[Winder]

Robot Serves Up 360 Hamburgers Per Hour | Singularity Hub

You can finally get a hamburger exactly the way you order it.

[Workingdog]

Plus, it always shows up for work and doesn't have an attitude.

[p38arover]

Where's the beetroot and the pineapple? At least it doesn't have mayo or pickle!

[Winder]

I think it would be pretty neat to watch it work. 360 hamburgers an hour is really moving. If it provides better burgers for the same amount of money then it would be awesome. Technology is pretty amazing.

[cmohr]

Plus, it always shows up for work and doesn't have an attitude.

And no spit....

[p38arover]

And no spit....

They are working on that!

[Winder]

The cool thing is what it does for a small business. A single person could run a food truck with the machine and serve a lot of people.

We will have to see how dependable the machines are and what the cost to maintain, but stuff like this empowers to do more with less resources. It would make running a small hamburger stand much easier and concessions at a large event like a football game could be automated.

If they would just make one that could make pizza and serve beer.

[fisheye freak]

Where's the beetroot and the pineapple? At least it doesn't have mayo or pickle!

Beetroot is a uniquely Australian innovation for the burgers- do not expect the Yanks to add it to the burgers(too healthy.) Without burger-flipping jobs, what will the unskilled do for a crust? They cannot just spend their whole lives on the dole, sponging off those still working. Still, if the burgers are OK, it will make life a lot faster and cheaper for a quick feed. The humans will just be needed for quality control. If the salt ,fat and sugar content can slowly be weaned down, perhaps the burgers can become .........HEALTHY !

[ihasa]

The cool thing is what it does for a small business. A single person could run a food truck with the machine and serve a lot of people.

We will have to see how dependable the machines are and what the cost to maintain, but stuff like this empowers to do more with less resources. It would make running a small hamburger stand much easier and concessions at a large event like a football game could be automated.

If they would just make one that could make pizza and serve beer.

I suspect it'll be less of a boon to small business owners, more like another way the big chains (who can afford to invest in this sort of kit) to drive them out of existence.

[Winder]

I suspect it'll be less of a boon to small business owners, more like another way the big chains (who can afford to invest in this sort of kit) to drive them out of existence.

The major chains are mostly franchises, so a massive overhaul would take years for the big chains. I don't know if the company could meet the demand of a nation wide chain. Momentum Machines is just a small company. It is possible that one of the big companies buys Momentum Machines and keeps the technology to itself, but McDonald's already has a pilot program with in-house technology so I don't see them buying the company or buying machines from Momentum Machines. I would not be surprised if Burger King or Wendy's didn't also have an in-house program under development. This is not really "new" technology, it's just that you never get to see what is in the R&D rooms of McDonald's or Burger King.

If anything this give the small business an option that before would only be available to the big chains with the R&D to develop this technology in-house. I don't think the small guys will be driven out of business. A lot of people wont want a machine made burger and there will always be a place for the gourmet burger shop or the old school hamburger joint. I never go to the fast food chain restaurants, but we have 3 gourmet burger places here and I go to them occasionally.

[monochrome]

The cool thing is what it does for a small business. A single person could run a food truck with the machine and serve a lot of people.

We will have to see how dependable the machines are and what the cost to maintain, but stuff like this empowers to do more with less resources. It would make running a small hamburger stand much easier and concessions at a large event like a football game could be automated.

If they would just make one that could make pizza and serve beer.

Disruptive, deflationary change. Thousands of workers will go on unemployment and will be unable to buy basic things, which will put more people out of work - which will ..... well, you get the point.

[GeneV]

Disruptive, deflationary change. Thousands of workers will go on unemployment and will be unable to buy basic things, which will put more people out of work - which will ..... well, you get the point.

It really depends upon how things like this take shape. If burger bots and 3d printers are cheap enough to be widely available, it could broaden opportunities. If not, well, I do get your point.

[monochrome]

Some say, once the adopter activity ended, the disruptive productivity increase of the automobie caused the Depression. Same for the internet and Depression-II.

Opportunities eventually appear - but after significant time. For instance, the USA is emerging as the manufacturing location of choice globally for large, complex assemblies such as automobiles. Think through Laobr Union activitism in that context (they know the jobs are coming back onshore over the next twenty years - and they want to control them).

[Winder]

Disruptive, deflationary change. Thousands of workers will go on unemployment and will be unable to buy basic things, which will put more people out of work - which will ..... well, you get the point.

That is the Luddite argument. When Ned Ludd destroyed the mechanical knitting machines that were going to put textile workers out of a job, that is what he argued.

Cameras put a lot of portrait painters out of business. If we destroy all the cameras we can restore the portrait painting business. Wages for skilled painters will go way up. Digital cameras are even worse than film cameras because they made photography even cheaper and more accessible for people with less money.

We should go back to making everything by hand! Screw automation and machines. We can all get minimum wage jobs then. Destroy the internet!!! It has destroyed wages for millions of people.

Advances in technology have made us richer and while low paying jobs have been lost, new higher paying jobs are created. Someone has to design and build these machines. Someone has to write the software that controls these machines. Someone has to fix/maintain/install these machines. Smartphones destroyed the pay phone industry, but they also created thousands more jobs writing applications and designing support technology that never existed before. Better paying jobs.

I was in grad school with a guy who would have been a 3rd generation textile worker at a mill owned by Russell Athletic, but his father had the foresight to make him to go to college. He got his BA in textile engineering and the mill closed 3 months before he graduated. He ended up going to get his PhD in Economics.

Anything that empowers people to be more productive and generates less waste or consumes less resources is a good thing for society.

[normhead]

It's cool, but scary. How do we know these robots can't be programmed to poison half the population of the US on a given day... I'm thinking about a movie using this concept. Maybe the inventors are the cows on the Chick-Filet commercials, planning to cause the demise of burger eaters every where. I wonder if Harrison Ford is available for this project.