Carl's Jr/Hardee's CEO considering automated restaurant

[Simon_Jester]

If your posts are any indication, human taxi drivers may well last considerably longer than human truck drivers. Truck drivers' responsibility typically limits itself to moving cargo from A to B. You, by contrast, are dealing with all kinds of situations where "just drive the car from A to B" is not enough. Or situations where a drunk throws up in the back seat; I doubt Robocar is smart enough to cope with that effectively.

[Darmalus]

Speaking as a taxi driver who loved the business... the grapes of wrath are ripening... If they officially put us out of business, I am a very intelligent person with very little to lose and that is not a situation that anybody should want to create.

One of the reasons the speed and method of it happening are so important.

If you change over fast a dump a few million professional drivers in the unemployment line over night, yeah, expect riots.

If instead companies stop hiring new drivers and over the next decade or two slowly replace old trucks/taxi's and buy exclusively auto-trucks/taxis as old equipment wears out or business expands, then the outrage is diffused over time.

Unless there is a serious culture change people who make minimum wage are simply screwed. Too many people view minimum wage as a punishment for ... something. I don't get it, but there is a lot of hate there.

[Starglider]

If they officially put us out of business, I am a very intelligent person

If you are a very intelligent person, self-described as having excellent social skills as well, then I am sure you can find something else to do quite easily. It's the not-very-intelligent not-very-social people who will face difficulties.

[Raw Shark]

If they officially put us out of business, I am a very intelligent person

If you are a very intelligent person, self-described as having excellent social skills as well, then I am sure you can find something else to do quite easily. It's the not-very-intelligent not-very-social people who will face difficulties.

I probably could, but I might not if I was pissed enough. And I feel for the less-socially-apt ones, especially my fellow autists.

[MKSheppard]

I doubt Robocar is smart enough to cope with that effectively.

RoboCar detects significant amounts of liquid in rear seats, along with increased amounts of gasses in it's olifactory sensor system that indicate vomitus.

RoboCar alters it's pattern and reports to Uber that it needs to be cleaned. Last fare-user is hit $200 for cleanup duties.

[Elheru Aran]

I suspect a robot restaurant would not be completely automated no matter how much a whiny CEO would want it.

Currently a 'standard' sized drive-in restaurant runs about maybe 20 people per shift, meaning a 3 shift place could easily have in excess of 60 people.

If you assume 90% of those people are basically job drones; with the last 10% of pay going to the Shift Managers and Team Leaders; that's about

(60 * 0.9) = 54 * 1,040 hours a year (at 20 hrs/wk part time) = 56,160 hours worked * $7.25 minimum wage = $407,160/year in simple labor salaries.

If you automated down to just three people a shift (Store Manager, Machine Operator/Janitor I, Machine Operator/Janitor II) and made the drone jobs $15/hr, your total labor costs would be:

(2 drones * 3 shifts) = 6 drones * 1,040 hours a year (at 20 hrs/wk part time) = 6,240 hours worked * $15 Wage = $93,600/year in simple labor costs.

That's a savings of over $310K~ a year in labor costs that could be used to buy equipment/maintain it; and unlike employees, you can amortize the depreciation of equipment value on your taxes.

Are you accounting for payroll taxes and such? Also, if you only have 3 people a shift, I guarantee they're full time, which means you're paying bennies. So that labor cost is going up.

Probably not enough to make *that* much of a difference, though...

[Zaune]

RoboCar detects significant amounts of liquid in rear seats, along with increased amounts of gasses in it's olifactory sensor system that indicate vomitus.

RoboCar alters it's pattern and reports to Uber that it needs to be cleaned. Last fare-user is hit $200 for cleanup duties.

Or hard plastic bench seats in the rear and some kind of automated cleaning system like in sophisticated public lavatories.

Though personally, I'd pay considerably more than cab rates per mile for Raw Shark's commentary on the most interesting parts of Denver. You should buy a minibus and set yourself up as a tour guide, do group bookings for bachelor parties and the like.

[Simon_Jester]

I doubt Robocar is smart enough to cope with that effectively.

RoboCar detects significant amounts of liquid in rear seats, along with increased amounts of gasses in it's olifactory sensor system that indicate vomitus.

RoboCar alters it's pattern and reports to Uber that it needs to be cleaned. Last fare-user is hit $200 for cleanup duties.

Okay. To be fair, that's a relatively simple problem. Bad example.

On the other hand, there are other problems which are more complicated.

And the point remains that the trucker's job is in some ways easier to automate- because people really do not have to be involved, except for the ones responsible for loading and unloading the truck. A taxi driver's job involves human interaction and contact on at least a peripheral level.

