McDonald's CEO says the chain won't replace workers with robots — no matter what former execs say

McDonald's isn't ready to swap workers for robots just yet.


According to McDonald's CEO Steve Easterbrook, the fast-food chain won't replace workers with machines — even if restaurant operators have to pay the $15 hourly wage that protesters are demanding. 


"I don't see it being a risk to job elimination," Easterbrook said on Thursday at McDonald's annual meeting when asked if rising labor costs would force the chain to cut jobs, replacing workers with kiosks and "automatic pancake machines." 


Instead, Easterbrook said, the company would look to automating food preparation, allowing more employees to work directly with guests and boosting customer service. 


"Ultimately we're in the service business, and we're competing with other opportunities for people to eat and drink out," says Easterbrook. "Frankly, we will always have an important human element."


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Yes, the Robots Are Coming for Our Jobs, But Just the Boring Ones

Which of America's bridges are getting ready to collapse? Ask the robot boats.

More than 600,000 bridges in the U.S. are due for inspection.

Traditionally, divers are sent out to visually examine the bridges' underwater structures. The work is time-consuming, expensive, and tedious, and can be dangerous.

Karl von Ellenrieder and his team at Florida Atlantic University’s Dania Beach campus are working on a fleet of intelligent, autonomous boats that could replace many of those divers.

Using underwater cameras, the boats patrol the underwater structures of the bridges without any human supervision.

If all is well, they continue on their programmed route.

If damage is detected, they cluster around the area, making sure it’s well documented for the managers overseeing the boats from land.

It is only at this point that human divers would need to be dispatched.  To read the entire article, click here

Robots are Coming

It’s intuitive that automation will take low-wage jobs.

But the White House, in its annual economic report of the president, has broken down just how much that is so. 

There’s an 83% chance that automation will take a job with an hourly wage below $20, a 31% chance automation will take a job with an hourly wage between $20 and $40, and just a 4% chance automation will take a job with an hourly wage above $40.

The White House used the same data that underlines other research in the field of labor and robots to arrive at the conclusion.

The key question is what happens when a robot takes one of these low-wage jobs. 

Traditionally, innovation leads to higher income, more consumption and more jobs, but the question is whether the current pace of automation may in the shorter term increase inequality. 

One study found that higher levels of robot density within an industry lead to higher wages in that industry, the White House notes. 

However, that could be because the absence of lower-skills biases wage estimates upwards.

The White House says the findings demonstrate the need for training and education to help displaced workers find new jobs.

In other parts of the world... for instance, British high streets and factories will be transformed over the next two decades as millions of jobs are replaced by robots, a new report warns. 

Eleven million jobs across the UK economy are at high risk of being automated by 2036, with the retail and transport sectors most vulnerable, according to Deloitte. 

It came as Sir Roger Carr, the chairman of BAE Systems, warned that humans could become “mere spectators” to their destruction unless governments do more to police the development of autonomous weapons. 

Deloitte, one of the "Big Four" accountancy firms, said rapid advances in technology and the popularity of online shopping meant more than 2m jobs in the wholesale and retail sector - or almost 60pc of the current retail workforce - had a high chance of being automated by 2036. 

Experts warned that self-checkouts and shelves stacked by robots would become a common sight in UK shops, with the pace of automation "likely to accelerate". 

Factory workers also face being replaced en-masse, the report said. A total of 1.5m jobs in the transport sector - or 74pc of the current workforce - are at high risk of automation in the next 20 years.

Sex With Robots

Can a robot consent to having sex? 

Will an operating system replace your girlfriend?


Will we able to sync to our partners' vibrators just by using our brain waves? 


In HuffPost's first ever Love+Sex Podcast, hosts Carina Kolodny, Senior Editor For Special Projects, and Noah Michelson, Executive Editor, take up the challenge and explore how new and emerging technologies could radically revolutionize all forms of intimacy -- and in many cases, how technology is already well on its way to doing just that.

In a world that offers no shortage of real, pressing problems, we spend an awful lot of time worrying about robots and what threat they might pose to our society. 

Although A.I. researchers assure us that technology is a long way away from this being remotely legitimate, we also worry quite a bit about robots taking humans’ place in everyday society, from the workforce to our bedrooms.

As it turns out, we probably don’t have to worry about the former issue, but the latter might actually be a source of some concern. In a recent Pew report on robots, “A.I., Robotics, and the Future of Jobs,” it’s suggested that while it might be some time before we see a robot takeover of our workforce, we’ll be bumping uglies with them on the reg sooner than we think.

