Monday, August 12, 2013

The Future of Burger Flipping

From SingularityHub:
Alpha machine from Momentum Machines cooks up a tasty burger with all the fixins. And it does it with such quality and efficiency it’ll produce “gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices.”

With a conveyor belt-type system the burgers are freshly ground, shaped and grilled to the customer’s liking. And only when the burger’s finished cooking does Alpha slice the tomatoes and pickles and place them on the burger as fresh as can be. Finally, the machine wraps the burger up for serving.

And while you fret over how many people you invited to the barbecue, Alpha churns out a painless 360 hamburgers per hour.
The claim is that the labor saved will pay for the machine in a year.  (Of course, and maintenance and repairs will be so rare that you won't even notice it.)  Still, there's a lesson here: burger flipping is going to go the way of farriers (the people who shoe horses) and the maids responsible for detaching and reattaching lace and buttons on fancy dresses.  The same crowd of leftists who have been complaining about the miserable pay for hard work are soon going to be complaining that machines like this are going to destroy all the jobs for disadvantages sorts.  Yup.  Just like almost every job as a farmer in this country in 1800 has disappeared.  (Back then, we were a nation of 97% farmers; now it's more like 2.5% farmers.)

3 comments:

  1. Keep up the demands for a $15/hr minimum wage, and the machine will pay for itself twice as fast.

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  2. There are thousands of farriers at work in the U.S. There are lots of horses: race horses, riding horses, show horses. Even some working horses.

    Not as many as there used to be, but still a lot - about 9 million.

    And they still need to be shoed.

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  3. My guess is that there were hundreds of thousands of farriers at work in the U.S. in 1900 -- and most of them were probably working full-time.

    ReplyDelete