[Starglider]

A taxi driver's job involves human interaction and contact on at least a peripheral level.

The solution to that is usually telepresence. One offshore call center employee required per ten autonomous vehicles. If people want a tour of the area they can have a prerecorded one with professional tour guide, video etc. Internet apps already have 'find the nearest/best rated X' covered.

Some people will still want human drivers as a premium service, in the same sense that some people book a horse and carriage to take the bride & groom to their wedding.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm not saying that can't or won't happen.

What I'm trying to get at is that I think it will take longer for this kind of service to mature and replace taxi drivers than it will to replace certain other types of professional drivers. As in, the truck drivers may be feeling the pinch in 2025 with the taxi drivers being safe until 2030 or 2035.

I mean, in this very thread we have people pointing out that jobs requiring more human interaction are harder to automate, and more likely to require a human on the spot capable of signing a form.* Taxi drivers fit this description better than truckers, and are therefore going to be more of a challenge to replace with automation. That is the full extent of my thesis.
______________

*That raises some questions which spontaneously popped into my mind too- how will autonomous vehicles respond to police officers attempting to pull them over? Or a fire engine running its siren to tell people to get out of the way? Or for that matter police attempting to direct traffic in an emergency? Is that a solved problem? As far as I can determine, I'm not sure driverless cars as we now know them can even perceive that a cop is trying to pull them over.

[Starglider]

What I'm trying to get at is that I think it will take longer for this kind of service to mature and replace taxi drivers than it will to replace certain other types of professional drivers. As in, the truck drivers may be feeling the pinch in 2025 with the taxi drivers being safe until 2030 or 2035.

Granted. However

I mean, in this very thread we have people pointing out that jobs requiring more human interaction are harder to automate

This is almost tautological in retrospect but it's much harder to predict in advance what actually 'requires' human interaction and what doesn't. Travel agencies are an example of something that was almost 100% human interaction and would have seemed hard to automate in 1960, but is almost entirely eliminated now. Even in 1980, people might have predicted that it would be automated but would have assumed this would be via natural language capable robots that emulated the human travel agent exactly. Few people foresaw cheap tablet computers linked to wireless global information networks, and the people who did had no idea whether the general public would be happy to switch over to 'apps' and 'web sites' instead of conventional conversation. Similarly 'research librarian' seemed pretty safe until search engines appeared; but then, the discontinuous jump in automation difficulty between 'research librarian' and 'legal research associate' was not appreciated (by most) until at least the 90s.

Our understanding of the landscape of relative difficulty of open software engineering tasks is refined every day, but as with all engineering it will only be fully revealed and appreciated in retrospect, and I am sure there are still plenty of surprises in store.

how will autonomous vehicles respond to police officers attempting to pull them over? Or a fire engine running its siren to tell people to get out of the way? Or for that matter police attempting to direct traffic in an emergency? Is that a solved problem? As far as I can determine, I'm not sure driverless cars as we now know them can even perceive that a cop is trying to pull them over.

The preferred option is vehicle-to-vehicle networking; police would love to have such overrides; but failing that some combination of pattern recognition and backup telepresence. And yes, of course this is an aspect of autonomous vehicle research.

[Simon_Jester]

You're right.

I tend to view truckers versus taxi drivers as a simple case because so far as I know, the trucker's job consists of skill set A, while the taxi driver's job consists of skill set A+B.

The only skills the trucker needs to have that the taxi driver doesn't are things that it seems as though an automated vehicle can do trivially (building a robot truck is not harder than building a robot car, so far as I can determine, it's just that the penalties for doing it wrong are more serious because getting hit with a truck hurts more).

The skills the taxi driver needs that the trucker doesn't, while probably things that some combination of 'appification' and automation and telepresence could replace, are at least a more significant challenge than changing your paradigm from "robot car drives from X to Y" over to "robot truck drives from X to Y."

In a more complicated case or where the two jobs are less directly comparable, I wouldn't try to make predictions.

[Darmalus]

Full automation is very likely far away, but if you can reduce 10 employees to 1, as long as the added costs are <9 employees you are coming out ahead. That one employee might be sitting in a monitoring center watching camera feeds and exist purely for legal or insurance reasons, but it does mean there is someone who can try to talk (over intercom) to the drunk guy peeing in the back of the robo-taxi, or yell at the kids throwing eggs at the auto-truck. Or not, maybe they just exist as a legal witness and the kids pictures are automatically forwarded to the police with charges of vandalism, and after some legal AIs bash their e-heads together and judgement is reached and the parents are emailed a bill before the truck makes it another mile down the road. I understand the stock market is largely ruled by AIs doing this already.

