What I read and watched
"Burger-flipping robot taken offline after one day" says that in response to the difficulties in training and retaining staff to do the job, the Cali Burger company of California has introduced a robot to flip burgers (2018). Although Flippy, the first such robot, has been taken offline for work to improve its speed, the head of technology at Cali, Anthony Limolino, expects robots to become increasing common in restaurants, admitting that they will reduce human staff.
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My response
Watching the accompanying video was interesting. I kept comparing Flippy to a human. It sort of looks like a human holding on to the spatula for flipping with both hands and moving in slightly awkward way, except that it's only awkward for a human to move that way. Actually, it looks a bit cute, like a toy. But like many toys, it has a serious purpose and is likely to force massive changes on society.
As Cali concedes, they expect the robots to eliminate human jobs. This is inevitable, and I think it would be a disastrous economic mistake to try to stop the robots taking our jobs. Robot machines are in fact much better at many things than human beings are, including flipping burgers, and they are cheaper to employ, which is why they are gaining ever more abilities to do ever more jobs. As minimum wages rise, it is natural that companies will replace expensive and less efficient human workers with cheaper and more efficient robot workers. This has already happened in the banking sector with the widespread use of increasingly sophisticated programs running on faster and more powerful hardware. And customers love it. It makes my life much easier to be able to do almost all of my banking without ever seeing or talking with an human bank employee. My trusty smartphone can let me do almost everything I need to do, from paying bills to transferring money or just checking a balance. Life is better with machines doing the boring work. And flipping burgers does sound, as my source says, both boring and unpleasant with the heat and grease.
One thing that really stood out in the video that is part of the story was the comment that, although everyone says that new jobs will be created to replace those lost to robots, they never say what those jobs might be. I'm not sure that such jobs will be created, at least not enough of them to give everyone a job, so perhaps more radical solutions need to be explored for a society coming soon where there just aren't that many jobs for humans to do.
As Cali concedes, they expect the robots to eliminate human jobs. This is inevitable, and I think it would be a disastrous economic mistake to try to stop the robots taking our jobs. Robot machines are in fact much better at many things than human beings are, including flipping burgers, and they are cheaper to employ, which is why they are gaining ever more abilities to do ever more jobs. As minimum wages rise, it is natural that companies will replace expensive and less efficient human workers with cheaper and more efficient robot workers. This has already happened in the banking sector with the widespread use of increasingly sophisticated programs running on faster and more powerful hardware. And customers love it. It makes my life much easier to be able to do almost all of my banking without ever seeing or talking with an human bank employee. My trusty smartphone can let me do almost everything I need to do, from paying bills to transferring money or just checking a balance. Life is better with machines doing the boring work. And flipping burgers does sound, as my source says, both boring and unpleasant with the heat and grease.
One thing that really stood out in the video that is part of the story was the comment that, although everyone says that new jobs will be created to replace those lost to robots, they never say what those jobs might be. I'm not sure that such jobs will be created, at least not enough of them to give everyone a job, so perhaps more radical solutions need to be explored for a society coming soon where there just aren't that many jobs for humans to do.
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My question
How do you think society should respond to the rise of robot workers?
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Reference
- Burger-flipping robot taken offline after one day. (2018, March 9). BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43343956
With only 76 words in my summary compared to the 360 in my response to the article, the proportions are good. But to be fair, it was a short article, even including the video that I watched a couple of times.
ReplyDeleteAnd now it's your turn to blog something in the news.