If robots can do the job better and quicker I'm all for it.

Chef Ramsey can just buy Robots for his restaurants?

The fast food business has its slow and snowed in times. When the slow times happen you can send employees home. McDonalds has shifts from 5AM till 8AM and then have a 3 hour lunch break.
Without the volume the cost of buying the equipment and maintaining the equipment will be high.

You don't pay or rent robots by the hour, when it's not busy it just sits there...like the many electrically powered automated appliances around you already.

There are other costs in running a business, that come due every month. If you lease or buy on credit the robots, then the payment is due each month. rent, any advertising,

These fast food places are where so many young people get jobs these days. Has anyone thought about the repercussions of robot burger flippers.

The food will be prepared and cooked by machines. Ancillary jobs will still exist at fast food establishments that use robots to cook.

The biggest difference will be in the consistent quality of the food and an end to waiting on humans to make it.

It would be rather pointless to install all that machinery and then continue to pay the same labor costs. And the main delaying factor in fast food is not imposed by the cook at the grill but the time that it takes to cook the raw food. Now, since I used to be a line cook way back when the main problem I have with big chain fast food is not the consistency of the food depending on where and when I purchased it, but the unhealthy ingredients and prescribed cooking practices that are employed by design.

Back on the jobs front there will be fewer of them and they will be the ones that require less skill, like cleaningif it's a sit-down restaurant or reloading the machine with food supplies. This kind of stuff is not so hard to automate, and I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years there was a version that did away with human labor altogether - you'd have a unit about the size of a shipping container that's basically a hot meal vending machine that's restocked once or twice a week by truck, or just swapped out with a full one while the cooking part goes through a cleaning and maintenance cycle.

OK working in fast food is a shitty job but more importantly the people who need to rely on fast food jobs are unlikely to qualify as robotic maintenance technicians instead without considerable help.

But, yes, we are rapidly entering a world where billions of less skilled, less educated workers will be rendered useless. The workers no longer employed flipping burgers will not be the workers employed maintaining the robots.

What will become of these people will need to be addressed. I'm not optimistic of their plight.

Human's need not apply

Sorry but that's the truth.

These jobs were meant for teenagers after school even though the restaurant is open during the school day. The grown ups doing these jobs now can go back to school and get a degree that will put them so far in debt that they won't need to worry about saving for retirement. Oh well, fuck 'em.

From the film "Idiocracy"... which is turning out to be a documentary.

We roll robodoc to the patient and robodoc does an assessment. Of course there is a human doctor on the other end but it saves time and the doctor can be anywhere in the world. To me this makes sense in home care and prevents having to transport fragile patients to er or offices there's telemetry on robodoc and access to the patient record. Tests like EKGs, ultrasounds etc can be done in the home. Stethoscopes can listen to heart, lung, bowel sounds via telemetry. Robodoc can visualize post up surgical wounds. Movement and central nervous system assessments. All kinds of input via wifi.

It will custom grind your choice of meat. Yum a big fat juicy half bison half beef burger with extra cheese and onions. Bring it on.

Oh, it's time for lunch. That's why this sounds like such a great idea. If they can use a drone to deliver it, it would be a winner.

Even Tesla's own instructions say to keep alert with your hands on the wheel at all times. Sheer FUD mendacity to pretend this was driverless technology

https://www.teslamotors.com/presskit/autopilot

I'm sorry for not seeing the distinction between a "driverless car" and a car which is designed to drive itself, but a guy holds the steering wheel the whole time, you know, just in case. The distinction doesn't seem significant.

Driverless cars have gone well over a million miles with the only incident even of shared fault being a bus that did not give way (plenty of course being the fault of the driver in the non-autonomous car.) Idiots who think a driver-assist technology that merely combines lane awareness with adaptive cruise control means they can watch a DVD and not pay attention are simply Darwin in action. Responsible people should not confuse the two to make a sophomoric Luddite point.

Plus driverless car only caused one death. Cars with drivers caused millions.

And I'm surprised they haven't created "food" ATMs before this. It doesn't even need to be called a robot. It's a machine that can prep and assemble. The prep is easy: feed-tubes to slicing/shaping machines, same as we already have in food-industry factories, just reduced to a smaller scale. The assembly would work exactly the same way.

Really, it's just a tiny factory in a box. Not really a robot. The corps could even go ahead and add the 'F' from 'food' to the ATM part for something catchy instead of robot...

The original attempts were still labor intensive, just not visibly so

Here is a really good write-up on it

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/meet-me-at-the-automat-47804151/?no-ist

More like the Automat was a cafeteria presented like a vending machine. It has nothing to do with the idea of robotic or automatic food service. There are no people involved in the automatic kind, other than for repair and maybe re-supply, though I could see the re-supply part also being automated.

or the pissed off spitting or the don't care employee drops patty on floor and picks it up and still uses it.

This was tried before, will it work this time? Nobody knows. Only have to wait and see.

People forget the goal of the Left was to liberate people from wage labor, where an individual is selling their life and their productivity to the Capitalist Bourgeoisie. Technology has the potential to end wage feudalism.

We need people to be prepared so that we can create programs to help society make the transition.

In a world in which labor has some value in creating products and customers, capital will pay people the minimum required to keep the wheel turning.

in a world in which work has no value, they will pay the minimum required to forestall revolt.

And robots will do that job too.

If there's no value in labor, then people have no value.

One last thing, capital has become an entity of it's own. People don't control it, it controls them.

I agree that people no longer control capital, and that it controls them.

However, the theory that a world where labor does not generate capital has no value is false. There are plenty of things that exist in our world right now that require labor, but does not generate capital. An immediate example would be stay-at-home parents. Another example would be open source projects that are freely distributed. Another example would be someone who volunteers at a suicide prevention hotline.

I am not saying that will be the future, or even should be the future, I am just pointing them out as examples. Capital does not equal value. The only thing capital measures is market value, which is vastly different from real value. It is possible to imagine a system in which real value is measured and capital distributed based on that value rather than market value. In fact, if we moved into a future where technology was able to perform most jobs that required traditional labor, that would be the ONLY way to measure value without economic collapse.

Capital has no need for the labor these people produce, so it has no use for the people.

The belief that capital will act as if people have inherent value is false. We don't.

Stay at home parents are valuable to the working spouse - not to the capital who employs him or her. Open source software is valuable as an intellectual challenge (and an investment) to the people creating it.

Capital acts on instinct, not rationally. If the end game of capitalism is economic collapse, that is what will happen. There's no mechanism to change the game because it's not under social control.

The best we can hope for is to delay the point at which human labor becomes irrelevant. At that point, we are all Chad.

very much about having to clean these things. That would require giving someone a job

And as for hygiene that just gets in the way of profits

I bet they'll have to blast the product with Xrays before serving up

I am also glad I remember life pre-cell phones

I irritate the hell out of my son because my mobile phone stays home when I leave most of the time. I don't have the need to be connected to the world at all times or live in fear of missing a phone call or text. It is handy to have access to the Internet at times but I survived 40 years prior to the Internet without major mishaps.

I feel sorry for people who are hysterical for immediate updates on EVERYTHING

a working class and a consuming class. Smart man and I am glad to have known him.

Soylent Green

Daisy....

This a regular problem at the local burger joint?