alt Hacker NewsThe thing is with a lot of the world, you could say about the same in 1950 about why isn't everything automated by now. A lot of the technology needed to do most of everything we do was already there. They had vending machines selling cigarettes back then and today people buy their geekbars from a person in the 7/11, and we think we've progressed. Factories today still mostly only semi automated. You'd think mcdonalds would just be a single unit deployable crate burger factory by now, but it looks the same as it did in 1950 for the most part with humans doing all the work.
No one is actually given the agency in any company to set about and engineer and implement an automated solution that replaces existing business units. They also have to be given slack to fail and iterate. Easiest to just run mcdonalds mostly as you ran it the last quarter lest you rock the boat too much. Rinse and repeat and people still bag fries today, and the deep fryer remains probably the most dangerous part of the kitchen.
That's an interesting point. Vending machines never became a big deal outside of Japan. Fast food was automated in 1964, with AMFare [1], but that was never deployed beyond one prototype.
Whether general purpose robots will change this is interesting. It looks like they're going to cost about as much as a car. (There are at least 18 makers of humanoid robots. The hardware situation looks good.) That's cheaper than humans. There are already companies that set up industrial robots and charge for them by the working hour, with all maintenance and setup included.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xop9py8zBY