http://www.businessinsider.com/
The company's robot can "slice toppings like tomatoes and pickles immediately before it places the slice onto your burger, giving you the freshest burger possible." The robot is "more consistent, more sanitary, and can produce ~360 hamburgers per hour." That's one burger every 10 seconds.
The next generation of the device will offer "custom meat grinds for every single customer. Want a patty with 1/3 pork and 2/3 bison ground to order? No problem."
Momentum Machines cofounder Alexandros Vardakostas told Xconomy his "device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient. It’s meant to completely obviate them." Indeed, marketing copy on the company's site reads that their automaton "does everything employees can do, except better."
This directly raises a question that a lot of smart people have contemplated: Will robots steal our jobs? Opinion is divided of course. Here's what Momentum Machines has to say on the topic:
The issue of machines and job
displacement has been around for centuries and economists generally
accept that technology like ours actually causes an increase in
employment. The three factors that contribute to this are 1. the company
that makes the robots must hire new employees, 2. the restaurant that
uses our robots can expand their frontiers of production which requires
hiring more people, and 3. the general public saves money on the reduced
cost of our burgers. This saved money can then be spent on the rest of
the economy.
If we are to undertake the lofty ambition
of changing the nature of work by way of robots, the fast-food industry
seems like a good place to start, considering its inherently repetitive
tasks and minimal skill requirements. Any roboticist worth his or her
salt jumps at tasks described as repetitive and easy — perfect
undertakings for a robot.Here's a schematic of what the burger-bot looks like and how it works. It occupies 24 square feet, so it's much smaller than most assembly-line fast-food operations. It boasts "gourmet cooking methods never before used in a fast food restaurant" and will even deposit your completed burger into a bag. It's a veritable Gutenberg printing press for hamburgers.
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