4 ms·

One of the lowest level jobs in the market is taking orders at a fast food drive thru. If AI can't do this job, it probably can't do yours either. https://www

One of the lowest level jobs in the market is taking orders at a fast food drive thru. If AI can't do this job, it probably can't do yours either. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c722gne7qngo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c722gne7qngo Bottom line: AI has very poor grasp of reality --- because (surprise, surprise) it has zero real world experience.

plantain 1y ago
>A trial of the system, which was developed by IBM and uses voice recognition software to process orders, was announced in 2019. I don't think the problem was AI technology...
pezgrande 1y ago
Prob what will happen is that you will need to use the app to "order" and then scan a generated code before accessing the drive thru. Not really AI needed, kiosk has been replacement these jobs since Corona (and prob earlier than that).
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago
  Corona is a brand of beer.
aabhay 1y ago
Many fast food places now have tablet based ordering, so turns out AI wasn’t needed for software to take away jobs. That said, AI could do that job perfectly well. The reason we still have human to human interaction when you order is that it creates a more interesting environment for employees, who crave at least some kind of human contact. And customers will pay marginally more for the food if they get some human contact as well.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  > Many fast food places now have tablet based ordering As an experience though, they could hardly have implemented it in a worse way. A big part of the reason I don't go to McDonald's any more is that the experience of using the ordering kiosks is so awful compared to just telling a human what I want.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > A big part of the reason I don't go to McDonald's any more is that the experience of using the ordering kiosks is so awful compared to just telling a human what I want. Huh, for me is the polar opposite. Maybe it's because I mumble, is unclear or don't speak the native language as well as the natives where I live, but I always preferred the kiosks. I seem to always get what I order then, and it's a lot easier to customize things. Generally just feels faster, which I guess is the most important thing about fast-food, I want to be in-and-out of there as quick as possible, the less humans I have to deal with, the better.
    - codazoda 1y ago
      I doubt it. I’m a perfectly capable communicator and I also prefer them.
    - ecshafer 1y ago
      When I worked at McDonalds, a major thing I learned is that when 95% of people say they got an order wrong, the customer ordered it wrong without realizing it. Customer says "I want a cheeseburger, plain", Mcdonalds puts that in as "Cheesebuger, no ketchup, mustard, onion or pickle". Customers will take plain to mean a dozen different things.
      - diggan 1y ago
        > Customer says "I want a cheeseburger, plain", Mcdonalds puts that in as "Cheesebuger, no ketchup, mustard, onion or pickle". Customers will take plain to mean a dozen different things. Isn't it up to the person who is receiving the order to ask clarifying questions then? Since they know it's potentially unclear/ambiguous, why not try to resolve the ambiguity before making the order?
        bryanlarsen 1y ago
        That'd just annoy the 99% of people that agree with McDonald's on what plain means. People at McDonald's are often in a hurry, and some would get really annoyed at stupid questions. Better to piss off the 1% than the 99%. If you're clarifying at this level, there are likely many other questions that you'd ask.
- metalliqaz 1y ago
  In my humble opinion, this kind of thing is the largest blind spot in the current tech economy. Massive LLMs had a breakout moment with chat, and now everyone has invested HARD into that technology while in fact there is really no good reason to think that massive models (billions of parameters, requiring billions of dollars to train, and requiring power-gulping servers to run) are needed or even preferred for most AI tasks. We had algorithmic automation for all kinds of things in the 80s, and that has been steadily improving for everything from chess engines to computer vision to content suggestion ever since. Photo touch-up runs on handheld devices and is nearly instantaneous. Self-checkout is ubiquitous. Digital CNC and 3D printing is no longer to relegated to professionals, the point that amateurs can buy off-the-shelf solutions and start creating products with a few mouse clicks. Billions is being spent on shovels in the current gold rush but are they really needed?
- hackable_sand 1y ago
  I would love to meet the idiot that believes this. I have some money to make $$$
mrits 1y ago
You are describing a vending machine
p0w3n3d 1y ago
There was this joke at some point of time: Expectations: AI will deliver food to you and your high-paid programmers colleagues Reality: You and your colleagues work at Mac because AI took your high-paid programmers jobs
- fknorangesite 1y ago
