Some years ago, in 2018, when the minimum wage in California was $11 an hour for companies with 26 or more employees, a Pasadena burger joint hired a machine named Flippy to turn patties on the grill. “The world’s first autonomous kitchen assistant,” an “upgrade on a human line cook,” had some initial performance problems, fired because he and the human staff could not meet the demand of a public that wanted to see a gear-and-lever gadget serve up lunch at CaliBurger.
He needed to be re-coded.
To his credit, though, Flippy never took a break, called in sick or sassed his boss, and was never paid a dime for his labor – he was a prototype of the industry’s worker of the future.
Catching up in 2024, when the state minimum wage is $20 an hour for the fast-food industry, a pair of new machines are working behind the counter at a couple of Chipotle Mexican Grill’s Orange County locations. Their names are Autocado, who works at the chain’s Huntington Beach restaurant, and Augmented Makeline, who can be found in Corona Del Mar.
Autocado is a “cobot” who “cuts, cores, and peels avocados before they are hand mashed to create the restaurant’s signature guacamole,” says the company, while Augmented Makeline, also a cobot, “uses automated technology to build bowls and salads while Chipotle employees operate the top makeline to make burritos, tacos, quesadillas, and kid’s meals.”
In between Flippy and the Chipotle cousins, artificial intelligence automation became more common in California kitchens, even dancing with the live employees in a learned rhythm. They perfectly cook burgers and “man” the fry station like a pro. One California restaurant, CaliExpress in Pasadena, owned by the same holding company as CaliBurger, claimed earlier this year to be “the world’s first fully autonomous, AI-powered restaurant,” reports KTLA 5 in Los Angeles.
Chipotle says the cobots, part of a pilot program, are not intended to replace human workers – which is exactly what the company’s public relations department would be expected to say.
But the hard reality is that when labor costs become unaffordable because they have been forced upward by public policy, always the case with minimum-wage hikes, one of the many poor choices that companies must consider is cutting staff. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis:
Increasing the minimum wage provides economic incentives for firms to adopt new technologies that replace workers: That is, a higher minimum wage raises the cost of labor and increases the range of tasks that are susceptible to displacement by automation — especially the tasks of minimum wage jobs, which tend to be labor intensive and composed of low-skill tasks.
In the past, cutting employees due to the burdens of minimum-wage laws often meant cutting production. No more. Technology is giving businesses more opportunities to replace humans with machines, and not just those who don’t interact with the public. Customers at CaliExpress can even pay with their faces at an automated kiosk.
While the lowest-skilled workers are the ones being displaced now, that’s going to change. “AI is slowly but surely going to replace (practically) everyone,” worries Kevin Drum, a leftist pundit who is alarmed that automation “will make millions of workers unemployable” and that we are “woefully unprepared for the seismic shift this will cause.”
Like many, he’s unnecessarily fearful.
“In a free society, robotization is not a threat but a boon,” says the Mises Institute. “A better future does not only require the continuation of robotization, there must also be a parallel move to free capitalism.
“In the societies that are confronted with a growing share of older people, widespread robotization is the way out of the public pension dilemma. For emerging economies, robotization is the way to overcome poverty more rapidly. For humankind as a whole, the robotization of the economy paves the way to lead less burdensome lives and to gain a high standard of living.”
We shouldn’t be afraid of a world in which Flippys are common. Much more frightening is a society that shuns technology which improves the human condition.
Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.
