Flippy the Robot Takes Over Burger Duties At California Restaurant (ktla.com) 226
Chain eatery CaliBurger announced today that its location in Pasadena is the first to employ Flippy, a burger-flipping robot developed by Miso Robotics. The robot is able to take over the cooking duties after a human puts the patties on the grill. KTLA reports: "The kitchen of the future will always have people in it, but we see that kitchen as having people and robots," said David Zito, co-founder and chief executive officer of Miso Robotics. Flippy uses thermal imaging, 3D and camera vision to sense when to flip -- and when to remove. "It detects the temperature of the patty, the size of the patty and the temperature of the grill surface," explained Zito. The device also learns through artificial intelligence -- basically, the more burgers that Flippy flips, the smarter it gets. Right now, cheese and toppings are added by a co-worker. CaliBurger CEO John Miller says the robot can cut down on costs as it will work a position that has a high turnover rate. "It's not a fun job -- it's hot, it's greasy, it's dirty," said Miller about the grill cook position. Less turnover means less time training new grill cooks. Flippy costs about $60,000 minimum and is expected to be used at other CaliBurger locations soon.
Flip It (Score:2)
Does Flippy flip flimsy fast food flippantly? Throw in Talkie Toaster and I'm THERE.
Strange solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Using a general purpose assembly robot to flip burgers at a normal grill seems like a poor solution. Why not use a conveyor oven ? Or a two sided contact grill for one or two patties.
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It's not a general purpose robot! All it can do is flip burger patties already sitting on a grill. It can't even put cheese on top of the patty, that has to be done by a human.
Why not use a conveyor oven ?
Because nobody wants a baked hamburger.
Or a two sided contact grill for one or two patties
That would actually make sense if I were building a burger factory to churn out ten thousand patties a day. That's how I'd do it.
However this is just one restaurant and it's probably making only a few hundred patties a day. You wouldn't want to spend too much money on a whole new automated grill
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Because nobody wants a baked hamburger.
At a fast food joint . . . would anybody be able to taste the difference . . . ? Or even care . . . ?
Although, alternatively, they could claim that robot baked burgers are healthier than human greasy fried ones.
That would actually make sense if I were building a burger factory to churn out ten thousand patties a day.
Ha! I gaze in pity at your puny production! The sign outside my fast food restaurant says "Billions and Billions Served"!
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That makes no sense. 100 burgers a day for three years is 100,000 burgers served. Once you load NPV onto TCO, you're adding near $1 per burger just to cook the patty.
I can see the ROI kicking in at the 500 burger per day range, but they've probably started at locations closer to 1000 burgers per day (circa 100 burgers per hour, with a steady service window of 10 hours).
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There is a french fry machine for restaurants (something like "perfect fries") that is a self-contained system that pops out either a single serving of fries or a batch of several servings that is closer to the GGP's comment; it doesn't take making thousands of burgers a day-- just being optimized for what it does need to do.
Likewise, automated drink machines hardly seem like a challenge for anything from the drive-through at McDonalds to Starbucks-- they might not be able to do everything, but triage of th
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That is a question of cost, space, numbers and equipment that is already there. Sure, if there was a market for 100'000 of these per year, they would probably come as a complete replacement for the cooking station. But there is not. So a general-purpose tool gets adapted. Also, this is the first iteration, optimization will be done when it is known how large the market is.
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Re:Strange solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't Burger King use conveyors? All chain pizza places do (to the best of my knowledge).
At Least Back to the Early 70's (Score:2)
My first job was at Burger King in 1974, and we had the conveyor belt broiler. Plop patties on the belt, they slid into a bin a few minutes later.
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Carl's had conveyors in the late '70s (speaking from work experience)
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However I see this specific experiment doomed to failure because Flippy sounds too much like Clippy (but the publicity will be worth it, I've never heard of CaliBurger).
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Using a general purpose assembly robot to flip burgers at a normal grill seems like a poor solution. Why not use a conveyor oven ? Or a two sided contact grill for one or two patties.