  Or, similarly: > I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do laundry and dishes. https://twitter.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238?lang=en https://twitter.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238?la...
  - p0w3n3d 1y ago
    Precisely
JustExAWS 1y ago
The article itself said it was developed by IBM in 2019 and wasn’t using LLMs. That’s not exactly a great citation.
bongodongobob 1y ago
6 years old and not using LLMs, try again.
kachapopopow 1y ago
These are actually *not* using llms! Good ol' typical decision tree.
scotty79 1y ago
Android kiosk can do that job.
toddmorey 1y ago
As others have pointed out, LLMs were not involved in the project from the article. But this transition will happen quickly—fast food chains are ruthless about efficiency and ordering from a discrete set of available options actually is something that AIs can do really well.
SkyPuncher 1y ago
As someone who worked in fast food in high school, I completely disagree with this. Order taking via drive through can be surprisingly hard. * Often lots of background noise * Sometimes multiple people try to order (often with one of those being way away from the mic) * People don't always know exactly what they want or what it's called. Sometimes things have a regional or local name that's not on the board. Right now, I order a "$5 meal deal at McDonals". This is often not listed on the board and it's not called "$5 meal deal" - but literally every cashier knows exactly what I'm talking about. I doubt AI would figure this out. * People often have custom requests that don't follow the "official menu". * The actual food ticketing system that gets sent to the grill has significant limitations in resolution. If you're doing anything other than a basic deletion, it's likely just coming through to the grill as "ask me". * It's extremely hard to handle edge cases like makeup meals, incorrect orders, coupons, etc. These generally require human judgement and a bit of contextual understanding. Generally, these are things you only understand by actually looking at the real world. For example, is there an unaccounted burger now sitting at the end of the grill line - looks like someone grabbed the wrong food. * Human cashiers are really good at hearing someone shoutout something like "ice cream machine is down" or "hold on fries" or "we're out of chicken" or "no fire sauce" and understanding what the means in terms of orders. It's a pain to get an AI system to be able to understand all of this nuance.
- eigenspace 1y ago
  Yes, this is a surprisingly difficult job that has a lot of complications. In fact, most jobs have surprising complications to them, and that surprising difficulty is why there's skepticism about AI taking over other jobs.
- ElectronCharge 1y ago
  Actually one of the fast food restaurants here takes automated spoken orders at the drive through. I've only used it once, but I was surprised that it worked flawlessly for me...
  - gspencley 1y ago
    The thing about automated systems is that they typically cover the happy paths, and leave people who fall outside of those happy paths extremely frustrated. Take automated phone menu systems, for example. "If you are calling about X, press 1 If you are calling about Y, press 2 If you are calling about Z, press 3" customers presses 0 because they are calling about none-of-the-above and wants to talk to a human "I'm sorry. I don't recognize that menu option. To hear the options again, please press 9." Oh just today, to give another example of how automation can seriously frustrate end users, I'm trying to get a Square POS account approved for my new business. Their automated verification system sent me a form requesting more information about my business because certain information "could not be verified." One of the questions on the form was asking me to explain a discrepancy between the legal business name I typed in when setting up the account and the business name as it appears on the articles of incorporation that I submitted. The discrepancy in question: white-space and capitalization. No human being would read the two strings as distinct or recognize any discrepancy. Only software does that.
jacinabox 1y ago
I just did a captcha the other day that asked the user to select which items can fit inside the sample item (which was a handbag). You'd think that a multimodal deep learning model could figure out what objects fit inside other objects if it's going to cure cancer or whatever, but no I'm assuming that it needs to be taught explicitly.
- Nextgrid 1y ago
  This is a defense against AI, not a training step. Though a multimodal model should be able to pass it.
- Garlef 1y ago
  There's a fun experiment with toddlers where they re-enter a room but the car they just sat in was replaced by a tiny version: They will try to get into the car even though only their foot fits in. So size/scale is not as easy a concept to model in our minds as we might assume. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OtngSHtz-cc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OtngSHtz-cc

plantain 1y ago

>A trial of the system, which was developed by IBM and uses voice recognition software to process orders, was announced in 2019. I don't think the problem was AI technology...

