[cgrealy]

> We haven't automated driving

Yeah, we pretty much have... it just hasn't been widely adopted yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI

And honestly, from a business perspective, most people really don't care about the skills ordinary people have.

Look at the wine industry for example. Top shelf wine is hand-picked, for exactly the reasons you outline, and some people are willing to pay top dollar for that end product.

But the vast majority of grapes are harvested by very simple machines, because scale and profit, and most people just want a $10 bottle of decent-ish wine.

We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour, McDonald's, Burger King, etc, WILL automate cooking a fucking hamburger.

Will it be as good as a "hand made" burger? Maybe.. maybe not?

Will the people paying a few bucks for a burger care? Nope.

This isn't an issue with "computer people"... this is an issue with economics.

[TeMPOraL]

> We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour, McDonald's, Burger King, etc, WILL automate cooking a fucking hamburger.

Curiously, McDonald's is probably as close as you can get to automating burgers and fries without crossing that final step of removing human labor entirely. It's not really cooking anymore, it's process chemistry[0], with some final assembly required.

--

[0] - Which I actually consider to be a good thing.

[munk-a]

This is the pattern you'll see repeated if you go looking for jobs that have been "automated away" - they get the dumb bits removed. No longer does the mail room call your desk to inform you that a package has arrived - scanning a barcode does that. The jobs in those sectors slowly shrink down (until eventually they just get rolled into the gigantic umbrella of responsibility that is IT) but the work never completely disappears.

Once upon a time I'm sure some dude had to constantly monitor the temperature of the cellar that holds the wine casks and occasionally call into town for a block of ice to keep things cool. Now we have refrigeration - and that mind-numbingly tedious portion of running a winery can now be conveniently avoided (except for the occasional maintenance) so you can concentrate on more important things.

Eventually it might be that McDonalds automates it's POS and menu to such a degree that for every ten franchises there's just one dude in a car that drives around responding to error codes and, ideally, the people who worked there will find something more creative and fulfilling to do with their lives. I don't hold those people with contempt - I feel like their skills (and everybody has skills) are being underutilized.

[XorNot]

Keeping the humans honest is generally the biggest problem with automation. Left unsupervised, people will trash everything. Add one overseer and that goes down a lot.

[slacktide]

As a mechanical engineering intern in the early ‘90s, I worked for a company that among other things, designed food handling equipment for McD. For them a lot of automation is about safety - young/inexperienced employees around potentially dangerous equipment = workers comp claims. I helped develop a fully automated pushbutton system to change fryer oil out from a bulk storage/disposal system. They had a lot of burn claims from teenagers changing it manually back then.

[gorgoiler]

I would be interested to know if there is feedback in the McD process chemistry loop.

A fun part of cooking by hand is dealing with the quirks of fresh produce. These once-living plants and meats are inconsistent enough to require decisions on the fly, mid cook. One cut is 50g thicker at one end than the other, one parsnip is 10% more dense at the top, this cod retained more salt than yesterday and requires less seasoning, etc.

Of course this kind of cooking is miles from what happens in fast food, but there’s a reason the burger station is the most senior position. Cooking patties properly requires skill to get them crispy, fully cooked, but still juicy. Hot damn I’m hungry now.

[TeMPOraL]

> I would be interested to know if there is feedback in the McD process chemistry loop.

There must be, running an open-loop process is rather tricky. If it's like any other process in food manufacturing, there are likely both continuous automated checks of trivially measurable properties and regular (every hour or less) manual lab tests[0].

> These once-living plants and meats are inconsistent enough to require decisions on the fly, mid cook.

As I understand their process (from what little I read and watched about it in the past), the keystone of it is minimizing input variance at every stage. They stick to specific varieties of potatoes, they keep bun production centralized, they place specific requirements on slaughterhouses for the meat they then blend into standardized pulp, etc. This makes it possible to constrain variance downstream - e.g. the meat pulp has roughly uniform properties, so it can be shaped and processed in tightly controlled fashion.

At the end come pre-processed food pieces that are then shipped to restaurants for assembly. McDonald's venues don't really cook this food, they put it through the last stage of processing pipeline - heating it in programmable ovens/fryers. Restaurant workers aren't making any cooking decisions. That's how McDonald's ensures its product consistency - there's no place left for a human to screw things up.

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[0] - Industrial food processing plants have labs on-site, which receive samples from the production line on an ongoing basis. This is used to check the batches for contamination / pathogens, verify measurements from automated sensors, and to provide ground-truth data for models used in model predictive controllers, if such are used in the process.

[LanceH]

I would expect to see it done at places like stadiums or other events where you have a crowd of 100k who all want to eat at the same time and the expected quality if near zero.

[Animats]

We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour

It's time to link to the AMFare video again.[1]

This was done 50 years ago, but wasn't cost-effective.

Country Garden in Beijing has several automated restaurants. They have 6 restaurants on this system now, one of which seats 600 people. So at scale, this is starting to work. Maybe. Looking at the videos, it looks hard to clean. Commercial food processing equipment has a look of "can be blasted with boiling soapy water daily", and not seeing that here.[2]

[1] https://youtu.be/FmXLqImT1wE

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1GipbISX54

[adamdusty]

We have not automated driving. Phoenix is step one but there are parts of the world that get weather other than sunshine. Yeah those cars are cool, but the roads in Phoenix are better than any other major city in the US, the weather is binary, sun or rain, the city is modern, and the stop lights communicate with audi (I think its audi) cars and you can see when it's going to turn green on the instrument display. Phoenix is the absolute ideal place for self-driving cars. Again, its a great achievement. They are doing great work, but I think it's a stretch to make the general statement that we've automated driving.

[andrewmcwatters]

McDonalds effectively did automate making a hamburger through supply chain and on-site process. It's cleaning that those professionals say is difficult, which seems to be why machines don't handle the very last portion itself 100%.

[mbesto]

> Yeah, we pretty much have...

"Pretty much". heh, there are 6 distinct levels of car automation for a reason.

> it just hasn't been widely adopted yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI

Now try this in Wisconsin in January with 8 inches of snow on the ground. I consider Wisconsin wide adoption, do you?

[cgrealy]

And how many accidents are there in Wisconsin in January with 8 inches of snow on the ground?

We don’t have to perfect automated driving; we just have to get it better than the average human… and that’s a pretty low bar.

And we don’t even have to automate driving everywhere. Who cares if we can’t automate it for 5%? Can we automate it for 95%? Hell, if we can automate it for 30-40% with a lower accident rate… that’s already a win.