this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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I've been hearing talk of mechanised coffee makers/baristas taking over for over 20 years now. In this current AI hype environment it's pretty easy to believe that now's the time. And sometimes hype can make that happen if everyone believes it's the time for it.
I'm not in the robotics space but I can imagine that more pervasive ML and/or DL techniques can bring the field forward. Whether they translates to better automatic coffee machines though? I think I'm doubtful just because of how much of the job is random fine motor control stuff. Though, to be fair, so many coffee places, even good ones, have so much variance in the quality of their product that they don't control for because they don't have to that I can see machines doing on average a better job in many cases ... where again, with AI hype, people may just be happy to accept and embrace that. I'd certainly go try coffee from a coffee robot now.
Which of course gets to the potentially oncoming reality for a lot of people ... climate change + job automation ... over a 5-30 year time scale, shit's about to get whack.
Crazy to read about the McDonald's where you don't interact with anyone but pretty sure they still have people in the back cooking the food
Oh yea ... and happening more and more.
Just a local burger joint near me started installing automatic ordering interfaces/computers. At first I was confused that it'd be worth it for them as they don't have the most amount of business. Then I realised that their demand spikes massively and is rather variable. So, instead of hiring people for shifts that are too long such that they will just stand around for most of it ... they're investing in machines so that what little staff they can afford can be stretched more during peak demand times.
I was on the outskirts of this robotics transformation.
The robotic arm stuff is the game changer. It's such a general purpose machine. It's very impressive but not quite perfect and the vision is very impressive but not quite perfect. When I seen it, it was very almost there but because it couldn't do that 1% it couldn't replace humans at all. It really feels like it just needs to be that little bit better and the world will change.
Well that was almost 5 years ago. One day, maybe it's here, the floodgates will open.
Yep, that makes complete sense.