pezgrande 1y ago

Prob what will happen is that you will need to use the app to "order" and then scan a generated code before accessing the drive thru. Not really AI needed, kiosk has been replacement these jobs since Corona (and prob earlier than that).

loloquwowndueo 1y ago
Corona is a brand of beer.

aabhay 1y ago

Many fast food places now have tablet based ordering, so turns out AI wasn’t needed for software to take away jobs. That said, AI could do that job perfectly well. The reason we still have human to human interaction when you order is that it creates a more interesting environment for employees, who crave at least some kind of human contact. And customers will pay marginally more for the food if they get some human contact as well.

SoftTalker 1y ago
> Many fast food places now have tablet based ordering As an experience though, they could hardly have implemented it in a worse way. A big part of the reason I don't go to McDonald's any more is that the experience of using the ordering kiosks is so awful compared to just telling a human what I want.
- diggan 1y ago
  > A big part of the reason I don't go to McDonald's any more is that the experience of using the ordering kiosks is so awful compared to just telling a human what I want. Huh, for me is the polar opposite. Maybe it's because I mumble, is unclear or don't speak the native language as well as the natives where I live, but I always preferred the kiosks. I seem to always get what I order then, and it's a lot easier to customize things. Generally just feels faster, which I guess is the most important thing about fast-food, I want to be in-and-out of there as quick as possible, the less humans I have to deal with, the better.
  - codazoda 1y ago
    I doubt it. I’m a perfectly capable communicator and I also prefer them.
  - ecshafer 1y ago
    When I worked at McDonalds, a major thing I learned is that when 95% of people say they got an order wrong, the customer ordered it wrong without realizing it. Customer says "I want a cheeseburger, plain", Mcdonalds puts that in as "Cheesebuger, no ketchup, mustard, onion or pickle". Customers will take plain to mean a dozen different things.
    - diggan 1y ago
      > Customer says "I want a cheeseburger, plain", Mcdonalds puts that in as "Cheesebuger, no ketchup, mustard, onion or pickle". Customers will take plain to mean a dozen different things. Isn't it up to the person who is receiving the order to ask clarifying questions then? Since they know it's potentially unclear/ambiguous, why not try to resolve the ambiguity before making the order?
      - bryanlarsen 1y ago
        That'd just annoy the 99% of people that agree with McDonald's on what plain means. People at McDonald's are often in a hurry, and some would get really annoyed at stupid questions. Better to piss off the 1% than the 99%. If you're clarifying at this level, there are likely many other questions that you'd ask.
metalliqaz 1y ago
In my humble opinion, this kind of thing is the largest blind spot in the current tech economy. Massive LLMs had a breakout moment with chat, and now everyone has invested HARD into that technology while in fact there is really no good reason to think that massive models (billions of parameters, requiring billions of dollars to train, and requiring power-gulping servers to run) are needed or even preferred for most AI tasks. We had algorithmic automation for all kinds of things in the 80s, and that has been steadily improving for everything from chess engines to computer vision to content suggestion ever since. Photo touch-up runs on handheld devices and is nearly instantaneous. Self-checkout is ubiquitous. Digital CNC and 3D printing is no longer to relegated to professionals, the point that amateurs can buy off-the-shelf solutions and start creating products with a few mouse clicks. Billions is being spent on shovels in the current gold rush but are they really needed?
hackable_sand 1y ago
I would love to meet the idiot that believes this. I have some money to make $$$

mrits 1y ago

You are describing a vending machine

p0w3n3d 1y ago

There was this joke at some point of time: Expectations: AI will deliver food to you and your high-paid programmers colleagues Reality: You and your colleagues work at Mac because AI took your high-paid programmers jobs

fknorangesite 1y ago
Or, similarly: > I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do laundry and dishes. https://twitter.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238?lang=en https://twitter.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238?la...
- p0w3n3d 1y ago
  Precisely

