The big issue with robot cooks isn't a machine that can cook food...those have been around for some time now. The real question is can the robots cook safe and healthful food with no human assistance? Any Board of Health will agree that the real challenge in cooking isn't the mechanical combination of the ingredients, it's inspecting the food and noticing potential problems that will stand out to any person.
Robots that can cook on their own have enormous benefits to society. The preparation of the food is made slightly cheaper and overall quality of the food improves (if a robot can make the perfect burger once, it can do it again and again). There's no need to worry about washed hands or cooks with colds, and for simple or repeat orders it's usually easier to interface with a machine instead of a person. But the real benefit to the world is freeing up the processing power of human minds for something other than flipping meat every X minutes.
These machines take a lot of the human labor out of food preparation, but at least one person will still need to be around to answer certain questions: Did this meat go bad before it was cooked? Were there rat droppings on the grill? Is there any chance that someone could get sick by eating this? Of course these things will take breakthroughs in machine vision technology and herculean data collection efforts. But once we get there, we can really cut costs and fight hunger with food factories.
Given that they're grinding meat on the spot, and that ground meat has a significantly higher risk of bacterial contamination than its non-ground equivalent, my guess is that this negates some of the risk. There still has to be a human involved to be sure, but I'd eat a burger from one of these any day of the week over the McDonalds equivalent (assuming I ate beef, of course, which i don't).
Robots that can cook on their own have enormous benefits to society. The preparation of the food is made slightly cheaper and overall quality of the food improves (if a robot can make the perfect burger once, it can do it again and again). There's no need to worry about washed hands or cooks with colds, and for simple or repeat orders it's usually easier to interface with a machine instead of a person. But the real benefit to the world is freeing up the processing power of human minds for something other than flipping meat every X minutes.
These machines take a lot of the human labor out of food preparation, but at least one person will still need to be around to answer certain questions: Did this meat go bad before it was cooked? Were there rat droppings on the grill? Is there any chance that someone could get sick by eating this? Of course these things will take breakthroughs in machine vision technology and herculean data collection efforts. But once we get there, we can really cut costs and fight hunger with food factories.