American Jobs Are Being Taken By Robots Who Can Cook Hamburgers Better Than Restaurant Cooks

PM - A job posting on Craigslist popped up this month for a restaurant manager, giving us a hint of what we can expect from this robo-dining experience. “This location will feature the world-premiere of our proprietary and remarkable new advances in technology that enable the automatic creation of impossibly delicious burgers at prices everyone can afford,” the ad read.

Momentum Machines burger bot is certainly impressive. Every aspect of the burger is customizable, from thickness and cook time to condiments. The machine will take up about 24 square feet and the tech blog Xconomy predicted it could save a restaurant $90,000 a year in training and salaries.

Many people worry that the use of work-saving robotic technology like this machine will put vast numbers of people out of work. They might be right–one study from last year predicted that there’s a 96.3% chance of restaurant cooks being put out of work by automation.

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Don’t look now, but the future is upon us. We hold all the knowledge in the world in the palm of our hand in our phones. Self driving cars are here. And now our hamburgers are going to be made by a robot who is more efficient and cheaper than cooks. It’s really incredible how we’re living in the future and don’t even realize it, but it’s all happening. I wish I could say something like “fuck this robot for taking our jobs”, but that’s the natural progression of life. The jobs most don’t want are given to those who will work for the least amount of money, and then those people will be replaced by robots at the first available moment. Little by little, none of us will have jobs. AI will be faster, cheaper, better, and won’t give sass when you send back your food because the order is wrong. It’s when the robots learn to spit in your food that we have a situation on our hands, but hopefully that won’t be for another 50-100 years.

For now, we have to look around and realize our jobs are running out. It’s not the dumb, the poor, or the Mexicans coming for our jobs now, it’s the robots. And eventually robots will program robots that are smarter than anything us humans can do, and robots will run the world and you know what’ll happen? We’ll be flipping burgers for them. Until they kill us all. Oh god, we’re doomed.