JustExAWS 1y ago

The article itself said it was developed by IBM in 2019 and wasn’t using LLMs. That’s not exactly a great citation.

bongodongobob 1y ago

6 years old and not using LLMs, try again.

kachapopopow 1y ago

These are actually *not* using llms! Good ol' typical decision tree.

scotty79 1y ago

Android kiosk can do that job.

toddmorey 1y ago

As others have pointed out, LLMs were not involved in the project from the article. But this transition will happen quickly—fast food chains are ruthless about efficiency and ordering from a discrete set of available options actually is something that AIs can do really well.

SkyPuncher 1y ago

As someone who worked in fast food in high school, I completely disagree with this. Order taking via drive through can be surprisingly hard. * Often lots of background noise * Sometimes multiple people try to order (often with one of those being way away from the mic) * People don't always know exactly what they want or what it's called. Sometimes things have a regional or local name that's not on the board. Right now, I order a "$5 meal deal at McDonals". This is often not listed on the board and it's not called "$5 meal deal" - but literally every cashier knows exactly what I'm talking about. I doubt AI would figure this out. * People often have custom requests that don't follow the "official menu". * The actual food ticketing system that gets sent to the grill has significant limitations in resolution. If you're doing anything other than a basic deletion, it's likely just coming through to the grill as "ask me". * It's extremely hard to handle edge cases like makeup meals, incorrect orders, coupons, etc. These generally require human judgement and a bit of contextual understanding. Generally, these are things you only understand by actually looking at the real world. For example, is there an unaccounted burger now sitting at the end of the grill line - looks like someone grabbed the wrong food. * Human cashiers are really good at hearing someone shoutout something like "ice cream machine is down" or "hold on fries" or "we're out of chicken" or "no fire sauce" and understanding what the means in terms of orders. It's a pain to get an AI system to be able to understand all of this nuance.

eigenspace 1y ago
Yes, this is a surprisingly difficult job that has a lot of complications. In fact, most jobs have surprising complications to them, and that surprising difficulty is why there's skepticism about AI taking over other jobs.
ElectronCharge 1y ago
Actually one of the fast food restaurants here takes automated spoken orders at the drive through. I've only used it once, but I was surprised that it worked flawlessly for me...
- gspencley 1y ago
  The thing about automated systems is that they typically cover the happy paths, and leave people who fall outside of those happy paths extremely frustrated. Take automated phone menu systems, for example. "If you are calling about X, press 1 If you are calling about Y, press 2 If you are calling about Z, press 3" customers presses 0 because they are calling about none-of-the-above and wants to talk to a human "I'm sorry. I don't recognize that menu option. To hear the options again, please press 9." Oh just today, to give another example of how automation can seriously frustrate end users, I'm trying to get a Square POS account approved for my new business. Their automated verification system sent me a form requesting more information about my business because certain information "could not be verified." One of the questions on the form was asking me to explain a discrepancy between the legal business name I typed in when setting up the account and the business name as it appears on the articles of incorporation that I submitted. The discrepancy in question: white-space and capitalization. No human being would read the two strings as distinct or recognize any discrepancy. Only software does that.

jacinabox 1y ago

I just did a captcha the other day that asked the user to select which items can fit inside the sample item (which was a handbag). You'd think that a multimodal deep learning model could figure out what objects fit inside other objects if it's going to cure cancer or whatever, but no I'm assuming that it needs to be taught explicitly.

Nextgrid 1y ago
This is a defense against AI, not a training step. Though a multimodal model should be able to pass it.
Garlef 1y ago
There's a fun experiment with toddlers where they re-enter a room but the car they just sat in was replaced by a tiny version: They will try to get into the car even though only their foot fits in. So size/scale is not as easy a concept to model in our minds as we might assume. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OtngSHtz-cc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OtngSHtz-cc