Comment by pcthrowaway
1 day ago
Curious how food service is at 0 tasks covered by AI. A few places have been switching to using those robots on wheels to run food to tables. And Doordash and Uber Eats have some robot and drone delivery in select markets now.
Covered by AI benchmarks. Nobody has yet made a benchmark for how good LLMs are at taking drive-thru orders, even though there are LLMs doing that.
Ugh so this entire thread is nonsense because even I know two different companies doing that.
> A few places have been switching to using those robots on wheels to run food to tables.
Is this not just a gimmick? You still need people on hand to take over if the robot has an issue, I don't see how it would reduce labour costs.
> Is this not just a gimmick? You still need people on hand to take over if the robot has an issue, I don't see how it would reduce labour costs.
"take over IF the robot has an issue" is exactly how it reduces labor costs.
2020: 10 waiters, waiting tables. You're on the hook for each of their salaries.
2030: 10 robots, one human waiter passively overseeing the cluster. You're on the hook for minor parts/occasional repair for the robots, and one person's salary.
Its not about a 100% staff elimination, but a large overhead reduction ensuring the few humans you're keeping around are more efficient overall for dollars generated in revenue versus the all-human staff before.
Plus, in certain cases, like kiosks replacing cashiers at fast food establishments, there's now one less qualification needed from employees (good social skills), increasing the pool of acceptable options you can hire where before some of those candidates would have been unsuitable for the job.
You're on the hook for more than a supervisor. Depreciation, financing, or lease payments on the robots is a big one.
And what do the robots do? Wheel the food to the table, where the customers then need to reach for the plates and pass them around? Not a great experience. Or actually set the plate in front of each diner, without dumping it, like a human waiter does? Much more sophisticated and expensive robot.
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Wait staff already makes two bucks an hour in the US. It’s basically as cheap as cheap labor gets. It will take a while, and very cheap robotics, to make robot waiters worth it financially.
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How about just handing out plates over the counter to the customers. But then again McDonalds have table service now so what do I know.
Okay so you go to a restaurant, who takes your order? The robot? Does it have a touchscreen like in mcdonalds were everyone has to spend 2 minutes awkwardly mashing the screen. Then the robot brings you the plates, then you have to put your own plates on the table, then how do you signal that you are ready to pay? Does every table have a button that you press to summon the robot again? Then you have to put your plates back on the robot?
Who the fuck would go to a restaurant like this.
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The demand for food delivery in the places where the robots are viable is nearly infinite. My city has had them for two years and there are still just as many humans doing deliveries, they are just sharing the already-crowded sidewalks with robots.
I don't use them; not because of any moral objection, but because they can't come inside buildings. The whole point of food delivery is to avoid going outside. Most human couriers come directly to your unit. The food delivery companies have spoiled us too much, and we are not ready to return to a world where you have to put on shoes to get food. Oddly, the delivery robots are probably better suited to suburbia, where folks are used to answering the front door to pick up a food delivery. But the distances involved aren't viable until you have delivery Waymos that can move at highway speeds.
They're seemingly talking about a motorized platform inside a restaurant delivering to "the table" not those door to door delivery robots you drop food inside that drive on the sidewalk.
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It seems in China hotels commonly have robots deliver room service meals. I guess it makes sense, the building is not too hard to navigate for a robot, and it would take a worker 3+ minutes for each delivery. I thought it was maybe a gimmick, but it seems >30% of hotels have them now.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202609/10/WS6aa122a5e4b06d4a...
Restaurants, for reasons (anti-)Communists can explain, is about the Master-Slave dynamic, or less polemically, the ability for a pauper to feel like a king.
There is an element of "I am rich enough to pay someone to cook for me. To serve me. To clean for me".
Vending machines exist and Automat's never really caught on in their previous form, replaced by fast food for those who want cost efficient food service without the service element.
Restaurant quality is strongly associated with the quality of the wait staff.
Grabbing food handed to you through a window at a drive through is already very highly automated. But also has the most price pressure.
I not think people count robots are AI. Unless they're intelligent robots.
Nobody wants that shit other than a few tech people.
Krispy Kreme has started using AI to take orders and it's awful. Terrible. Always gets everything wrong and you have to correct it. I think their phone system is AI too now. Madness.