The new burger chef makes $3 an hour and never goes home. (It's a robot)

In a test kitchen in a corner building in downtown Pasadena, Flippy the robot grabbed a fryer basket full of chicken fingers, plunged it into hot oil -- its sensors told it exactly how hot -- then lifted, drained and dumped maximally tender tenders into a waiting hopper. A few feet away, another Flippy eyed a beef patty sizzling on a griddle. With its camera eyes feeding pixels to a machine vision brain, it waited until the beef hit the right shade of brown, then smoothly slipped its spatula hand under the burger and plopped it on a tray. The product of decades of research in robotics and machine learning, Flippy represents a synthesis of motors, sensors, chips and processing power that wasn't possible until recently. Now, Flippy's success -- and the success of the company that built it, Miso Robotics -- depends on simple math and a controversial hypothesis of how robots can transform the service economy.