Tuesday, August 12, 2014

The Robot DESIGNED to Eliminate Fast Food Workers

At least that's the way I'm reading this sentence:
“Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” cofounder Alexandros Vardakostas has said. “It’s meant to completely obviate them.”
From Singularity Hub's "Burger Robot Poised to Disrupt Fast Food Industry":
I saw the future of work in a San Francisco garage two years ago. Or rather, I was in proximity to the future of work, but happened to be looking the other direction.

robot-vegetables-momentum-machinesAt the time, I was visiting a space startup building satellites behind a carport. But just behind them—a robot was cooking up burgers. The inventors of the burger device? Momentum Machines, and they’re serious about fast food productivity.

“Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” cofounder Alexandros Vardakostas has said. “It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

The Momentum burger-bot isn’t remotely humanoid.

You can forget visions of Futurama’s Bender. It’s more of a burger assembly line. Ingredients are stored in automated containers along the line. Instead of pre-prepared veggies, cheese, and ground beef—the bot chars, slices, dices, and assembles it all fresh.

Why would talented engineers schooled at Berkeley, Stanford, UCSB, and USC with experience at Tesla and NASA bother with burger-bots? Robots are increasingly capable of jobs once thought the sole domain of humans—and that’s a huge opportunity....MORE
Now combine that with yesterday's Cashiers Replaced By Machines at McDonalds (MCD) and you might, might need a couple employees, maybe someone to clean the toilets. 
Here's Momentum Machines' homepage.