A Robot Makes a Mean Caesar Salad, but Will It Cost Jobs?

Even at many restaurants today the person who's name is above the door as it where rarely touches the food. So as long as that person is the one who is responsible for designing the recipes and menus and plating what difference does it really make if the dish you are served was prepared by a robot or whatever line chef happened to be on duty that day?

A strong argument is made that the options for new jobs are rapidly diminishing, as automation eliminates jobs by skill level, while at the same time the economy is not giving people time to retrain (people most imperilled by automation are usually those living paycheck-to-paycheck). Those two things were not simultaneously true in the past.

The cashiers are gone. The fry cook is gone. The drive-thru order taker is gone. The cooks are gone.

You'll still have a preparer that will probably also do running (they'll bag the multiple, separate items up and take them to the front). You'll have a shift manager that will help with a bit of everything (eg if a customer has a problem with the order kiosk or payment). You'll still have a human cleaning the building and parking lot, taking out trash. There will also obviously be people routinely involved in machine maintenance, installation, etc.

There will be some complication with condiments and food layering. There will probably be a position for food ammo reloader, that keeps the machines loaded with whatever that machine cooks / prepares.

It would be possible to get rid of the bagger/runner, but it'd probably be cost prohibitive and needlessly complex to assemble the various robots on a line that could also bag properly.

At its best, eventually, this system will produce more food (1.5x to 4x I'd guess), at a lower per customer cost, with superior food safety (including hygiene). Then it's a question of how much of that gain gets competed away (benefiting customers) and how much goes into the pocket of the owners.

Starbucks will be similar. They won't get rid of all their humans, they'll reduce their number significantly.

It's likely to be a decades long, piece by piece, transition. The early results won't be spectacular for either customers or franchise owners, it'll take many years of gradual improvement.

When job replacement happens over several generations, it's a pretty easy problem to solve. When it gets faster, turns out some human abilities are not scaling very well.

Once manufacturing is underway, the process is typically made as efficient as possible and made to scale. The work that went into design and testing can now be scaled to thousands or millions of units which is a great return on investment. Each unit has a one time cost for materials used for parts, with some long term maintenence costs.

Operation requires only an electric energy draw. If that energy is from a clean source such as solar, this unit isn't having much of any further negative impact. Operation could last years or decades depending on design and whether or not the product is superceded, at which time its parts can be recycled. Even then, the time spent on design will be used to create the next version.

Supplying the machines with goods is already a task handled when goods are delivered to the location and stocked, so there isn't going to be much or any overhead added there. Plus, we can automate that too (self-driving vehicles for transportation, robots for the last leg of delivery and stocking).

Human workers do not scale in the same way that machines do, and aren't typically as efficient at this type of task.

Finding suitable human workers is difficult and can take considerable time and resources every time one is hired.

Human workers are expensive, and this is an ongoing neverending cost. This cost will not scale down as you hire more workers or work them for a longer time (unlike machines).

Human reliability is hit and miss. Also, you cannot work them 24/7. There is lots of downtime and you would require at least 3 or 4 humans to replace 1 machine if the task requires 24/7 uptime.

The enegry that humans consume and their waste is typically not effecient. Three meals a day, often including animal products which are costly in terms of resources and environmental impact. Then there's waste treatment for them. And the energy costs to deliver the food from a farm to their location, and even farm growing and harvesting.

None of this is as effecient or "green" as a renewable energy draw such as solar, wind, or hydroelectric delivered over a power line.

On many levels, humans are a poor replacement for machines in predictable tasks such as making a coffee or a sandwich for a chain restaurant. Humans are good for social work, and making coffee is not social.

In terms of someone needing a job, even if that job is meaningless and unnecessary, basic income should be provided instead. But that's a whole other conversation and we aren't there yet.

Point is: Machines are efficient. Social impact is a different conversation.