There's a variation on the panopticon society I haven't seen before. No giant government programs, just cameras and computers and legal AIs cheap enough that the average person can take measures to defend themselves as they see fit.

Politics decides how good this outcome is from a human welfare perspective.

[Napoleon the Clown]

With regards to drunks and automated taxis, I have to question how well their drunk ass will be able to communicate/operate the machine interface. Or, when they just give a vague statement on where they want to go. I'm sure Raw Shark can relate instances where the fair had no clue what the address or name of the thing was, just that it was by something else memorable. Then the lazy bastards that don't want to have to punch in an address, and don't like repeating themselves until a computer translates what they're saying. A lot of accents would need programmed in to use pure speech recognition. Once again, drunken ramblings will need accounted for.

Not insurmountable problems, but they'll definitely delay things.

[Guardsman Bass]

Automating cashiering in fast food places seems pretty straightforward, although the customizations on orders might make it difficult. I've seen something like it in Japan - you go up to what is essentially a vending machine, pick an item, put money in, and it prints you a ticket that you give to the cook to prepare. The American version would be going up to a touchscreen that walks you through each item, or just lets you pick the default if you don't want to customize it (or have it prompt you to customize the toppings on burgers).

Not so much the other stuff in the back, but that might be a good thing. You could have one manager who can also double as a cashier for people having issues with the self-payment systems, plus 2 cooks in the back (or one).

Not insurmountable problems, but they'll definitely delay things.

Some of those might be simpler if you integrated a taxi-service specific phone app into it. Then you could hail a cab with an app, and have your phone prompt you where you want to go - at which point you can drunkenly say, "Home" and it takes you there.

RE: Truck drivers

I'm not so sure they'll be quickly replaced. If something minor breaks down on the truck, are you going to drive a crew out to fix it? That might be more expensive than just having someone ride along until something breaks on the auto-driven truck.

And with delivery drivers, you've also got the issue of unloading small amounts of cargo and packages. The big deliveries are no problem - you can have the folks at the destination unload it, or even an automated system. But, say, deliveries to someone's house? Are you just going to ping people's phones and tell them to come outside and get their package on the truck?

[bilateralrope]

With regards to drunks and automated taxis, I have to question how well their drunk ass will be able to communicate/operate the machine interface. Or, when they just give a vague statement on where they want to go. I'm sure Raw Shark can relate instances where the fair had no clue what the address or name of the thing was, just that it was by something else memorable. Then the lazy bastards that don't want to have to punch in an address, and don't like repeating themselves until a computer translates what they're saying. A lot of accents would need programmed in to use pure speech recognition. Once again, drunken ramblings will need accounted for.

Not insurmountable problems, but they'll definitely delay things.

Doesn't Uber require people to input their destination into the app before they send a car ?

I'd expect any automated taxi to do the same thing. If someone is too drunk to tell the app where they want to go, then they don't get picked up. Which would also reduce the number of people vomiting on the seats.

[Jub]

I'm not so sure they'll be quickly replaced. If something minor breaks down on the truck, are you going to drive a crew out to fix it? That might be more expensive than just having someone ride along until something breaks on the auto-driven truck.

This is what happens already. When a rig breaks down the driver sure isn't the one fixing it, he calls a tow truck or whatever and mechanics tow his truck to a service bay. You could just have a boatload of sensors monitor things and report breakdowns you could also have periodic inspections to ensure that breakdowns are rare. Bigger issues would be putting on chains for winter driving in mountains, but I think even that could be solved.

And with delivery drivers, you've also got the issue of unloading small amounts of cargo and packages. The big deliveries are no problem - you can have the folks at the destination unload it, or even an automated system. But, say, deliveries to someone's house? Are you just going to ping people's phones and tell them to come outside and get their package on the truck?

For unloading small loads, you could probably have some sort of small drone do that. Something like a largish quadcopter or maybe a small robot that takes your package to your door. Larger loads could be delivered using a self-driving forklift that is stored in the back of the truck.

[K. A. Pital]

When there was a contraction due to the automation of agricultural labour, industrial manufacturing consumed the excess workers (and then some) by spreading all over the world. When a contraction in the number of industrial workers started, the "services" industry took up the slack - people became talking faces at shops and outlets, restaurants etc.

Every new sector that consumes the released workers and puts them back to work has to be (1) larger in terms of manpower requirements than the previous sector and (2) no less accessible to the average person considering the knowledge and skills. For example, an industrial worker requires actually more skill than a retail shop worker, so fired industry workers can transition en mass to work in retail.

