Let's assume your robot arm example is about a frycook at a burger joint. I agree a robot arm isn't an effective way to replace the frycook, but a specialized system like Momentum Machines is developing[1] will be.
The automated fast food joint isn't a regular one with robot arms instead of people, it's a box the size of a small office that takes raw ingredients from a stockpile inside of it and creates fully assembled burgers, fries, chicken strips, and onion rings without any human interaction.
Automation hardware will strike a middle ground between specialization and reuse. Eg the deep fryer will be able to cook several different meals, but it will still only have 1-2 degrees of freedom for putting stuff in and taking it out. Similar story for the grilling surface, veggie chopping system, and the plating / packaging mechanism.
This is much cheaper, faster, and more reliable than truly general purpose robot arms. More importantly though, it takes dramatically less space than a conventional restaurant, so you can plop your company's food-making-box down in Times Square and actually make a profit, while everyone else is stuck four blocks away to break even on the real estate.
The stories will be different in different sectors, but in general I think the coming automation wave is a bunch of quantitative changes coming together to form qualitative ones like this. You could probably build a burger-maker a decade ago too, but the hardware and design know-how necessary have gotten orders of magnitude cheaper and more abundant, and so now it's actually happening.
I think this also has some interesting implications for real estate long term - if every mcdonalds needs 50% of the space they currently occupy over time that real estate will be put back in the market, multiply that by every organization doing that and it has some follow in implications that I can't forsee but find very interesting.
OTOH, the nice dining experiences will be done by people who can improvise and improve day-to-day based on their own tastes. eventually, the stuff people do will be the "good" stuff, and the stuff robots do will be the "bad" stuff. Hopefully. A more negative viewpoint says that robots will do the "high value" stuff and the people will only do the "low value" bad stuff.
In fact, if you consider the partial oxygen pressure (which is what matters for your lungs), this air is no worse than the air you find inside an airplane, or at a 2500m (8200 ft) mountain peak; Wikipedia says 140 million people live permanently at above 2500 m.
Now, this already exists and is called a hypoxic air fire prevention system, and is used e.g. in some data centers and in archives of valuable documents. It's not used in fast food restaurants though, because they have better ways of preventing and extinguishing fires at lower cost.
The majority of space in a McDonalds is the dining area and ordering counter area These areas are occupied by customers. The kitchens in a McDonalds is already pretty compact and dense.
I mean, real-time voiced-over translation on Skype? Eventually even mimicing the other person's voice? Yes please!
All thanks to this shallow form of AI that Nick Bostrom coined as "artificial narrow intelligence" (as opposed to "general" intelligence, i.e. human-like; and "superior" beyond ours). It's becoming possible for businesses of all kinds and all trades, thanks to the drastic cost reduction of deep learning since we moved these tasks to GPUs (and these bad boys keep improving at +25% performance per generation roughly every 18 month). And what AI does, sometimes is order of magnitude better than what any human individual/team could do (think Spotify's recommendations, anything with "big data" and "subjectivity" in it).
Which leads to the same conclusion as your last sentence.
It's orders of magnitude more scalable but you're music nerd friend will beat Spotify's recommendations any day.
Second of all, following their links we find that in 2012 they had a full scale machine built that had a 95% success rate, and they projected 11 months until they could launch the concept in a restaurant. What has happened since? No word, AFAICT. Happy to be corrected if I missed it somewhere and they have actually launched.
But otherwise, it doesn't exactly convince me this is "the next industrial revolution" if they can't polish out that last 5% of a single-purpose burger-making machine in almost half a decade.
A more concrete if less evocative example is Amazon's warehouse automation. Relatively simple robots with 3 DOF (2D planar movement + a container jack) are wiping out enormous numbers of jobs, both in obvious immediate effects (less fulfillment center jobs) and by decimating conventional retail.
edit: Momentum still has 19 employees on LinkedIn, so they're not completely dead it seems.
But once competition automates, all bets are off everyone must automate or perish.
Its very much like the prostitution industry or pr0n.
None of those are going to automate any time soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34T3IkAtOrc&ab_channel=McDon...
For restaurants where one of the main draws is price I think automation is inevitable as a cost saving measure.
I think we'll adapt as a race, but it'll be mighty uncomfortable for some (say those reliant on low skilled jobs, truck drivers, fast food workers, etc.). It's not to say that the way things will get done will even look the same as the transition occurs. I suspect many things will look different. For instance, rather than speaking your order to a person at McDonald's, you make your selections from a menu and a machine creates it, and then you pick it up and take it back to your table. Redbox already does this for movie rental. Think about how they've changed what we expect of renting movies... Same for home construction, particularly of the cookie cutter variety. Rather than a crew of people going through the motions to excavate a hole, lay a foundation, frame the house, put up drywall, paint, etc., Maybe it'll just be 3D printed with a huge machine (this tech actually exists, if in its infancy). Or maybe we'll switch to brick houses because they make brick laying robots (not humanoid, more like boxes which can move around). The next decade or two will be interesting!
But high end pizza places still don't use them and instead rely on stone / brick / coal pizza ovens instead.
Even if all of those assumptions hold today, what makes you think the the robot arm of a decade from now won't cost $20,000, but, with minor maintenance, operate for a decade?
What jobs have been created by this automation? This certainly didn't create 8 (times the # of stores) jobs for software engineers - otherwise, this wouldn't have been profitable for QFC.
Does anyone seriously think that those 8 people went on to do work that paid better, or was more valuable then putting groceries into plastic bags? If so, why haven't they done that before they were put out of work by a machine? Do engineers not see a connection between this, and the fact that they get to step over human excrement on their way to work?
HackerNews is read by a very weird set of people. All highly motivated and smart. Now, I've worked in a lot of small companies with people who are fairly smart but have no realy desire to win at work (or get promoted) they just want to turn up, do the work and go home. Home is time for family, hobbies, pub, etc.
I've noticed that simple web apps replace people. Excel or an access database, some scripts and someones job is suddenly much easier. People move on, or get demoted to part time, or some small pay cut (or years without a pay rise) and eventually leave.
These are usually the 18 - 25 year olds, employed to help out accounts or a manager or as a secretary while the PA is busy. These are the people that I don't see around so much these days. The gossips, the ones who remember your kids names, who have time for a chat. Who organise a night down the pub where the whole team bonds. They are the glue and the social oil that makes the machine move smoothly.
But they don't seem to get hired these days. Who needs them to print out a thousand letters and put them in envelopes? gmail will do that. Who needs them to find that document filed away in the back office? Or to go to the other office on the other side of town to find that blueprint?
Automation does kill jobs. For good and for bad. Life goes on.
still, there is rarely a line.
You have some might fine AI machines ;)
Whenever I hear statements like this, I cannot help but think that the person making the statement has never done a week of work as "unskilled labour" themselves. (No offense intended.) Be it flipping burgers or building houses, there is improvisation both when it comes to high-level intelligence and in the ranges of motion the human limbs go through that make robots a complete non-starter.
Adding to that, a cheap robot arm that can lift as much as a four-year-old is $20k purchase price, plus another $20k for the controller/AI system, and probably $2k-$3k a year in maintenance. Figure four year depreciation when run 8 hours each day, you're looking at a yearly cost of $12k. That's compared to ~$15k for someone working full time on minimum wage. Take into account the huge process of switching your business over to robots, and it just doesn't look good.
Also, we don't need AI to take a customers order, you just need a touchscreen, or even just an app. The tech has been here for more than a decade. Why don't restaurants do this?