On 1 April, the same day California's new 20 hourly minimum wage for fast food workers went into effect, a new restaurant opened in north-east Los Angeles that was conspicuously light on human staff. CaliExpress by Flippy claims to be the world's first fully autonomous restaurant, using a system of AI-powered robots to churn out fast food burgers and fries. A small number of humans are still required to push the buttons on the machines and assemble the burgers and toppings, but the companies involved tout that using their technology could cut labor costs, perhaps dramatically. "Eat the future," they offer. I visited CaliExpress last week to find out what an all-American lunch served with a side of existential dread tastes like.

Burger fans in Pasadena, California will soon get to taste the future of fast food: a patented, AI-powered, short-order-cooking robot named Flippy. Flippy's makers said the new dining spot will be'the world's first operating restaurant where both ordering and every single cooking process are fully automated.' In addition to Flippy, responsible for deep frying chicken nuggets and French fries, a fellow'BurgerBot' will be grilling up patties, and a biometric payment system, PopID, will take customers' orders. While Flippy got its first job in the fast food industry back in 2017, serving at 50 CaliBurger restaurants after training, the new'CaliExpress by Flippy' will be the first time the rail-mounted mechanical arm will get to work with more of its own kind. Holding company Cali Group -- which owns Miso Robotics, the firm behind Flippy -- said it hoped the new CaliExpress will'inspire the next generation of kitchen AI and automation entrepreneurs' by offering educational tours and robotics exhibits.

We've warned you about the impending robot takeover time and time again. And soon one company in particular will make sure that our favorite fast food chains all start employing robots at their locations all around the world. Miso Robotics' website states that its mission is to "make restaurant operations safer, easier, and friendlier." The company's focus is on creating AI robots to assist with things like frying food and serving drinks, eliminating "dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks in restaurant kitchens." The company's initial investment was completely crowdfunded, which resulted in $50 million raised by 18,000 investors over two years, according to Food on Demand.

One of the earliest predictions about artificial intelligence was that robots would steal jobs from people, particularly for seemingly monotonous and menial tasks. Case in point: Flippy 2, the "autonomous robotic kitchen assistant" developed by Miso Robotics to turn hamburgers as they cook. The restaurant chain CaliBurger is testing Flippy at various locations. But what the robot is best at doing isn't what it was designed to do. "[A CaliBurger franchise owner] said, 'Flippy isn't actually as good as I might have liked at flipping hamburgers, but it's pretty good at pulling baskets of French fries out when they're done,'" said Thomas Davenport, a digital fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.

Restaurants have been struggling with labor shortages since the worst days of the pandemic, and the situation doesn't seem to be getting any better. After employees quit in droves and millions of restaurants shut down and laid off their entire staff, people seem to have found other ways to earn a living. Long waits, slow service, and disappointing meals. While there may not be a ton that robots can do to help at traditional sit-down restaurants, they're quickly moving in to fast food and fast-casual restaurants. Miso Robotics' Flippy, initially debuted in 2017 to flip burgers at a California fast food chain, got hired at 100 White Castles earlier this year (with expanded capabilities!).

Whether it's creating perfectly cooked fries and burgers or pouring soda without any spills, robot chefs are venturing further into the $296 billion U.S. fast food industry amid a nationwide labor shortage. Miso Robotics, a California-based company, built a kitchen bot called Flippy that was able to cook 300 burgers per day and then expanded into whipping up fries with the second version. The fast-casual chain Wing Zone in May inked a deal with Miso to install Flippy 2 into all future restaurant locations. Jack in the Box is deploying that same machine along with the company's Sippy bot - which quickly pours, labels and seals beverage orders - this year with a goal of getting into 10 high-volume locations in 2023. Whether it's creating perfectly cooked fries and burgers or pouring soda without any spills, robot chefs are venturing further into the $296 billion U.S. fast food industry amid a nationwide labor shortage And Miso has another machine called Chippy that can cook up Chipotle's tortilla chips - which will be integrated into a southern California location of the Mexican restaurant this year.

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are becoming essential for many businesses and domains. And although hospitality hasn't made extensive use of these technologies so far, Accenture predicts it will be one of the industries to make the most of AI and ML by 2035. Read on to learn how. As is the case for many other industries, artificial intelligence and machine learning deliver tremendous benefits to the hospitality industry. Those that are derived from the limitless capabilities of cognitive technologies to mimic how humans think and learn.

All artificial intelligent agents are robots, but is it possible to generalize this to vice versa, that are robots artificial intelligence? Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) have made it possible to find creative answers to the problems encountered by humanity and companies of all sizes across industries. Yet many questions still linger: Is AI a subset of robotics? Does AI fall under robotics? First, it should be clear that robotics and artificial intelligence are completely different concepts. These two areas are essentially wholly distinct. Artificially Intelligent Robots are a small section where the two sciences intersect.

In this third part of my series on the future of work, I want to deal with the impact of automation, in particular robots and artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs. I have covered this issue of the relationship between human labour and machines before, including robots and AI. But is there anything new that we can find after the COVID slump? The leading American mainstream expert on the impact of automation on future jobs is Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor at MIT. In testimony to the US Congress, Acemoglu started by reminding Congress that automation was not a recent phenomenon.

It's a scenario movies and sci-fi stories have predicted for years: an intelligent fleet of human-serving AI robots become too smart and take over the world. This common storyline has some people worried it will come to real-world fruition -- thanks to technological developments in artificial intelligence and robotics. For many others, though, applying intelligence to robotics is all about furthering innovation. And innovation there has been. Robotics dates back to 1898, when Nikola Tesla used radio waves to remotely direct the movement of a robot boat in a miniature man-made pond during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden in New York. That experiment led to Tesla becoming the father of robotics.