Is Data flipping your hamburger?
With a growing population of California transplants in North Idaho, CaliBurger should be a familiar fast food chain. How about Flippy? If you’ve been to a Pasadena location recently, odds are he flipped your burger. Then cleaned the grill.
CaliBurger plans to install Flippy the robot, who made his debut last month (after a failed attempt in March), in 10 more restaurants by year-end. He’s not alone. Bay area Zume pizzeria has been using “Doughbots” — who press dough five times faster than humans — to make pizzas since June 2017. Sally the Salad Maker, by Chowbotics, offers ATM-style customized service in Silicon Valley.
In fact, California seems to be the focal point of robot-assisted food startups.
Café X, in the heart of San Francisco near the Museum of Modern Art, is a coffee kiosk with a robot barista. This is not that premixed swill you can find at gas stations, but a step-by-step latte made in less than a minute. Skilled baristas may point out that a rushed process can’t taste the same; with steaming involved I might agree. Yet this Café X robot had customers lined up a block long after opening in February. At Café X’s two other locations, however, humans are still employed to greet and to serve the robot-made lattes.
Not all fare so well. Eatsa, a fully automated vegetarian dining experience where customers use a card to get food from a machine Jetsons-style, was a 2015 California startup founded by an ex-Google exec. After quickly expanding to Washington, D.C., by 2017 it had already closed five locations. How much of that is robot-based resistance is hard to say; a lawsuit alleging the chain was not accessible to the blind may also have hampered success.
Or maybe diners just felt lonely.
The proliferation may not be merely because advances in AI made it possible. The fast food industry is desperate for workers. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the industry had a shortage of 844,000 unfilled jobs in April 2018. According to economists quoted in the Wall Street Journal, so far technology is not supplanting human hospitality jobs; restaurant unemployment is at a record low (and turnover is very high). Fast-food employment is up nationwide, with 18.4 workers per establishment in 2017, up from 17.4 before the recession began in late 2007.
Still, many worry that once machines do people jobs, we won’t get them back when unemployment ticks up again (especially in more highly skilled industries such as manufacturing and mining). The more they do unskilled or low-skilled work, the more education the average worker will need to do what’s left, and that’s getting increasingly more expensive to attain.
Robots generally save employers money (except when they need repair), don’t complain, and work longer and more efficiently. They can also do menial or grubby tasks humans don’t want to do, such as flipping burgers and cleaning grills. But there are ethical considerations in AI.
Robots can only do what they’re programmed to; what happens when human judgment would alter a routine action, when a situation demands a different approach? Will they be able to think on their feet, approach a new problem creatively, respond to sensitive customer situations?
Ethics aren’t just about the human side of the equation. With further advances, robots will continue to become more intelligent, perhaps somehow sentient, reminiscent of Star Trek’s fictional character Data. Already some experts are warning of issues such as forced labor and robot rights. While that may seem premature, it makes sense to get ahead of ethical considerations, anticipating rather than reacting to AI’s effects.
Science and technological development in artificial intelligence grows more rapid with each step, with many helpful applications. They’re not only handy burger flippers; robots spare lives in medicine, warfare, and unsafe work environments. Yet the more humans rely on AI, the more important industry ethics become. Medicine and law did the same; both have a sophisticated and adapting set of professional ethics.
So must AI, because robots aren’t merely replacing humans; they’re gradually becoming part of us.
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Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Contact her at Sholeh@cdapress.com.