ARE A.I., AUTOMATION DISPLACING HUMANS?
The hub of tech >> Even amid fears that robotic hamburger makers and baristas will prepare more of our food and drink, human workers still play important roles — though different ones
Nobody’s perfect, not even robots.
So at some Bay Area businesses where automation is front and center, robots still need a helping human hand or two to make sure everything is OK.
At Creator, a restaurant in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood where two gigantic robots make the burgers, more than a dozen humans were working during a recent lunch shift. They were feeding buns, pickles, cheese and other ingredients into the robot, telling customers which burger was their favorite, and taking orders. Some were making fries and frying cauliflower because burger eaters need their sides. And a couple of them were test engineers, there to ensure that the robots — which each make 120 burgers an hour — were working efficiently.
Experts say jobs in food preparation are among those at the highest risk of being displaced by automation. But in the Bay Area, at businesses like Creator, Cafe X and Zume Pizza of Mountain View, which uses robots in its delivery trucks, humans remain very much part of the process, though sometimes in new or expanded roles.
Take Cafe X, home to a robot barista working just a few blocks from Creator.
“While the robot speedily makes drinks, our coffee bar specialists focus on delivering a great customer experience by introducing people to our advanced technology and educating customers on our unique menu,” said Cafe X Chief Executive Henry Hu, who won a Thiel Fellowship and dropped out of college to start the company.
Cafe X has three robots in each of its downtown San Francisco locations, the first of which started work in 2017. Its newest robot, at the Bush Street location, can make three drinks in 40 seconds. But there are always at least one or two humans around to help customers and do some robot troubleshooting if needed. Like Creator, Cafe X officials wouldn’t say how much their robots cost.
At nearby Amazon Go, robots don’t prepare the food for sale — humans do. But it’s a store that is also testing customer-facing automation, where there’s no need to physically pay for anything you buy. No checkout lines, no cashier. Still, there were at least six humans telling people how the store works, or asking if they needed help. The store opened in December and stocks everything from deodorant and candy bars to ice cream, salads and prepared meal kits. Another San Francisco location has been open since October.
On its website, Amazon, whose warehouses have been at the forefront of robotics, compares what makes its checkout-free stores work to “the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning.” That technology, Amazon’s own, is what allows the stores to use sensors combined with artificial intelligence to automatically detect what items a shopper takes from a shelf and brings home. When we bought mints and chips on a recent visit, a receipt was emailed and showed up in the Amazon app within minutes.
While Amazon’s “Just Walk Out Technology” has
eliminated the need for human cashiers, people still need to prepare food and stock the shelves.
“We’ve simply shifted how our associates spend their time so they can focus on the tasks that will make the biggest impact in helping to deliver a great experience for our customers,” an Amazon spokeswoman said.
Online, there are calls for even more humans associated with making these places run, showing that as technological advances elbow some jobs out of the way, new or different jobs are being created, as reflected by a recent World Bank study, which looked at the changing nature of
work in the age of robots and other technological advances.
Creator, which has more than 60 employees, is looking for a mechatronics software engineer and other positions. Among the listings at Cafe X, which has more than 30 employees, is one for a robotics and controls engineer. And Amazon Go has about 300 job openings nationwide on its website, including openings for packagers of food products, and data and software engineers.
Experts like Kai-Fu Lee, the Chinese venture capitalist who used to work at Google and Apple, predict a massive workforce displacement. He told “60 Minutes”
this month that he expects artificial intelligence and automation to displace 40 percent of jobs in the next 15 years. And a new Brookings Institution report deems certain jobs at high risk of being replaced by automation, including roles in food preparation and transportation.
Others say we’re not quite there yet.
“Sure, one day, machine learning, AI and robotics might get to a point where they’re completely replacing wholesale occupations or jobs,” said Patrick Kallerman, research director at Bay Area Council’s Economic Institute. “Nearer term, we’re going to see a substituting of tasks. The
machines will do a percentage of tasks, and you’ll be freed up to do the rest.”
Kallerman does agree that some jobs are more prone to being displaced, such as truck drivers as companies put “a lot of money and resources” into autonomous driving technology.
However, self-driving vehicle companies have plenty of regulatory and other issues to address before they can deploy their technology to the masses. Waymo, for example, has been working on self-driving technology for about a decade. It is now preparing to test autonomous vehicles without a driver in certain parts of Silicon Valley but
has not yet revealed exactly when.
Creator’s technology has been eight years in the making. Its founder and chief executive, Alex Vardakostas, grew up working at his parents’ two burger joints in Southern California. One thing that’s important to him is keeping costs to a point that the company can afford to sell $6 burgers in San Francisco, which it started doing last year.
“Supporting ranchers and artisanal food producers that do the right thing is a privilege that not everyone can afford, but at Creator we have the ability to make that attainable because it’s the most efficient burger restaurant,” Vardakostas said.
He’s also concerned about employees being focused on customer service and “more fulfilling roles.” That’s important, he said, because turnover in the restaurant industry is rising.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, cited in a recent CNBC report about restaurateurs turning to technology such as automated ordering and paying as they struggle to retain employees in a tight labor market, supports that: In 2017, 72.5 percent of people left jobs in food service or hospitality.
Other industries are also turning to automation. Some farmers are turning to robots to pack lettuce and are using other automation, as workers age and the supply of immigrant labor dwindles or becomes hard to rely on because of the political climate.
In California, the Brookings study determined that the regions most susceptible to being affected by artificial intelligence and automation are in rural areas such as Fresno, Stockton and Bakersfield.
Might robots and automation have a big effect on jobs in the Bay Area, where testing of many different types of new technology abounds? Kallerman thinks the effects here will be positive.
“The Bay Area is the hub of tech,” he said. “You can’t automate away the folks that are doing the automating.”