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

nytimes.com

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

#101

Post by greenleafjacob »

jamesrcole wrote: post #67
dvdhnt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The salad cook is just another in the long line of manual jobs that can be done quicker, better, cheaper by a robot. Allow me to be sentimental for a moment. I agree that some jobs, perhaps even most, can be done "better" by a robot. At least, if we're defining better as more cheaply or "to spec". However, when I go to a nice restaurant, I go because I enjoy the Chef's style, their ability to express their art thro…

Here's an alternative perspective to consider: what if the artistry is in the design of the dishes, and the automated systems could be used for implementing that design. That could lead to good food being cheaper and more accessible to more people.

In the future, we will probably download food designs from a food app store, and use our food printer to fabricate the food.

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

#102

Post by lovemenot »

biot wrote: post #32
mjevans wrote: post #4

If there is a tax (I believe there should be) on automation then my opinion is that it should be based on the profit and reduced by the percentage of 'traditional' (role specific) job hours that remain; counting service personnel the same as bus-boys/janitorial services. If the profit is under a given percentage then there shouldn't be any tax assessed.

How much are you personally willing to pay in tax for your refrigerator/freezer, your dishwashing machine, and your laundry machines?

This is a good question, but I suspect it's disingenuously framed, so as to stymie your parent.

If she says "a lot", you reply "good luck to you, and you alone". If she replies "very little", you say "right, so your tax is going nowhere."

Feels like possibly you are defending a local maximum.

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

#103

Post by bambax »

> Salad bars are magnets for bacteria and viruses. Even if the sprouts and ranch dressing aren’t tainted, the serving utensils may be. The Silicon Valley start-up Chowbotics has devised what it says is a partial solution.

A solution to what? What exactly is the problem? Just because bacteria (and "viruses"? really?) may or may not be found in salad bars doesn't make it an emergency. Exactly how many people get sick, or die, because they ate at a salad bar?

It seems the problem is invented to justify the product.

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

#104

Post by jon_richards »

christopheml wrote: post #87
greglindahl wrote: post #10

My local coffee place has humans who operate an espresso machine, while Starbucks has baristas who push a button, and there are vending machines that produces espresso without having an operator. None of this excites a moral panic. Kitchen labor-saving devices have been being invented for hundreds of thousands of years. What's new? Think about wheat. Wheat used to be ground in stone mills operated by oxen or wind or…

What's new? Well, if we keep replacing low-skill jobs by high-skills ones, we may have a little problem: are humans going to keep up with the training? Is the workforce going to adapt fast enough? 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.

Horses used to be used for practically everything. The first commercial steam engine pumped water from mines and was measured in "horsepower", the the rate at which a horse could continuously pump water. Then steam engines replaced freight hauling. Then personal transport. Don't see many working horses now.

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

#105

Post by staticelf »

astrodust wrote: post #47
Zigurd wrote: post #23

I'd bet my lease gets reviewed by an AI before I eat a robot-cooked meal. Food is variable and dirty and the downside risk of not being clean is pretty bad, even acknowledging that robots will always wash their hands. Maintenance, risk, and general exposure to meatspace, in every sense, means that knowledge workers will probably be the first to be automated out of a job.

What if the robot runs out of disinfectant and nobody notices or cares? Robots are only as clean as the company that owns and inspects them permits them to be.

What if employees at a restaurant run out of disinfectant or doesn't wash their hands after visiting the restroom? What if no one notices or cares? :)

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

#106

Post by ben_w »

ekianjo wrote: post #56
greglindahl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We made the transition from subsistence agriculture to now. 90%+ of the population used to tend crops.

Exactly. Funny how most people seem to completely forget that little detail of recent history.

The massively disruptive translation that completely overthrew the existing social orders worldwide, allowing a few small European nations to conquer most of the world and force an unwanted drugs trade on what had, for several thousand years previously, been the world superpower? The transition which directly to the rise of both communism and capitalism as viable nation-scale forms of government?

Sure, humans will go on (unless we nuke outselves), but that doesn’t mean it will be easy or fun to live through if we just presume it’ll all be fine.

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

#107

Post by musage »

jon_richards wrote: post #104
christopheml wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's new? Well, if we keep replacing low-skill jobs by high-skills ones, we may have a little problem: are humans going to keep up with the training? Is the workforce going to adapt fast enough? 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.

Horses used to be used for practically everything. The first commercial steam engine pumped water from mines and was measured in "horsepower", the the rate at which a horse could continuously pump water. Then steam engines replaced freight hauling. Then personal transport. Don't see many working horses now.

Don't see many horses at all. That is, the offspring of those working horses certainly doesn't roam about in pastures, to pursue happiness because there are no jobs that require them.

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

#108

Post by ekianjo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #83
ekianjo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Funny how most people seem to completely forget that little detail of recent history.

What matters is if there is anything to transition to. 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.

> What matters is if there is anything to transition to.

There will always be something to transition to. It's not because we cannot imagine it that it means there is nothing ahead of us. Like 75% of the jobs people have nowadays did not exist 100 years ago, and nobody at that time could have imagined them.

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

#109

Post by Boothroid »

bambax wrote: post #103

> Salad bars are magnets for bacteria and viruses. Even if the sprouts and ranch dressing aren’t tainted, the serving utensils may be. The Silicon Valley start-up Chowbotics has devised what it says is a partial solution. A solution to what? What exactly is the problem? Just because bacteria (and "viruses"? really?) may or may not be found in salad bars doesn't make it an emergency. Exactly how many people get sick,…

Having had a case of food poisoning of a level where my kidneys were near the point of shutting down before I got treatment, I'm all for any new approaches that can reduce the chances of tranmission.

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

#110

Post by wiz21c »

sho wrote: post #18

I'm bullish on food robots in general, but I have to say that as a fan of caesar salad, the output of that robot fails to impress. It looks exactly like what it is - a bunch of ingredients randomly dropped in a bowl. The lettuce hasn't even been tossed with the dressing! I wouldn't pay for that, and IMO this robot has a long way to go before I'd agree it can make a "mean" salad.

I would add that if a bad cook can make an average salad, it doesn't make any easier to accept the fact that we make robots which can barely do better.

In other words, instead of replacing the cook by a machine, we should train him to cook better. And we should train people to make the difference between a soulless dish and a good one.

(I cook for myself and I can assure you that a machine can't cook; it can assemble ingredients, that's for sure but there's no creativity (and believe me, the simplest dish, if infused with creativity, can taste so much better))

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