This is actually what Burger King does. They stick the patties on a conveyor belt that goes through a flame broiler and comes out the other side. You don't need a whole lot of technology to automate burger making.
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Re:Strange solution - generality, steps to future. (Score:2)
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Isn't a conveyor what Burger King has been using for > 40 years now? It's "flame grilled" too. So, it's not "baked". Seems that McD's is just catching up with competition here.
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A decade from now it's not unreasonable to assume there will be joints where the human employees visit only sporadically when there is a problem. 2 decades from now it's anyon
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But you need a human anyhow, to place the patties on the grill, take them off, carry the box of patties from the truck to the cooler, from the cooler to the cooking station, discard old boxes, oil and clean the grill plate, and now also give daily maintenance to the burger flipping machine (or likely even more often for the spatula equivalents, if hygiene is a concern).
And you will still get the odd order of a double-cooked burger, which the robot can't handle. You then have a choice between telling the c
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You don't need to replace a human worker 100%, though. If this machine handles 60-80% of the grill worker's tasks/time, you can combine that worker's job with another one that is at less than 100% utilization, and you've potentially replaced one worker for multiple shifts per day. And I'm not sure what the GP was thinking, but I'm pretty sure you're not going to give the thing Sundays off when you're implementing it as a labor-reducing tool.
As it is, though, this seems to be mainly a combination proof-of-co
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You don't need to replace a human worker 100%, though. If this machine handles 60-80% of the grill worker's tasks/time, you can combine that worker's job with another one that is at less than 100% utilization, and you've potentially replaced one worker for multiple shifts per day.
Only if the other task can be done in the time between him putting fresh patties on the grill and taking cooked ones off. He can't really delay the latter because he's doing something else, or people will eat overcooked burgers, and won't come back.
I can see how it could enable a charmaster of bovinity to cook twice as many burgers in the same time, so a busy place might replace one of two people with a machine. But you still need someone who can pay attention and rescue the burgers quickly when the machi
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A 10-year old kid can be trained to flip a burger.
Now why must the robot be equipped with 2 hands? I agree with your sentiment about 10 year olds doing the same thing.
Don't take away the human if you're technically replacing him. Might as well put an H1B hopeful in there. Add an extra arm, or something, so the robot can do Facebook! or post memes on imgur =)
SpongeBob... (Score:3, Funny)
...is not going to be happy with this.
If it's greasy and dirty (Score:2)
maybe we should better have a robot who eats this crap.
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Double-sided (Score:3)
How is this an improvement over the double-sided grills that cook both sides at the same time?
Example: http://www.garland-group.com/P... [garland-group.com]
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How is this an improvement over the double-sided grills that cook both sides at the same time?
Example: http://www.garland-group.com/P... [garland-group.com]
To use burger universe vernacular, the little old lady looks at that burger machine and barks, "Where's the hype . . . ?"
It isn't labeled "Autonomous AI Robotic Automation" and isn't "Powered by Bitcoin Blockchain Technology."
Hook it up to a Raspberry Pi that reads from /dev/random and prints it on a cheap display and add a coin slot labeled, "Insert Bitcoins Here", and then folks would get interested in it.
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One day when I worked at McDonald's, the meat hadn't been taken out of the deep freeze early enough and so the burgers weren't fully cooked after their preset cook time. They looked fully cooked on the outside (thanks to the double-sided grill press), but were quite raw in the middle even on t
McDonalds has not flipped burgers for decades (Score:2)
McDonalds transitioned to use a two sided "clamshell" grill several decades ago, so there has been no burger flipping for some time.
Also this robot is quite slow compared to a human.
Not a useful robot.
Perhaps customers like to see the robot flipping action.
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But don't forget, a robot that 1/10th the speed is still profitable if it's 1/100th the cost.
So who's doing the rest? (Score:2)
It's just flipping burgers. Will it make me a rare one if I ask for it?
Someone else is apparently putting the burgers on the grill, and cheese, and assembly of the burger.
Does the FDA have to approve kitchenbots, to ensure they're not using toxic fluids, non-sealed batteries, or lead based paint?
I know one thing for sure, there's probably some guy making $30 a day under the table, cleaning the grease dishes, and the robot.
Better burger robots than this out there (Score:2)
All this does is flip the burger. There's already robots that cool and build the whole thing. How is this news? It's like showcasing a iPhone 6s as something new.
Seems inefficient (Score:2)
Seems to me you could bake these burgers in the same way bread is baked.
A conveyor belt that moves the burgers over the fire in a consistent way.
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Why would you go through the effort of making a robot arm to do this?
Seems to me you could bake these burgers in the same way bread is baked.
A conveyor belt that moves the burgers over the fire in a consistent way.
In that case, the customer might as well go to McDonalds or Burger King. That people go to CaliBurger is at least in part due to a perception that the burgers are cooked better.
What an impressively weak design (Score:2)
2) The outside facing door opens and closes on robotic hinges.
3) Burgers are delivered on a carousel mail-slot system so that 8 stacks of 150 1cm thick burgers can be delivered directly from the truck to the restaurant. Make room for two of these stacks so that one can be empty and being replaced while the other is in use.
4) When a patty is needed, a door to the freezer is opened via robotic
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Umm ... no (Score:2)
Right now, cheese and toppings are added by a co-worker .
What the actual fuck? No, this thing doesn't have co-workers.
Bad news (Score:2)
All those English Majors not finding any job will now end 'putting' burgers instead of flipping them.
Great news for the non-college bound (Score:2)
Safety Cage (Score:4, Insightful)
How can a human put the stuff on the grill, or put the cheese on afterwards? Do they have to shut down the robot, enter the safety cage, exit the cage, turn on the robot. I don't see how you can do that with 'food' sitting on the grill.
The pictures in the article don't show any room. The human co-worker would have to slide up next to the robot, get smashed in the gut or the head by a heavy steel pneumatic arm, and then they wouldn't have to worry about their minimum wage job anymore.
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Safety cages are only required when you can't push the machine back by hand.
There are no safety cages on elevator doors (for example).
Califburger (Score:2)
Is essentially basic In-N-Out ripoff, Check out their menu and compare.
This is just a publicity stunt
I've been there.. (Score:2)
I've been to the Pasadena location... It's attached to a club that does rock concerts.
The burgers are meh. Only good thing about the restaurant is they will loan you a wireless charging ring for your phone while you're eating. Oh. And the shakes.
Re:What do the humans do? (Score:4, Insightful)
In the immortal words of EDI, "I enjoy the sight of humans on their knees."
Burger King... (Score:5, Interesting)
...is wondering what all the fuss is about. All people do there is put the patty on the rotating chain and out comes a fully cooked burger from the other side.
Burger king robot from start (Score:2)
I cam heree to say the same thing. They also get flame broiling to boot. Some people prefer a non-broiled burger (jucier allgedly, but that's really more to do with the meat). But no reason one could not implement the same thing in a grill that was a chain driven burger sliding system.
I think the value of flippy is it can retro-fit an existing grill. But I doubt it costs less than just getting a flame broiler.
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No you shouldn't.
Marshall stop spamming /. Your as bad as the other one, old "what's his 'tard"?
Re:How's that $15/hr min wage working for you? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the minimum wage has absolutely nothing to do with this. It's about total cost per hour, it's about efficiency and machines are across the board more efficient than human beings, even if the human beings make next to nothing. Let's do the math.
The machine costs 60 000. Assume a pay of 5 dollars an hour and you're running the place 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. That comes down to 17280 a year. The machine will still be more cost-efficient that a human being., it will just take 3,5 years to pay for itself rather than the less than a year it will take on a 15 dollars an hour pay. Hell, China [bloomberg.com] is leading the way in automation of production, and they're using it to replace workers that make around 10-15 bucks a day because the machines are simply more cost-efficient and reliable than human workers even at those wages. So your equivalents in China are essentially yelling: 'yeah, how about that, priced yourself right out of a job! If you only were satisfied with working at 3 dollars a day you maybe could have kept your job for another 5 years before it was automated!"
