No doubt this is the future of fast food. Been wondering for years why a big player like McDonalds wouldn't come out with such an automated process and came to the conclusion it must have something to do with the economic consequences this would bring along. The amount of minimum wage jobs this would destroy, would have a very devastating impact on the U.S. economy.
"Destroying jobs" with technology is not a bad thing. The world benefits from cheaper products, and we shouldn't keep people working in jobs where they are no longer needed just for the sake of letting them work. They should learn new skills, find other jobs, and contribute to society in other ways.
No company would hesitate to fire every one of their employees if they could get machines to do better work for cheaper. The only reason McDonald's hasn't done it yet is because they haven't found a cost-effective way to do it.
There's only so much work to do. Machines seems to be eating more jobs than innovation can create. Eventually, we will face massive (over 50%) unemployment, unless of course we change a thing or two in our way of life (such as 20 hours work weeks or such).
Machines are great, but we do need to mind the way we use them.
In the short term the less intelligent half will be massively unemployed until we get something like Gattaca going and then everyone can basically be researchers (or writers, etc).
The real question is what happens after the singularity.
> The real question is what happens after the singularity.
Probably more true than you realize. The most likely scenario for a technological singularity is an AI that writes a slightly more efficient AI, and so on until world domination if it's quick enough (which is likely).
So we better know exactly¹ what we want the AI to do, or it might for instance tile the solar system with molecular smileys to maximize a badly programmed notion of "happiness".
This is almost assuredly the future of all food. In 20 years (at the latest) I imagine some kind of make-all food crafting machine will be the de-facto standard in new homes and would have a very reasonable cost associated (maybe 10 - 20k) considering time saved.
But even then, that is only a hairs step away from 3d molecular printers just building amino acids and proteins up into the food you want anyway. Significantly fewer moving parts and things to break, too. I hope that happens in our lifetimes.
> But even then, that is only a hairs step away from 3d molecular printers just building amino acids and proteins up into the food you want anyway. Significantly fewer moving parts and things to break, too. I hope that happens in our lifetimes.
IMHO, "printing" food is a dream that will never happen. Much like flying cars. It sounds futuristic and all, but you just can't do it both cheaper (and better) than dropping a seed into the ground and waiting.
Pronutria is working on bacteria/algae that converts sunlight into protein. They talk about 10x reduction in the cost of protein, i.e. meat.
Another company(forgot it's name) is working on algae that manufactures sugar as an input for the biofuel industry. Their target is 4x cost reduction vs plant grown sugar.
If they succeed it would be interesting to see the dirsuption to the food industry.
> If they succeed it would be interesting to see the dirsuption to the food industry.
Meh, the status quo will just spend their tremendous capital on a hate campaign to paint algae grown proteins as artificial and bad because they aren't bloody cow butt.
The throughput on the machines might be pretty good, but the ping time won't be. When you have four registers stacked five people deep and drive-thru wrapped around the store at peak periods, and drive-thru just took another six Big Macs, wiping out the dozen you had, you want to be able to tell your grill staff "give me a dozen macs now!" Not "sorry, your one cheeseburger will have to wait until the twelve Big Macs the previous two customers ordered ahead of you."
It is worth pointing out that the traditional problem of robots is control -- if just once, some bucket is 1mm off target, some robot arm which grabs it will grab it off-center and torque it, and when it drops it will spill, which ruins some nearby work area and requires the process to be shut down and manually corrected. That's the failure mode: error propagation.
Inability to anticipate load is a problem here, but it's not as dire as you're claiming -- the worst is that someone waits for a while longer, and this only applies if you don't have humans manning the registers -- after all, humans can indeed issue an order to a robot of "give me a dozen macs now!"; that is an order which robots can accept. I'm much more concerned with the fact that a totally-automated burger joint might not notice a hole in the wall forming due to water damage, or a rat making its way in through the aforementioned hole in the wall, following the smells of delicious burgers.
