New San Francisco restaurant has factory-style "burger bot" making all its hamburgers

Very true. Here’s a preview:

The outcome will definitely not be Fully Automated Luxury Communism for the humans. Not anywhere in the U.S.

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Did you even watch the video? There’s a love dispenser right there next to the ketchup.

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Call me nuts, but it might be easier to love a burger you’ve bot’ed than the 10,000th one you’ve made by hand.

:slight_smile:

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Sure they are. Soylent-love™.


The next rounds of robots will take care of that.


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No fear. He still has:

And I doubt they have skills that the average fast food worker lacks.

Also, this is opening the way for artisanal burgers, made one-at-a-time with love™.

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I was thinking of a different kind of seafood - the kind that makes you say, “Yum.”

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You shouldn’t eat those…

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Those spaces in the support system are going to be next to impossible to clean and keep free of dust and spider webs.

Perhaps that’s part of what the staff does.
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Ahh…the little people.

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Possibly. But why would I want to eat there when they eliminate all human interaction or actions? I may as well just stay home and throw one on the stove - better, cheaper, more convenient, more comfortable.

May as well just get an egg salad sandwich from a restroom vending machine.

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Or purposely joining a discussion board run by bots.

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I wanted to see precision machinery assembling a burger carefully.

This was not that.

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Agreed. My one “secret” to making a great burger is to VERY loosely form it into shape. If it’s tightly packed, it won’t be as tender and provide good mouth-feel.

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Not sure if you watched the video, but there’s plenty of human action and interaction.

A human is taking your order, a human is plugging it into the machine and gathering up the burger, a human is topping it with lettuce and pickle, and a human is delivering it to you.

The only part that doesn’t involve a human is that a guy isn’t repetitively flipping meat patties on a flat-top grill, and I couldn’t care less about that.

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That’s just step one. They’re moving forward to self driving restaurants next.

Or backwards to the Automat, depending on your point of view.

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What, like Teslas that serve food? Cool!!
And I would be super okay with more Automats. There was very briefly one in NYC a few years back that had halfway-decent food, but I would love to go to an Automat like the mid-century Horn & Hardart restaurants, with coffee flowing out of silver dolphin spigots (!) and dozens of employees.

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Also, bank tellers should work 24-hour shifts for poverty wages so they won’t lose their jobs to ATMs.

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There were Automats in NYC for decades. My mother worked there.

Edit - using an automat spoon to stir my coffee right now. Wonder if it’s considered an antique.

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Oh absolutely, I’ve got several books about their history and wish I’d gotten to go to one before the last one closed in 1991. A tiny, kinda crappy one called BAMN! opened in 2008 and didn’t last.
http://nymag.com/listings/restaurant/bamn/

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Pray that I’ve helped to put in the work to build the Australia Project rather than Manna.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

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Does a robot making burgers in a burger factory take human jobs? Probably (though it’s a lot more complicated than the current fad for automation hand-wringing tends to acknowledge). Does a robot making all the burgers for one restaurant take human jobs? Not really.

If it’s a sit-down restaurant, especially one that serves anything other than burgers, the actual burger-making is probably considerably less than 8 person-hours of labor per day.

And unlike a human burgerista, who only gets paid for making burgers, this thing looks like it’s sucking up 50 square feet of San Francisco storefront real estate 24/7, on top of its hefty capital cost, plus whatever labor is required to keep it running, plus backup arrangements for when it’s not. They’re going to need to hire more people to provide a level of service that can justify the high prices required by using the robot. Or more likely go bust in the first year.

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I had forgotten that robot ever existed but now I remember finding it terrifying as a kid.

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