The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless, and even most positions requiring a higher education will be in the same situation a couple decades from now with the advances in AI. Anyone who thinks human beings can in the long term remain competitive with systems that are specifically designed to be more cost-efficient than humans, doesn't understand a thing about automation or economics, or what this shift means for economies overall.
Re:How's that $15/hr min wage working for you? (Score:5, Insightful)
That comes down to 17280 a year. The machine will still be more cost-efficient that a human being
Well, except that all it does is flip the burger... it doesn't put raw patties on the oven, it doesn't season it, it doesn't put cheese on it. And I doubt it's got any capacity to tell when something's wrong and stop and/or fix it. It doesn't come close to doing the full job. Robots do great for high volume production, like you want to churn out a million iPhones. But Momentum Machines showed off their burger-making robot in 2012 and it's still not here, this flipper is like 1% of the process. By all means automation is real... but this "we'll all be out of a job in five years" hyperbole is too much. Sure if you're young enough to be planning a career many decades out or what your kids will do when they grow up maybe it's a big deal. But when you see how much they struggle to automate the jobs even high school drop-outs do we're not going to have "I, robot" style assistants in my lifetime.
Re:How's that $15/hr min wage working for you? (Score:5, Insightful)
That was not my point. My point is that looking at the wage made by the guy who's replaced (or partially replaced) by the machine is not an argument really. Put another way: saying that 'if people were just satisfied with making less they'd be safe from having their jobs automated' is a false statement.
To be clear, I'm not saying we'll all be out of jobs going ahead, but especially unskilled or lowly trained labor will be disappearing, and it's happening at a rate faster than you probably realize already. The factories that are moved from Asia back to the west employ a fraction of the people they used to, because automating as much as possible is the economically sound option, and this trend will only keep going, and it will get faster the more commonplace these systems become.
I'm not saying we'll get to 'I robot' -level even within my lifespan as someone who's soon 28, but we don't need to get that far for most non-university educated people to have trouble finding work when most of these menial tasks are automated, which will lead to major issues unless we're prepared.
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Well, except that all it does is flip the burger
You say that like it's no big deal, but it's a really, really big deal. It doesn't call in sick. It doesn't have car trouble and miss a shift. It doesn't come in late. It doesn't come in hungover. It doesn't cause drama with the other employees. It doesn't spit in the food. It doesn't require training every 3-4 months because the previous robot doing that job quit, and it's a new hire. And when new ones are deployed, they don't need training. They can just have the brains of the current one copied over.
All
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Well having real live servants will be a status symbol. The rich can come home to their army of very obedient servants, get their footwear licked clean and such and abuse their servants in other ways secure in the knowledge that there are 10+ potential servants lined up at the door willing to take that $10 a day job for each you have employed..
They'll be other ways having humans in the chain will be a status symbol in a world of robots. The best restaurants will have human servers and chefs if you're willin
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Agriculture still needs large numbers of low-skill workers - no-one has made a good fruit-picking robot yet. It's highly seasonal work though. Tends to attract a lot of undocumented labor - farmers get cheaper temporary workers, workers get a job where they can disappear once the harvest season is over.
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I know, right? There's no tomato picking machines [ucdavis.edu], apple picking machines [youtube.com], blueberry picking machines [youtube.com], or raspberry picking machines [youtube.com], AND THERE NEVER WILL BE!!!
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Don't worry about it. Those former burger-flippers will be taking a 6-month trade training course and will be making $15 driving around town doing robot repair and maintenance...
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Suggests Dylan as a prophet. A hard rain's going to fall. I feel it too.
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Note that they're replacing human labor in China with robots too, and they're only making $15/DAY. Do you REALLY think someone in the U.S. can afford to live on less than $15 a DAY?
