|
I'm the type who rarely visits a fast food burger place.
There are a multitude of reasons why.
 First, it's not really too healthy. It's also rarely good.
Or fast. Or cooked and assembled competently. Almost assuredly, something in my
order will be wrong. I'll still be hungry once I eat my 50% corn beef patty.
I've also grown wearisome of the same four greasy options (I yearn for an In-N-Out here on the
east coast--even Gordon Ramsay loves
it.).
In fact, there are only a few excuses to really eat at a
McDonalds: you're on the highway and it's at a rest stop; or you're overseas
and need some 'authentic' American cuisine; or you're drunk, it's 3 a.m and
everything else is closed.
Yet, most of the above issues I've listed are easily fixed.
An automated food preparation and point-of-sale system could easily make any
fast food joint faster, more accurate, and with a more consistent result
between each burger. No longer would you have to consider which dropout is on
the grill this shift, but you might even be able to expect something resembling
the burgers you see in a commercial. (Just kidding!)
 Realistically, fast food chains could have automated about
80% of their workforce back in the 1990s; the sensing and automated food
processing has been available. Instead, these restaurants want workers who can
sense how easily they can be replaced. It's why they're open-minded about who
they employ, why they employ people with no other job prospects: because it's
easy to replace an employee who wants more money or benefits.
Implementing robots takes significant capital and a lengthy
period of adjustment. These robots require maintenance when they break down,
and that means productivity ceases. The opposite is true of people. It takes 15
minutes to teach someone how to cook French fries, and a sick or 'broken' employee
can still be productive.
Therefore, it's going to take some serious ingenuity to get
burgers flipped by hardware and software--but we're on the verge of conquering
this quintessential robotic challenge. And the 3.5 million line cooks in the
U.S. might be out of a job.
 First, the machine. Momentum Machines of San Francisco has been
working on an automated burger assembly line for two years. This assembly
line can create 360 burgers an hour utilizing just 24 square feet of floor
space. It chops and cooks the ingredients right before being placed on the bun.
Users can customize burgers by toppings as well as meat ratios. Each burger is
cooked and assembled using a variety of sensors and machine vision.
If many fast food chains do away with staff in favor of
robots, it will kill a large sector of the workforce. While these jobs will
disappear, many new engineers and technicians will be needed to service these
machines. The problem is that there won't be enough skilled workers, and that
too may ultimately impede the adoption of automated food service.
Lastly, consider that fast food joints literally saturate
popular markets. It's not uncommon to find a different McDonalds on every other
street corner in a big city, with a Burger King or Wendy's competitively staked
nearby. We may one day have burger machines on every corner in your
neighborhood, much akin to how mailboxes once were. A scary thought for an
already obese nation.
Anyhow, I don't expect burger robots to seriously alter my
short notice meal options. The first few times might be novelty, but eventually
it will be similar to visiting an ATM rather than the bank teller. However,
burger robots are a critical lens for how ubiquitous technology is changing how
people are served and how people are employed.
| 
Re: I Welcome Our Burger Robot Overlords
"Almost" Good Answers: