By Nick Bernabe
Colonel Sanders is raising a robot army to serve fried chicken at a restaurant near you. KFC’s first automated restaurant, called Original+, went live in Shanghai on April 25th, complete with an artificially intelligent robot manager named “Du Mi” who works at the front counter.
According to Chinese news outlet Sohu, “‘Du Mi’ marks the first commercial use of artificial intelligence in the fast food industry. The artificial intelligence robot was launched by China’s leading Web services company Baidu during its World Conference in 2015.”
KFC hopes that the hip new automated restaurant will attract young customers with its free wireless phone charging stations and human-less service.
But it’s not just KFC, and it’s not just China where automation, robots, and artificial intelligence is taking the place of human workers. If and when these automated restaurants gain traction in places like China, they are sure to be implemented in the U.S. as well. In fact, they already are — though to a lesser extent, for now. McDonald’s and other food chains are experimenting with digital kiosks similar to the self-checkout machines already found in many grocery stores.
KFC’s Original+ kiosk.
In fact, as we covered recently at Anti-Media, automation is set to replace human jobs across broad sectors of the U.S. and world economies:
[T]he Bank of England is preparing for automation to shed 80 million American jobs and 15 million British jobs within the next 10 to 20 years. This is approximately 50% of the U.S. and British workforce. Forbes has put the number at 45%.
The ongoing debate surrounding robots, A.I., and automation displacing human workers is a delicate yet very important one. Many experts, including Stephen Hawking, have warned of the dangers of monopolistic artificial intelligence while others believe with the right direction from people, robots and technology can liberate humanity from manual labor.
The inevitable automation of the world’s economy will reshape society as we know it. Minimum wages will no longer protect workers as employers shift to using robots who will never ask for breaks, pay, raises, or healthcare. Worker unions may essentially be rendered useless. Militaries will eventually no longer need humans to fight wars. Additionally, Uber, Lyft, taxi and limousine drivers, and other driving jobs could soon be replaced by self-driving cars as automation also changes the way we think about transportation altogether.
Automation is loved, feared, and hated by many, but only time will tell how it will change our lives — for better or worse.
This article (New KFC Restaurant Run Entirely by Robots) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Nick Bernabe and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email [email protected].
So I wonder how much it will cost to fix them after some one dumps a soft dink onto there electronics?
The ultimate question that comes to this human CPU should be on every corporate entity out there in cyber space… if you replace workers with robots, where will the customers come from to purchase these edibles> Sounds like a real “nuts ” and bolts dilemma in my analysis! Thou shalt NOT harm humans!
And if most everything for sale in the US is manufactured in China, where will the customers come from to purchase everything else?
Presumable working as a “robot” in a crappy service job, like KFC.
I wish I was smart enough to hack into the system and have all the food gave away for free. People would soon be on the scene serving.
I’m going to take my sexy robot wife to the automated KFC for dinner.
Cherry 2000 model?
OMG this movie looks awesome. Going to download it right now. I read that it only made $14000 dollars at the box office LOL
I read another article about a week ago, how all the Chinese restaurants have quite using their robots. They are using just one, in one restaurant,as a sort of greeter. They actually did a poorer job then the human ones did. So, for now, they have gone back to people.
So how are people going to pay for these products WITH NO JOBS? The economy is only serving the 1% and maybe only a smaller percentage of that number. If people don’t have jobs, they won’t be buying KFC, Big Macs, etc – unless the intent is to give EVERYBODY WELFARE. And how does that get funded? Or do we just kill off the “surplus” population?