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fast food workers because they are stupid enough to think they deserve $15.00 for flipping burgers
It doesn't matter how much you think you should get paid for doing something, if I'm doing anything, I need to get paid a certain amount just to live. The burger joint could just not pay $15/hour and instead just pay $5/hour and see what happens. Ohh, no burgers to sell, now you're out of business. Well then, flipping burgers must be worth $15/hour.
The idea of "worth" is extremely abstract and not intrinsic.
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The machine costs 60 000. Assume a pay of 5 dollars an hour and you're running the place 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. That comes down to 17280 a year. The machine will still be more cost-efficient that a human being., it will just take 3,5 years to pay for itself rather than the less than a year it will take on a 15 dollars an hour pay.
In business it's a lot easier to justify an investment that pays off in one year than one which pays off in 3 to 5. So increasing the costs of human labour or decreasing the cost of machines leads to humans being replace with machines. I.e. your calculation actually proves the OP's point rather than disproving it.
It's no coincidence that McDonalds and co decided to start installing kiosks in addition to the workers taking orders at counters. Firstly it enables them to sell more stuff. Secondly it enables t
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The McDonalds kiosks are a nightmare: Nobody ever uses them, staff have to be dedicated to TRY to get people to use them, Half the time they're out of receipts and you give up, the other half the time you pay cash and have to use the counter-person anyway.
But more importantly, they're a failure because they put the impetus for resolving problems on the purchaser, not the staff. If I use a kiosk and can't find my item/can't order what I want, the problem becomes mine.I have to fix it, I feel silly if I can't
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To be honest I've never used one. Still even if McDonalds have messed up the implementation it doesn't doom the idea. It'd be like saying 'Well the [first automobile] is unreliable. Let's stick to horses'.
Technology will move on. I'm sure in the long run you'll see restaurants where you order at a console and the food is prepared by unseen humans. In fact I went to one in NYC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Also in the long run someone's going to work out a way for those meals to be mixed by machines with h
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Seriously??
Most clerks these days, especially in FF, seem to have the IQ and concentration capabilities of a small soap dish.
If you ask them anything remotely off the script, that isn't a 1 button push on the register, they get that bl
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Funny thing about that. They blame the increased minimum wage for that, but they're also putting in the kiosks in in areas that didn't raise the minimum wage at all.
Don't let them fool you.
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The machine won't call in sick.
Sure it will. It will almost certainly have a diagnostic panel, and almost certainly won't have even a three nines uptime guarantee.
Doctors of the expensive kind that make house calls have to give it regular check-ups.
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The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless, and even most positions requiring a higher education will be in the same situation a couple decades from now with the advances in AI. Anyone who thinks human beings can in the long term remain competitive with systems that are specifically designed to be more cost-efficient than humans, doesn't understand a thing about automation or economics, or what this shift means for economies overall.
Uh, "shift" in economies?
When 20 - 30% of the human population is unemployable 10 - 20 years from now due to automation, there will be a considerable disruption to global economies. This alone will likely cause chaos, so we may not even get to the second phase.
When 90% of the human population is unemployable 30 - 40 years from now due to good-enough AI, there will be no "economy" to speak of. Most of the population will belong to the Global Welfare State. And UBI will become nothing more than Welfare 2.0
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When 20 - 30% of the human population is unemployable 10 - 20 years from now due to automation, there will be a considerable disruption to global economies.
This won't happen. We automated farming, we automated manufacture, we automated IT. Everything you use today used to take hundreds or thousands of times as many human labor hours to provide. That's right: we've eliminated 99.999% of all jobs in the past two centuries.
What we did, we started buying 10,000 times as much stuff, where "stuff" is quantified as "what used to take so much labor". We only need 1 in 10,000 workers to supply X now, so we buy 10,000 X, where X is the generic output unit.
Let'
Automation requires large unit volumes (Score:5, Informative)
machines are across the board more efficient than human beings, even if the human beings make next to nothing.
