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Flippy, the burger-flipping artificially intelligent robot, was the future of the fast food industry. For about four hours.
“The future is here,” proclaimed the Pasadena Star-News and about a hundred other MSM news sources — “Flippy” the burger-flipping robot was about to go into service at a fast-food restaurant in Pasadena, and in 50 more locations soon afterward. It was morning in America’s fast food joints: no more demands for a living wage, no more employee no-shows, no more first or last jobs for desperate Americans. It was, all the news accounts agreed, going to be glorious.
(Just as an aside here, may I say that there is no class of person for whom I feel more empathy than managers of fast food restaurants. Trying to keep a 24/7 restaurant open and functioning with a crew of kids has got to be qualification for admission to heaven based on having done your time in hell. I would rather work as a wrangler for a precision drill team of cats.)
No surprise then that the owner and managers of fast food restaurants were drooling at the prospect of a super-efficient hamburger cooker with no need for bathroom breaks, down time, sleep or food. Spending $100,000 for a burger flipper that can put out 2,000 perfect burgers a day? Why would you not? As with every successful con game that has ever been pulled off, the marks desperately wanted then promises to be real, the lies to be true, wanted so badly to believe the hype from David Zito, head of Miso Robotics:
“This combines thermal vision, 3D and computer vision data, and we use machine-learning algorithms,” he said. “It’s really a deep-learning technique where we can take all of that data and train Flippy to see what’s happening on the grill. He can react to it to make sure he’s cooking the burgers consistently every time.”
What could possibly go wrong? Only a handful of news outlets stayed around to cover the end of Flippy’s shift, and quite possibly the end of his career, which came about four hours after the beginning. The restaurant fell far behind demand for burgers, which was heavy because of all the people there to see Flippy flip them, and had to switch the damn robot off to get the customers fed.
It turns out there’s more to making a burger than flipping it. Someone or something has to put the raw patties on the grill, spaced far enough apart that Flippy’s flipper will fit between them. Someone or -thing has to put the cheese on, when needed, at just the right time. Someone or -thing has to assemble the sandwich, wrap it, deliver it, etcetera.
Flippy is stranding silent near his grill now, awaiting an upgrade that will help him work better with other children. The human staff is receiving additional training to learn what one executive described as how to “choreograph” their work with a frenzied machine that could take your arm off in a nanosecond. The welcome party for the future of fast food has been postponed.
Meanwhile, over at Tesla Motors, the most highly automated automobile assembly plant in history — the future of automobile manufacturing, if you will — is having similar problems. The Model 3 assembly line, designed to spit out 5,000 copies a week of the consumer version of the pricey Tesla, has, like Flippy, been shut down for a period of reflection. Problem One is that the robot, artificially intelligent assembly line has not been able to meet even half the target rate of production. And Problem Two is that the Model 3s, while electronically superb, are crappy cars, whose doors don’t seal or line up, whose windshields rend to crack due to misalignment, and whose welds are imperfect.
Elon Musk, the Leonardo da Vinci of his time, admits he screwed up when he installed “excessive automation” at the plant and inadvertently created a “manufacturing hell” instead of automotive heaven. “Humans,” he adds wryly, “are underrated.” This from a guy who, like Bill Gates, has often expressed the fear that Artificially Intelligent robots will take over the world and enslave humanity.
Collectively we are treating unimaginably complex organisms such as the body, and the earth, as if they were simple machines, manageable with a few switches and levers — you know, genes and stem cells — and at the same time treating simple machines as if they were capable of creative reasoning. We don’t need more artificial intelligence. We need more of the real thing.
What are Flippy’s power requirements?
Don’t know. Let me know if you find out.
I will keep looking but the Miso Robotics site doesn’t say. It is all good because it is cheaper than labor and energy (and debt) are infinite according to the techno-cornucopian.
[gee, I don’t know if this will pass the CENSOR, but here goes; meanwhile, welcome back]
No longer tech darling? Tesla is losing $6,500 every minute
https://www.rt.com/business/425542-elon-musk-tesla-losses/
Tesla is losing $6,500 every minute and needs another $2 billion to get through the year. With losses continuing to mount, the spotlight of scrutiny has ramped up on the former media darling.
There is now a “genuine risk” that Elon Musk’s electric car company will not survive until the end of the year, Bloomberg reports.
What censor?
Silly robotics company. Of course Flippy can’t do it the same way as a human. The grill heats unevenly, burgers are put on at different times – the cooking requires too much processing power. Automation works by breaking a task down into very small repetitive parts. The entire burger hut would have to be redesigned. Maybe burgers would be on a belt, each one kept track of by number or position & cooked individually, tiny grills in parallel. My job in a hospital lab has been mostly reduced to babysitting machines. The system works well for chemistry tests, but requires huge computing power. Economical because humans have to be highly educated & highly paid to do the job.
It’s fascinating how two diametrically opposed yet equally prevalent modern myths are revealed here. One is that (1) everything can be reduced to a nothing-but. Thus humans are nothing but machines; all aspects of a human being, even a human being like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, are fully reproducible in a machine made of so much plastic, metal etc. And people at a workplace are also fully replaceable with machines, being nothing but so many hands, to be replaced with cheaper and more efficient hands wherever possible. And human life is ultimately about nothing else but the satisfaction of material desires, hence the relentless pursuit of mammon, with the creation of ever cleverer technologies to provide ever greater satisfaction for the said desires.
The other myth is that (2) human ingenuity is so great it can overcome all problems. (Gee, if we’re so wonderful, then how can we be treated as nothing-buts?) So human ingenuity will enable us to replace all human labor with machines, to go to and colonise Mars, perhaps even to bend the laws of arithmetic so we’ll be able to have infinite growth in a finite world, etc.
Would be interesting to explore the issue just how these two myths ever came to be in the first place in history. Well, one thing’s for sure, the two myths aren’t delivering the goods, as we may all be about to find out the hard way (sigh)…
Wish I’d said that…
hu·bris
ˈ(h)yo͞obrəs/Submit
noun
excessive pride or self-confidence.
synonyms: arrogance, conceit, haughtiness, hauteur, pride, self-importance, egotism, pomposity, superciliousness, superiority; More
(in Greek tragedy) excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis.
I worked at a Hardees when I was young there is More to just flipping bergers that robot is the most ridculous idea I have ever heard if you look at fast food menus all the food has stuff on it thats the part humans have to do and there are special orders all of this the robot appears u nable to do,also most fast food bergers go down a converyer belt then you make them into big mac’s or double cheese bergers or what ever else.
I remember when I was just starting married life and learning to cook. The worst part of it was getting everything all cooked and ready at the same time….it took me many years and, too cold or too hot or too undercooked, to get it right.
I remember when a newly married niece asked me how I did it…practice and learning from ones mistakes.
As far as I know robots do the one thing they are programmed for…..I am not afraid of losing my work to them any time soon
If flippy is a success it will earn its makers money. That is the only reason flippy exists at all. Nobody really needs a robot burger flipper but if it means saving money by putting people out of work it will be purchased.
A great example of how money and not common sense runs the world. Young people need jobs not robots.