course the same thing will happen here too. Now robots can make "hand made" caesar salads. But eventually the same social constructions will be created against that and in preference to man-made "hand crafted" caesar salads. Under a blind taste test man-made and robot-made foods will be indistinguishable but without the blindfold there will be enough culture and clever rethoric created to trick the senses, and we'll be back to where we were a few years ago.

beegeezuz 9y ago

I'm sick of these "it's gonna cost jobs!!!!". FFS take a chill pill.

bambax 9y ago

> Salad bars are magnets for bacteria and viruses. Even if the sprouts and ranch dressing aren’t tainted, the serving utensils may be. The Silicon Valley start-up Chowbotics has devised what it says is a partial solution. A solution to what? What exactly is the problem? Just because bacteria (and "viruses"? really?) may or may not be found in salad bars doesn't make it an emergency. Exactly how many people get sick, or die, because they ate at a salad bar? It seems the problem is invented to justify the product.

Boothroid 9y ago
Having had a case of food poisoning of a level where my kidneys were near the point of shutting down before I got treatment, I'm all for any new approaches that can reduce the chances of tranmission.
orbifold 9y ago
There was a case in Germany a couple of years ago, a relatively large number of people got a very deadly and rare bacterial infection. The cases were distributed all over the country. In the end it turned out that the origin was contaminated sprouts from one sprout factory. This robot only eliminates one part of the risk.
MrFoof 9y ago
Let's replace "salad" with "burrito" and just look at Chipotle in isolation... * In March and April 2008, 22 customers were infected with hepatitis A from a Chipotle restaurant in California. * In April 2008, over 400 people were infected with norovirus from a Chipotle restaurant in Ohio. * In February 2009, an outbreak of campylobacteriosis was traced to a Chipotle restaurant in Minnesota. * In July 2015, five people were infected with E. coli traced back to a Chipotle restaurant in Seattle, Washington. * In August 2015 nearly 100 people were infected with norovirus from a Chipotle restaurant in Califorina. * In August 2015, 64 people were infected with Salmonella traced back to Chipotle restaurants in the Minneapolis area. * In October 2015, 52 people were infected with E. coli traced back to Chipotle restaurants, with 20 requiring hospitalization. * In November 2015, 5 people were infected with E. coli traced back to Chipotle restaurants in Oklahoma and Kansas. * In December 2015, ultimately 141 people (80 directly) in Massachusetts were infected with norovirus traced back to a Boston, Massachusetts area Chipotle restaurant. * In July 2017, more than 130 people were infected with norovirus traced back to a Chiptole restaurant in Virginia.

amelius 9y ago

We should stop worrying whether AI will cost jobs, but instead think about who reaps the benefits of thousands of years of technological progress, and how those benefits can be distributed more fairly.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
zipwitch 9y ago
Exactly. Comments about"costing jobs" always miss the point, partially or wholly. _Jobs are a cost._ They are what it takes to create _wealth_. At issue is how to best create and distribute wealth.
- MuffinFlavored 9y ago
  I disagree a little bit. We are all typing this from our comfy environments, able to pay for Internet, etc. What about when jobs start to disappear and the economy as we know starts to change for the worse? Either by affecting us directly, or the markets which we are a part of, I don't think this will be a positive thing.

dogruck 9y ago

There is a misconception that the list of tasks that we need humans to work on is roughly equal to the number of humans that we currently have available. Instead, I think if we eliminated many of the current tasks from our global priority queue (such as chopping salads) then we will soon discover new tasks.

jeremyjh 9y ago

I don't think there is any easy fix for this. The capital is only interested in building robots if they save human labor costs. If they save human labor only to pay those same costs in taxes for basic income then they should have invested in something else. For the most part, the deployment of capital into robots can only happen if it is going to displace people.

cm2187 9y ago

A domestic robot is probably as big of a market as self driving cars. Not that this is close. But a robot that would clean, wash, iron, prepare food, do some basic plumbing and painting, replace bulbs, receive parcels, yell at the dog if it misbehaves, etc... I start to think that I will own one in my lifetime.

misja111 9y ago

This might cost some jobs but not very many. There have been all kinds of automated food solutions in existence for many decades. They serve a niche in the market for people that just want to grab and eat something quickly. But most people prefer the experience of having humans create and serve their food when they go to a restaurant.

dagw 9y ago
most people prefer the experience of having humans create and serve their food when they go to a restaurant. Serve sure, but how many people care about what goes on beyond the closed doors of the restaurant kitchen as long as food is up to standard. Would you really care if your steak was 'hand fried' by a line chef or fired by some kind of meat frying robot as long as it was of high quality done to your liking. The 'problem' however (at least short term) is that line chefs are pretty cheap and advanced robots are pretty expensive.