When the workplace contraction in the services industry goes on, what is the new rapidly expanding sector where the people are going to go? Services to services? Services squared? Household servants? Each free household will have no less than 2 slaves?

[Starglider]

I predict a steady rise in the number of people who, when asked what they do at a dinner party, say 'I work in social media' and wave their hands vaugely. Apparently it's aspirational; we recently had a discussion here about a 25-year-old who was fired from a customer service at Yelp for complaining too loudly, in which she said that she wanted to be writing funny tweets for a living.

[K. A. Pital]

99 Francs it is then.

A cruel reality where the majority of people get scraps for "funny tweets" as 99,9% of the tweets are not funny enough to make a penny, and those who get a lot waste their life, creating the illusion of success for others to strive towards. Poor people endlessly advertising shit to other poor people in the hope of being paid, while others try their best to block the stream of paid product-placement shit. Amusement industry will turn humans into cheap buffoon beggars - which is still a step above the burger-flipper, perhaps...

[MKSheppard]

When the workplace contraction in the services industry goes on, what is the new rapidly expanding sector where the people are going to go? Services to services? Services squared? Household servants? Each free household will have no less than 2 slaves?

The Emperor on his Golden THrone will save us.

[Elheru Aran]

As far as automated ordering goes. They're already rolling that out in some parts, here in Atlanta the local QuikTrip gas station chain has a little "QT Kitchens" feature in some stations where you can order sandwiches, pizza, ice cream, that kind of thing. No cashiers; there's only a couple of touchscreens. You pick what category of food you want (ice cream, coffee, sandwich, pizza, etc), then it takes you through the various submenus (sandwich-> bagel sandwich -> bagel with egg, bagel with sausage, bagel with bacon, etc), before your final screen with the add-in options (salsa? 75c extra; BBQ sauce? 50c; and so forth), and once you're done it spits out a receipt which you take to the front desk to pay.

A person does put together the food for you, so it's not THAT automated. I fully expect it to start getting more and more common in fast food before too long, though.

[Zaune]

I predict a steady rise in the number of people who, when asked what they do at a dinner party, say 'I work in social media' and wave their hands vaugely. Apparently it's aspirational; we recently had a discussion here about a 25-year-old who was fired from a customer service at Yelp for complaining too loudly, in which she said that she wanted to be writing funny tweets for a living.

Roll on a reputation-based economy, eh?

[Guardsman Bass]

When the workplace contraction in the services industry goes on, what is the new rapidly expanding sector where the people are going to go? Services to services? Services squared? Household servants? Each free household will have no less than 2 slaves?

They'll go into what is nebulously called the "white collar" sector, but which is really about putting people atop ever increasingly large numbers of automated systems and maintaining said systems (especially since the consequences of failure get larger). We see this already with increases in firm size - larger companies and organizations need increasingly large numbers of people just to manage the complexity of them, to mitigate the problems that arise over time.

I just wouldn't under-estimate people's ability to adapt to new jobs, at least when they're young and the economy's good. And automation could bring some benefits for low-skilled workers as well, if it makes it possible to take tasks that require a ton of training and work right now and make them doable by folks with less training (like if you came up with a machine that lets someone with an associates degree do stuff that used to require an MD).

[Gaidin]

I suspect a robot restaurant would not be completely automated no matter how much a whiny CEO would want it.

Currently a 'standard' sized drive-in restaurant runs about maybe 20 people per shift, meaning a 3 shift place could easily have in excess of 60 people.

If you assume 90% of those people are basically job drones; with the last 10% of pay going to the Shift Managers and Team Leaders; that's about

(60 * 0.9) = 54 * 1,040 hours a year (at 20 hrs/wk part time) = 56,160 hours worked * $7.25 minimum wage = $407,160/year in simple labor salaries.

If you automated down to just three people a shift (Store Manager, Machine Operator/Janitor I, Machine Operator/Janitor II) and made the drone jobs $15/hr, your total labor costs would be:

(2 drones * 3 shifts) = 6 drones * 1,040 hours a year (at 20 hrs/wk part time) = 6,240 hours worked * $15 Wage = $93,600/year in simple labor costs.

That's a savings of over $310K~ a year in labor costs that could be used to buy equipment/maintain it; and unlike employees, you can amortize the depreciation of equipment value on your taxes.

Are you accounting for payroll taxes and such? Also, if you only have 3 people a shift, I guarantee they're full time, which means you're paying bennies. So that labor cost is going up.

Probably not enough to make *that* much of a difference, though...

Nevermind that I don't think you get away with paying a "Machine operator" what is functionally politically being rushed to minimum wage for a burger flipper. Yea. More than 15$ plus benefits.