Speaking as someone who makes these sorts of cost calculations almost daily such a blanket statement is completely untrue. Professionally I am a certified accountant and also an industrial engineer. I manage a small manufacturing company and have to make decisions on automation all the time. Whether a machine is more economically efficient depends on the specific situation. In particular it depends on the volume and value of what is being produced. Many seemingly simple tasks are actually quite hard to automate economically unless you are producing large quantities of the product.
Hell, China is leading the way in automation of production, and they're using it to replace workers that make around 10-15 bucks a day because the machines are simply more cost-efficient and reliable than human workers even at those wages.
That depends on what those Chinese workers are making. I've been to China and I assure you that there is no lack of work for their labor force. Once the unit volume of a product gets high enough, it makes sense to automate almost any process. Having lower labor costs simply means the required unit volume is higher but the calculation is the same. Foxconn can consider automating the assembly of iPhones because they make MILLIONS of them. But there are VAST numbers of things we need to make for which the cost of automation is prohibitive and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Turns out that humans are very flexible, easy to train, readily available, and (comparatively) inexpensive for many tasks both simple and complex. Automation will replace a lot of assembly work (and that is a good thing) but it is not going to replace it all.
Let me give you an example. On my production floor today we are building a wiring harness for a customer. We have a machine that can automate production of the wire leads that go into it. But for this machine to be economical it really needs a production run of about 500 pieces because of the setup time and tooling costs. But we are only making 30 of these harnesses. So for this product (and many others we make) it is provably cheaper to use people to manually make the wire leads. But even if we were making 50000 of these harnesses we STILL would need the people because the only thing the machine can do is make leads. It cannot do any of the hundreds of other tasks that go into making the product whereas I can train almost any human to do most of them and not have to pay $100K up front for a new machine to do each task. To fully automate this job would require unit volumes in the hundreds of thousands to millions. Point is that there is a LOT of headroom between making one unit and the number where automation starts to make sense for people to work in. And this isn't going to change no matter how much people worry about it.
The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless
Oh I wish that were actually true. My day job is running a company that does assembly work and we hire a fair amount of what could reasonably be called unskilled labor. For the unit volumes we produce (we make smaller quantities of a wide variety of products) there is no machine that could possibly economically replace these workers nor will there be one anytime soon.
There are several flaws in your argument.
1) Humans can be easily and quickly re-purposed to a different job. A burger flipping robot can just flip burgers and while it may be efficient at that task it is useless otherwise. To really replace a person you would need far more automation.
2) To replace a human who does more than one specialized task (and most do) you need a far more flexible set of automation which is not coincidentally FAR more expensive. Good luck asking the burger fli
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I always just tell people that we're expanding the output of human labor, thus decreasing the cost (a big part of that machine's cost is labor, although for low-demand goods as such they might be taking a huge 30% profit margin). You gave a more-complete answer.
If anyone but the fringe UBI folks actually thought automation would kill jobs, I might need people like you on my campaign team.
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Breakeven analysis (Score:2)
but it seems that your reasons for disagreement support the contention that an increase in minimum wage is not causing producers to utilize automation where they otherwise would not.
A higher minimum wage does have SOME effect on whether automation is economical but it generally isn't as big an effect as many would have you believe. For businesses like a restaurant, it is generally extremely difficult to automate substantial portions of the business. You can raise the minimum wage and the net effect isn't going to be automation but rather more people eating at home more often. Some restaurants may go out of business but most of them will simply raise prices and people are still goin
Re:Automation requires large unit volumes (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh I wish that were actually true. My day job is running a company that does assembly work and we hire a fair amount of what could reasonably be called unskilled labor. For the unit volumes we produce (we make smaller quantities of a wide variety of products) there is no machine that could possibly economically replace these workers nor will there be one anytime soon.