AndrewOMartin 9y ago

I predict that once a machine is invented that can automatically make a coffee, anyone employed making coffee will lose their jobs too.

FussyZeus 9y ago

Maybe this particular robot won't cost jobs (though I have doubts about that, but we'll grant it) but other robots will. I don't understand how there's even a sort-of discussion between the author and their audience about "Do robots cost jobs" of course they bloody do, that's the point, those robots are sold to the businesses that buy them on the idea that they're going to reduce labor costs, that's the point. Restaurants have been serving us filthy salads out of bars for decades, do you think they suddenly had an attack of conscience about it? Of course not, having that machine means a whole host of things the employees don't have to do, that's why they bought it. It may not cost anyone a job right now, but it will be contributing to that down the line.

Ensorceled 9y ago

Ummmmm, that's not a "mean" caesar salad. It's competitive with a supermarket premade but doesn't compare to a restaurant or homemade caesar salad. This isn't any different than a vending machine or those coke dispensers with a touch screen flavour picker. The real job loss will be when this is a real robot that is fresh tearing the romaine and whisking the dressing after you press the buttons and delivering an actual caesar salad.

shostack 9y ago
Not disagreeing on the perceived quality of this salad...but does that really change the issue at hand? I would think that while it may be challenging, I don't see it as unthinkable that we could have a robot tear leaves of romaine and spinning a whisk.
- Ensorceled 9y ago
  Right. But this machine is functionally equivalent to a coffee vending machine: punch espresso drink, medium, cappuccino and put your cup under the nozzle. Those machines haven't replaced anybody at Starbucks -- they simply made the lives of the receptionist at my Toyota Dealership easier. These examples need to be game changers to convince people, a fancy vending machine isn't going to scare anybody. A replacement fry cook, sous chef or truck driver will.

philipodonnell 9y ago

Sometimes automation is about taking the difficult, time-consuming, manual parts of a process and making them faster and easier, which saves time and less time=less jobs=article in NYT. And sometimes automation is about taking the easiest, lowest skill part of a process and making it slower and more difficult, which somehow still results in an NYT article. I mean all it does is assemble the freaking salads from pre-chopped ingredients. That's it. That's the _easiest_ part of preparing a salad.

snappyTertle 9y ago

Robots making food will lower the cost of food, giving more people access to better nutrition. This will also free up labor and capital to do other things. Machines helped make farming more productive so humans no longer have to live on farms, and dedicate their lives to the next meal on their table. If we were worried about jobs back then, we would've outlawed tractors and other machines. If we really want to create jobs, we would go back to manual labor to make produce our food.

linkmotif 9y ago
> This will also free up labor and capital to do other things. Yes we definitely need more people on disability watching Maury
falcolas 9y ago
That "freed up [food service] labor" was already at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to skill and pay. Where else would that "free" labor be readily applicable that they don't fall into reliance on social safety nets?
busterarm 9y ago
I'm skeptical. This is painfully slow and handles 1 person at a time. Any midtown/downtown NY salad bar can turnover 10 peoples' salads in the time this machine took to make 1. There's no way this machine's operating cost is better than that. Sure, you could scale up these machines, but then the human-staffed salad bars are winning on floor space (and rent). It looks like you could only fit 2-3 of these machines in the footprint of the average NY salad spot. The only place this might win is where salad consumption is infrequent, in which case for food safety reasons, you probably don't want to be eating the salad there anyway.
VeejayRampay 9y ago
I don't think it will not lower the cost of food. In my opinion, the savings won't go towards pricing, they will go towards the owners' bank accounts (or shareholders). See Foxconn and the whole fleet of robots in their factories.
9y ago

Adamantcheese 9y ago

Is it just me or does reading what basically boils down to "Don't go outside, eat this premade salad and 'boost your productivity'" sound somewhat depressing? I don't think that being inside all day eating low quality food under fluorescent lights is going to boost my productivity at all. I would honestly want to go to a restaurant and get an actual salad at lunch.

knappa 9y ago

General robot job replacement related issues aside, this robot only holds enough for 50 salads and, based on the video, seems painfully slow. It doesn't seem ready for a lunchtime rush.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]