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McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

bbc.com

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Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#161

Post by chillacy »

vallismortis wrote: post #22

Welcome Manna. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

A lot going on there, my main observations:

1. the Australia Project resembles the society in Ian Banks' series The Culture

2. Curious that a post-capitalist society uses credits to ensure allocation, sort of a UBI, but it seems to gloss over a couple details:

2a. Do credits accrue or is it use-it-or-lose-it?

2b. It sounds like credits can be transferred between people (the space elevator story), what stops credit accrual from skewing via the Pareto Law into the same 1% having 99% of credits?

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#162

Post by desert_boi »

chrisco255 wrote: post #151
rangibaby wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We saved billions of dollars with automation! Why is no one buying our products anymore? Hmm, it must be because they are spending all their money on avocados! I think the only way to go is to do basic income funded by an automation tax. Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.

Why wouldn't the price of food plummet in an automated world? The cost of labor is priced into everything you buy. I still think we're a few decades from these scenarios, but I am not willing to solve a theoretical problem (permanent unemployment) until it becomes a problem in reality. Right now we've got 3.7% unemployment despite all this tech. So I remain very skeptical of this theory playing out and UBI being nece…

Cost disease, i.e. things cost as much as they do because they always have. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#163

Post by hayksaakian »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #21
bluedino wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen people order? I would shoot half the customers if I worked a fast food counter much less the drive through.

My first job was at Burger King. Working the drive thru was seen by most as a punishment. During the day it wasn't that bad but at night people were absolutely ridiculous in their behavior and expectations. It didn't help that many were drunk or under the influence of other intoxicants. Not sure how well automated systems would be able to deal with such situations. Maybe the customers simply couldn't order food unles…

Reminded me of this:

https://theuserisdrunk.com/

Drive-thrus aren't the only things people use while they're drunk

There are probably people using your website or app while drunk. How does your user experience handle this?

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#164

Post by bryanrasmussen »

hirundo wrote: post #15

Next they'll come for the cooks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCVol2iWcc There are ~487k fast food cooks employed at ~$22.6k average wages. That's more than an $11 billion annual incentive to bring robochefs to retail. And that's just fast food, just in the US. Robo janitors may take a bit longer. Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The jan…

If you get robo servers and robo cooks your kitchen janitorial needs go way down.

at this rate they will soon need robo customers.

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#165

Post by [deleted] »

triggercut wrote: post #124
hirundo wrote: post #15

Next they'll come for the cooks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCVol2iWcc There are ~487k fast food cooks employed at ~$22.6k average wages. That's more than an $11 billion annual incentive to bring robochefs to retail. And that's just fast food, just in the US. Robo janitors may take a bit longer. Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The jan…

Lots of interesting operating considerations. A few thoughts, having worked in "Quick Service Restaurants" a long long time ago. Ignoring cost of human labor and a move to equipment maintenance for a moment, one of the key metrics tracked is waste/loss, i.e. from the bins in the kitchen. Amounts of discarded buns, lettuce, tomatoes, burnt or spoiled, past due-date, serve-time etc. it all gets tallied and recorded. If…

[deleted]

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#166

Post by bryanrasmussen »

chrisco255 wrote: post #151
rangibaby wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We saved billions of dollars with automation! Why is no one buying our products anymore? Hmm, it must be because they are spending all their money on avocados! I think the only way to go is to do basic income funded by an automation tax. Henry Ford knew that people needed enough money to actually buy his cars and made it happen with high wages.

Why wouldn't the price of food plummet in an automated world? The cost of labor is priced into everything you buy. I still think we're a few decades from these scenarios, but I am not willing to solve a theoretical problem (permanent unemployment) until it becomes a problem in reality. Right now we've got 3.7% unemployment despite all this tech. So I remain very skeptical of this theory playing out and UBI being nece…

because in this case food prices are going to skyrocket in a climate change world.

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#167

Post by teddyh »

mankyd wrote: post #75
tracker1 wrote: post #11

"Double Quarter Pounder, just the sandwich, only cheese, no bun. Two side salads no croutons, no dressing, two dip cups of ranch for nuggets. Large diet dr pepper, easy ice." Lets see if the AI can get that right more often than their staff can.

Honestly, I expect that would be the easy part. The hard part is: "Can you put [specific toy] in the kids meal?" "Wait, no, I want ketchup on that. I mean, mustard." "Can you bring it out to me when its ready?" "Your ice machine is broken?" "My debit card doesn't have much money on it, so just ring up my order until it hits $20." Taking an order is totally doable. Answering questions that require stateful knowledge i…

“A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 99999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a ueicbksjdhd.

First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.”

https://twitter.com/brenankeller/status/1068615953989087232

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#168

Post by zanny »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #105
zanny wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxing automation is absolutely wrong. We want automation. In the same way it would be wrong to say landlords of condos make too much profit because there are so few condos so we are going to tax condos more. More automation is required to contribute to liberate resources to eventually push our civilization to the next level. If anything, incentivize it. We want things behind made with "infinite" productivity. But we…

This would be nice if it were true. Since the top 0.1% have figured out how to own the nation via politics and trying to dumb down the general populace to ignore what they're doing I don't have nearly as much confidence in automation as you do.

I'd go insane if I weren't optimistic that we can eventually reach a post-scarcity, totally automated, enlightened civilization. The alternative is our destruction anyway. Its going to happen in much the same way as space colonization or uploading our consciousness if we continue on.

And there is kind of a doublethink in that statement. To stop automation requires state intervention in the first place. It would, naturally, be done on behest of corporations who want to prevent automation competing with them in some form, but I imagine the money backing automation outweighs the resistance on that front. If the government is out of the control of the people, automation cannot be stopped anyway. Reclaiming democracy is necessary regardless of if you have an automation employment crisis or not because if you don't have influence over your own destiny malicious entities that do will insure you suffer for it.

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#169

Post by aidenn0 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #19
hirundo wrote: post #15

Next they'll come for the cooks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKCVol2iWcc There are ~487k fast food cooks employed at ~$22.6k average wages. That's more than an $11 billion annual incentive to bring robochefs to retail. And that's just fast food, just in the US. Robo janitors may take a bit longer. Maybe they can design automated kitchens that work like jumbo dish washers. Seal, flood, heat, drain, reopen. The jan…

Next they’ll come for the liquidator. The Burger King on the NYS thruway north of nyc went to touchscreen ordering. Everyone refuses to use it and there is one long line going to the one register that remained.

That will pass. At one point I could jump to the front of the airline check-in queue because nobody was using the touch-screen check-ins. Now the touch-screens are the only way.

Re: McDonald's is to replace human servers with voice gen in its US drive-throughs

#170

Post by dole »

ilaksh wrote: post #114
zaroth wrote: post #85

Why would I order with my voice by yelling at a microphone outside my window? How stupid is that? Obviously I order on my smartphone and a creepy robot hand extends the bag to me as I drive by. The UWB radio in my phone will let them know which car is mine. Most of the time I’m ordering the same thing for my family of 4 (not at McDonalds , but you get the point) and so two taps later everything is ordered and paid fo…

McDonald's app is really convenient for ordering and paying. And they have coupons. I am a fan.

Used to be a fan until they started having shittier coupons.
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