Dan Fastenberg
businessinsider.com
July 18, 2013
In recent months, some fast food workers have been staging walk outs, complaining of low pay and the lack of benefits.
But a new trend suggests that they may face competition that doesn’t care what hours they work, or what they’re paid.
Fast food chains in Japan, China and Great Britain have begun piloting the use of robots to cook meals. And while robots have been emerging in recent years as a boon for completing menial tasks like dispensing medicines in hospitals, these fast food robots are capable of preparing full sushi rolls or noodle dishes for Asian food outlets. In many cases, customers complete their orders through a touchscreen, which then alerts the robot how to prepare the meal. No humans needed.
It stands to reason that American fast food companies will adopt the robots at some point. One new fast food robot is the noodle-slicing “Chef Cui” in China, which as the Associated Press reports, costs restauranteurs 30,000 Chinese Yuan to buy, or $2,000. Comparatively, a human noodle chef is paid about $4,700 a year in China, according to the AP.
For Liu Maohu, a noodle restaurant owner in Beijing, the choice of hiring a robot over a human is easy. “The robot chef can slice noodles better than human chefs,” he told the AP. “And it is much cheaper than a real human chef.”
This is just the beginning, too. A report by the McKinsey & Company consulting group says that robots will occupy about one out of every eight commercial service jobs by 2025. And for fields like manufacturing, packing, construction and maintenance, the figure is roughly one in four. To reach those numbers, companies will have to invest roughly $1.4 trillion, according to McKinsey.