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Again, not robotic kitchen automation. Oh, it's in process. I consulted on a early prototype of a new automation project for them and that was 3 years ago. Mc

Again, not robotic kitchen automation. Oh, it's in process. I consulted on a early prototype of a new automation project for them and that was 3 years ago. McD just refines and tests the hell out of things for years with their vendors before they launch it. I worked in a McD kitchen 30 years ago as a teenager. The ironic thing is that the amount of people needed to run a kitchen has stayed essentially the same. Most run with 2-3 people during an average period. It's just that over those years McD has already automated a huge portion of the grunt work in the kitchen, the rest is just tending to the machines and final assembly + customization, which no robot will get right for another decade or two. Humans are more versatile, easier to train, quickly replaceable when one goes offline, and keep a much cleaner workstation. The robots do the JIT work on everything else.

JohnHaugeland 6y ago
> Humans are more versatile, easier to train, quickly replaceable when one goes offline, and keep a much cleaner workstation. This is a biassed viewpoint. The problem is that humans do dozens of tasks. When we take one of them and give it to a machine, we view that as a new tool, and we imagine the human hasn't had its work reduced, because 19/20 of the things they were doing last month they still are. Fry machines are now automatic. So are cash registers. Many locations' burgers are auto-flipped. Those ice cream machines automate 5 different human jobs. Lots of orders are taken on machine now. Etc, etc, etc. . > Humans are more versatile, easier to train, quickly replaceable when one goes offline, and keep a much cleaner workstation. No they don't. If you made your own ice cream, you'd understand. It's just that when a machine takes over one specific job, we stop thinking of that as having been a human job, and let the human messes go out of our heads. There was a time when fast food restaurants sliced their own cheese; ground their own beef; cut and cooked their own french fries; mixed their own sodas. You don't live long enough to understand the progress of piecemeal automation.

JohnHaugeland 6y ago

> Humans are more versatile, easier to train, quickly replaceable when one goes offline, and keep a much cleaner workstation. This is a biassed viewpoint. The problem is that humans do dozens of tasks. When we take one of them and give it to a machine, we view that as a new tool, and we imagine the human hasn't had its work reduced, because 19/20 of the things they were doing last month they still are. Fry machines are now automatic. So are cash registers. Many locations' burgers are auto-flipped. Those ice cream machines automate 5 different human jobs. Lots of orders are taken on machine now. Etc, etc, etc. . > Humans are more versatile, easier to train, quickly replaceable when one goes offline, and keep a much cleaner workstation. No they don't. If you made your own ice cream, you'd understand. It's just that when a machine takes over one specific job, we stop thinking of that as having been a human job, and let the human messes go out of our heads. There was a time when fast food restaurants sliced their own cheese; ground their own beef; cut and cooked their own french fries; mixed their own sodas. You don't live long enough to understand the progress of piecemeal automation.