Obviously there will always be a phase of low-volume prototyping, so there will always be business for a company like that. But when you consider that we're 7-8 billion on this planet there's very few items we really need just thirty of. Maybe to my generation it's not that noticeable but my dad has from time to time commented on how amazingly cheap you can buy small electronics, power tools and such. It's almost always from China, probably part of some huge production run where they just thought "Well if we aggregate the whole global demand and undercut the competition with automation then we can sell a hundred thousand units and make it work." even if it's quite niche.
I'm probably stating the obvious to you, but if small production runs become relatively more expensive then we're going to try avoiding them with more computer simulations, VR, 3D printing, modular reuse so even though it can't take over the jobs it can take away the jobs. Particularly that it might be cheaper to just do overkill than designing one bespoke solution for every variation, even if technically it would have been cheaper in large volume. I have some stories from friends in the construction industry about bespoke, place-built work vs pre-made assembly-line modules, that humans are better at the former doesn't necessarily make it the future...
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No, the minimum wage has absolutely nothing to do with this. It's about total cost per hour, it's about efficiency and machines are across the board more efficient .....
No... you couldn't be more wrong here. While it's true that machines COULD be more-efficient than humans, Magnitude matters a lot.
A human worker that does the same stuff for $15/Hour that was previously done for $7.50/Hour is naturally 50% less efficient than before the increase.
It can very well be UP TO NOW (before the minimum wage)
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Therefore we shouldn't be importing millions of untrained laborers under the guise that Americans wouldn't do the work - or should we?
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The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless, and even most positions requiring a higher education will be in the same situation a couple decades from now with the advances in AI. Anyone who thinks human beings can in the long term remain competitive with systems that are specifically designed to be more cost-efficient than humans, doesn't understand a thing about automation or economics, or what this shift means for economies overall.
I suppose if the goal is making the product as cheaply as possible, and nothing else matters, well then that's just great.
But between you and me and the guy living under the bridge, in my world the goal is to sell the damn hamburger. At some point, with the continued elimination of jobs and the upward creep into white collar jobs, we might make those burgers very cheap indeed, but not have much of a consumer market..
For some reason a lot of people who know a lot about economics and making money on the
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The sad part is that we should be celebrating the day when robots take over all the work. Especially unpleasant work. But because of the screwed up way we run the economy, we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and turn it into a fearful threat to survival instead.
FAIL!
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Don't forget the overheads. No training costs. No HR or legal costs. Predictable performance, uninterrupted by family emergencies or sick days which would otherwise call for rescheduling shifts.
The kitchen of the future will still have humans. Just fewer of them. Possibly a lot fewer.
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No. Again, the amount of the minimum wage has nothing to do with the facts that humans cannot compete with a machine specifically designed to be more cost-efficient at a given task. The fact that you still do not understand this after being given the example from China where pays are a fraction of the West baffles my mind.
Giess what? This has nothing to do with the argument.
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Sorry Timmy but you had a 1.9 GPA. In order to qualify for any kind of social assistance, ie UBI, you have to go see the autoDoc and get the snip snip procedure (Sterilization) otherwise have fun starving.
A no strings attached UBI will never happen even with a very high percentage of automation.
I for one will be using my Flippy robot with a club to run hippies/hipsters off my property rather than to feed
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Hummingbird drone with pepper spray.
Or was that tongue-in-cheek? A serious conversation about how Our Betters will arms their compounds is perfectly appropriate here. If you score the contract for their tazerbots your grandkids won't even have to live in terrafoam.
Better to be the jackboot, or whatever Card said.
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Actually much of the cost is with middle men and bean counters not directly associated with healthcare givers.
I don't have a problem with my medical professionals making 6 figure salaries.....they sacrifice a lot to get the training, and often work grueling hours in cond
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Not mythical at all...I lived during the late 60-'s through the late 70's...maybe even somewhat into the 80's when this held true.
HMO's were the start of the evil that drove health care costs up....bean counters.
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That *might* apply to drugs and devices, but the vast majority of the cost of health care is doctors' & nurses' salaries, real estate, and facilities. None of those are things that are made cheaper abroad by being overpriced in the US.