In the report, which polled nearly 1,900 experts on the future of robotics and labor, Stowe Boyd, the lead researcher for Gigaom Research, writes that by 2025, “Robotic sex partners will be commonplace, although the source of scorn and division.”

He also predicts that sex robots will likely be viewed by detractors the same way that we currently “bemoan selfies as an indicator of all that’s wrong with the world.”

As for whether robots will displace human labor in other sectors, the consensus seems pretty split on that one: While 48 percent of the experts polled agreed that robots would replace many blue and white-collar workers by 2025, 52 percent said they didn’t expect technology would become advanced enough for such a scenario to unfold by that time.

Boyd is not the first person to speculate that sex with robots may one day be preferable to having intercourse with flesh-and-blood partners, nor is it that far off from becoming a reality: Back in 2010, the world’s first sex robot Roxxxy premiered at the AVN Expo, and this year, the Japanese sex toy company Tenga created a robotic device that stimulates users while they have sex with a virtual avatar.

Cooking Robots

A restaurant in China is electrifying customers by using more than a dozen robots to cook and deliver food.

Mechanical staff greet customers, deliver dishes to tables and even stir-fry meat and vegetables at the eatery in Kunshan, which opened last week.

"My daughter asked me to invent a robot because she doesn't like doing housework," the restaurant's founder Song Yugang told AFP.

Two robots are stationed by the door to cheerfully greet customers, while four short but humanoid machines carry trays of food to the tables.

In the kitchen, two large blue robots with glowing red eyes specialize in frying, while another is dedicated to making dumplings.

Song told the local Modern Times newspaper that each robot costs around 40,000 yuan ($6,500) -- roughly equal to the annual salary of a human employee.

"The robots can understand 40 everyday sentences. They can't get sick or ask for vacation. After charging up for two hours they can work for five hours," he added.

The restaurant, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, follows in the tracks of another robotic eatery which opened in the northeastern city of Harbin in 2012.

Rising labour costs in China have encouraged manufacturers to turn to automation, and the country last year surpassed Japan to become the world's biggest consumer of industrial robots.

The cooking robots -- which have a fixed repertoire -- exhibit limited artificial intelligence, and are loaded with ingredients by human staff, who also help to make some dishes.

But customers at the restaurant who tucked into fried tomatoes with egg, soup, and rice were thrilled with the experience.

"My children are really excited by the robots," said Yang Limei, a mother of three.

The round-headed waiter robots can only move along fixed paths, and politely ask customers to move out of their way whenever their routes are blocked.

"I've never seen a robot serving food before," said Yuan Yuan, nine. "I'm really surprised."

I, Robot, Aware

Cleaning the Sydney Harbor Bridge used to be a dangerous, dirty and laborious job. As soon as a team of workers, operating a sandblaster, reached one end of the iconic structure they had to start again to keep 485,000 square meters of steel pristine.

Now two robots called Rosie and Sandy, built by SABRE Autonomous Solutions, blast away paint and corrosion all day long without a break. They determine which area needs most attention via a laser scan and move about on rails.

 “A sand blaster can slice through flesh. Automating jobs like that is a good thing, it helps improve the quality of human work,” says Roko Tschakarow, head of the Mobile Gripper Systems Division at Schunk, which supplies the lightweight robot arm for the Sydney robots.

Rosie and Sandy are at the forefront of a wave of new autonomous robots that have broken out of the factory and could be coming to your workplace soon.

At the Automatica robot and automation fair in Munich this week the organizsers devoted a whole section to so-called “service robots” for the first time.

Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for manufacturing, engineering and automation demonstrated a Care-O-Bot that sweeps office floors and empties waste paper bins. Pal Robotics showed Stockbot, which walks the aisles in a shop or warehouse to check inventory at night.

 “Ten years ago it took five minutes for a robot just to recognize the object in front of it was a table,” says Alin Albu-Schaeffer, director of the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). “Many aspects of robotics are now reaching a critical mass . . . service robotics is coming.”

Approximately 95,000 new professional service robots, worth some $17.1bn, are set to be installed for professional use between 2013 and 2015, according to the International Federation of Robotics. That excludes an estimated 22m domestic service robots – the autonomous vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers that are already becoming a familiar sight to consumers.

 “As people start to benefit personally from service robots in their home and garden and as popular consumer-orientated companies like Google and Amazon create and use robot technology, public attention and acceptance is further increasing,” says Bernd Liepert, chief technology officer at German robot company Kuka.

 “Ultraprecise surgical robots are making new forms of minimally invasive surgery possible that can reduce postsurgical complications, enable faster recovery and possibly reduce surgical death rates,” McKinsey, the consultancy, noted in a recent report.