Kiosks have finally arrived at McDonalds. And man....has that taken a long time. We all thought this would happen a decade ago.
If it takes this long to get simple kiosks, how long do you really think it will take before robots take these jobs? Probably a decade.
It's gonna be a while. They can't even perfect toys yet.
ReplyDeleteToys are tougher though, I'd think. Toys are random or should be to be fun.
ReplyDeleteBurger robot? One arm that flips a patty onto a premeasured-temp grill for a pre-measured amount of time, then flips it over for a certain time, then picks it up after a pre-measured time. sensor tells that cooked burger has been picked up and drops a bottom bun on a conveyor. Another sensor says there's a bun here and squirts condiments onto the bun. Bun moves down the belt and a tomato slice and a hunk of lettuce drop from small refrigerated compartments onto the burner. Finally a top bun is placed on the top and burger slides onto a piece of wrapping paper, where mini-robot arms wrap it up.
Fries? when the order computer has an order for a burger and fries, as the burger process starts, a chute drops a small-medium-or-large size of uncooked fries into a smaller than we use now fry-cooking utensil which lowers into the oil. after the right time (as the burger is done, ideally) the fries come up, the fry holder dumps fries into the cardboard holder, and a belt takes to to the place where the finished burger is waiting.
And I came up with this while watching Stanford get outplayed by Arizona.
Hey! I've been to a couple of tree games. Glad to see you stuck around.
ReplyDeleteI'm not discounting the arm. But they aren't really suited for that environment. I'm not saying it won't work. But for how long will it work? After all, these arms are just shrunken down industrial robots who reside in pristine clean environments.
I prefer these kiosks to the usual cashiers ...
ReplyDeleteThe kiosks don't screw up taking my order at least, especially when I want to change a few things like not wanting pig products on my Egg Macs.
But there's still plenty of opportunity for the people preparing my order to screw it up, although the kiosks let the blame rest solely on them.
Oh, yeah, about robots taking those jobs ... pass the butter. :-)
BTW, apparently Google's reaction to the "Not Particularly Challenging" meme has been to make it even more difficult to pass through the portal of Google's captcha, and so my snark level has been reduced considerably.
And so I have this idea that involves [CENSORED DUE TO GRAPHIC VIOLENCE] about where Google can shove its captcha ... :-)
You know I love some Rick and Morty. We were going to try to make them into pumpkins this year, but I just can't get it to congeal.
ReplyDeleteYou know - the other day I was thinking that of all the times I've seen hurricanes rip things apart in Florida - I've never seen a McLaren in the damage.
My idea with the arms, etc. might not be workable today.
ReplyDeleteBut give them a couple of years.
I'm less interested in replacing inside order takers with screens/keyboards then i am in finding a way to make it easier to order at the drive-thru. Not that I use drive-thrus too often as the nearest is 40 miles away.
I got to spend the weekend with my kid at our alma mater. College Game Day (ESPN) came to the home of Ol' Crimson after 15 years of flag waving across the country. Somewhere between 15-20 thousand people at the broadcast's 6 a.m. start. Then 40,000 stuck around for the afternoon game where we beat Oregon. Next week, we're in Palo Alto to beat the Trees.
Oh - absolutely agree. They will make little improvements over time. And they will waterproof it like the crap they have been pitching at CES for years. It's why we can now have cell phones in the toilet apparently. People just tend to underestimate how much time it really takes. For instance just a few years ago the Baxter robot seemed poised to take over human's. And they had to lay that robot off. No one ever talks about the tragedy of robot unemployment. LOL. I'm guessing it wasn't financially viable in some way.
ReplyDeleteSo... are you going to be in Palo Alto, or is your team is going to be in Palo Alto?
Once upon a time in New York, there was a spunky little vending machine company disguised as a pop-up restaurant ...
ReplyDeleteThey sold Dutch junk food in the form of the "kroket", which is a kind of fritter stuffed with anything you can think of, including stuff you don't normally think would work well in fritters. (I tend to like my chili in a bowl, not in a fritter, for instance.)
Although the stuff was pretty good, the big problem was getting the supply chain worked out, and so the pop-up fizzled out after a while and went away.
The "Bamn! Food" place mentioned here might be it.
Before we'll see swinging arms and all sorts of expensive and hard-to-keep-sterilized machinery in existing restaurants doing food-by-robot, it'll be more likely that we'll see twenty-equivalent unit (TEU) containers being converted into pop-up Dutch-style "automats" with drive-through lanes built around their installations.
But these won't be ordinary "automats", and they won't even be fixed installations ...
Why deal with the cost of cleaning in-place when you can pick up TEUs with big rigs and then take them to a regional facility where they're professionally cleaned, stripped, and reloaded with raw materials while the replacement unit chugs on as if none of this had even happened?
Why deal with the problem of the restaurant getting unhygenic when you can keep most of the operation at a bone-chilling -5 C all the time, only heating up the parts that are required for serving hot food? When the restaurant's running low on supplies, why not have a big rig do an early pick-up and replace operation?
If you're serving a limited menu with customizations, you can build standardized machines with options to add the customizations.
Think of how many McDonald's menu items are essentially the same item but with different kinds of customizations, and then think of how you could reduce that even further by getting rid of a few of the odd special parts ...
So there won't be "robots" working in restaurants to start with.
There will be a giant container "robot" restaurant design custom-built for a specific company's output instead, and it'll pop up in an over-sized parking lot. (Unlike most of the other parking lot occupants, at least that one would consistently pay rent.)
Even the kiosks will be stuck on the sides, ready to retract for transport, just so the company can clean off all of the Priority Mail postal sticker taggings and graffiti.
And in some spots where they'll pop up, they'll be welcomed as the only restaurants in the area with a perfect 100% health rating.
If they only take plastic money for payment and are well-secured against theft, they can be put in places where people are becoming afraid to work, but where there's still a need for the services. (Waffle House robberies, anyone?)
That's also why I think the future of robotic arms is for a new redneck bar gimmick that replaces the mechanical bull. :-)
At the point when you can have robots working in restaurants, you can have robots working at pretty much anything, and so historians can write a few cheeky magazine articles about the "transition from post-scarcity to post-labor and its discontents" ... which will probably be written by robots and will probably read something like this bit by Bruce Sterling.
"My dog, for instance, says he'll truly miss humanity ... but then again, my dog says a lot of things." (Yeah, Bruce, some of us got the joke.)
It's an interesting concept. If I had f-u money I would open a delivery/takeout only restaurant. No inside dining. Do you know how much business restaurants from from takeout these days?
ReplyDelete