And that, folks, demonstrates just how effective the pharmaceutical industry is at lobbying and promoting propaganda!
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Do you really think the device and pharmaceutical companies sell at a loss around the world? If they weren't turning a profit in Europe, they'd just stop selling there.
They're soaking Americans exactly because they can.
But even if we accept your premise, the economically rational thing for the U.S. to do is to implement universal single payer healthcare as well so that we would only be paying our own share of the cost rather than paying everyone else's as well.
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The correct measure in the U.S. is taxes plus health insurance premiums plus healthcare copays. (don't forget that employers paying the insurance premiums counts too since they count that as part of the cost of employing you).
If you add all that up, Americans are paying more.
The healthcare industry is laughing at you behind your back for demanding to pay double. No rational economic actor would do that.
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Well, that's one problem there, the employers should NOT be in the business of providing healthcare coverage to employees. This is a relatively 'new' thing....years back when competing for employees employers started using this as enticement for prospective employees, and it some how turned into the 'norm'.
Let the employees get that money as more salary and allow them more freed
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Even if employers just hand the money over as salary, the point remains, taxes + health insurance + copays in the U.S. are more expensive than taxes in Europe (which include better health insurance than you can buy in the U.S.).
It also remains irrational to demand that the situation not change in the U.S.
Your entire post is nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
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That hasn't worked since the '70s when HMOs came into existence, supposedly to curb rising healthcare costs. They chose to pay for regular checkups and other routine care in order to avoid expensive major medical events. It was a market based "solution" to the already rising cost of major medical.
Clearly, the market was wrong. If fear of regulation hadn't paralyzed us for decades, perhaps healthcare wouldn't be such a disease ridden swamp today. At this point, I doubt the industry even knows how to operate
Well, let's look at it: (Score:2)
Let me show you how this works out:
Let's say a Caliburger grill cook - a burger flipper - makes $9/hr. This is what Caliburger pays for a "prep" position. It may be more than that; Caliburger pays up to $11/hr for a lead cashier, but we'll go with the lowball.
Caliburger is open from 11am to 10 pm, or a total of 11 hours a day. The fry cook position has to be paid all those hours - not to the same employee in order to
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All it does is FLIP BURGERS. It requires a human to slap on the cheese, lettuce, etc. Then there is that nice white dinner jacket the robot arm is covered in that needs to be cleaned every day or the health inspector will get heart palpitations. And machines do not run forever without maintenance.
Put quickly, the robot arm is overkill for what its doing. It would be more efficient to have a moving line of top and bottom griddles, put the burger in between on the bottom, lower the top, and out the other end
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It's faster. With a high minimum wage, the point at which the relative risk considerations and the ROI trigger a change in operations--and the rate of that change--for each individual business is sooner and faster.
This discussion is an economics one: will the high minimum wage damage our economy by creating unemployment? I argue for social safety nets because the economics argument is inherently non-humanitarian: if we shove too many poor people onto the street at once, the proles will make a lot of
min wage is $10.50-$11.00 now in ca (some citys h) (Score:2)
min wage is $10.50-$11.00 now in ca (some citys higher)
Here's a crazy thought (Score:2)
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The amount of government assistance is about the same (efficiency gain of fewer people), but the company saves money and one person if freed from the system
The overall economy grows.
How does the company save money? They're paying the same amount, but get less work in return. The value that is produced by one person being paid $15 / hr is significantly less than 3 people being paid $5 / hr. That's not growing the economy at all.
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Suppose we could buy flippy for cheap, $5,000. Then we don't have to visit McDonald's for a burger. You can just tell the robot to cook your meal instead and save a ton of money.
A home solution? Give me a break. Talk about automation for automation's sake.
Suppose we could flip our own fucking burgers at home. Gee, what a novel idea.
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"Du brauchst absolut keine Vorerfahrungen und auch keine Kenntnisse. Denn ich hatte sie auch nicht."
Kein Wunder, du bist ja auch dumm wie Brot.
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you left out the part where he will not ever stop until you are dead.