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Researchers at Cal Poly Are Studying The Social Impact of AI & Robotics on the World of Food

by Michael Wolf
July 3, 2023July 13, 2023Filed under:
  • News
  • Robotics, AI & Data
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Last fall, a group of researchers at Cal Poly was awarded a $700 thousand grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the social and ethical impacts of AI and cooking automation.

The study will last four years and explore the benefits and risks to individuals and the impact on family and communal relationships, creativity and culture, economics and society, health and well-being, and environment and safety.

The study is led by Patrick Lin, a philosophy professor and director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at Cal Poly.

“Robot or AI kitchens would automate a special place and communal activity in the home, so that immediately warrants critical attention,” Lin said in the announcement. “Outside of the home, restaurants are one of the most essential and oldest businesses, given the primacy of food. They are the bedrock for an economy, the soul of a community, and the ambassador for a culture. But the pandemic is causing a seismic shift in the restaurant industry, and robot kitchens could be a tipping point that forces many restaurants to evolve or die in the coming years.”

According to Lin, the primary work output will be a public “ethics impact report” that evaluates the societal impacts of robots and AI on this “last mile” of food automation. This will include examining everything from robots flipping burgers or making restaurant pizzas to using AI and robotics in the home to produce and create complete meals.

It’s an interesting project that came onto my radar because Lin personally invited me to participate in a workshop hosted at Cal Poly to discuss the impact of robotics and AI on the last mile. While I usually don’t participate in these types of research projects, I decided to take him up on it since this is an area that I’m pretty fixated on of late.

One potential area I am particularly interested in is how human workers will react to the addition of automation to their workplace. While I expect some workers will embrace the opportunity to use technology to make their work-life easier, others will bristle or outright resent some of their previous tasks being taken over by automation.

One operator who experienced this firsthand is Andrew Simmons. He recently saw former employees undertake a social media campaign to disparage his restaurant for using robotics in the kitchen, including reporting the restaurant to the local health department. What’s interesting about Simmons is, unlike many of the headline-grabbing robot installations at national chains like Sweetgreen, he’s a small one-restaurant operator who is reinventing his entire restaurant workflow through an automation-heavy tech stack. I imagine other smaller operators will attempt to follow the template he’s created (he says he could automate future restaurants for $70k), particularly if he shows he can be successful.

As restaurant robots become lower-cost and more accessible, there’s no doubt society at large will need to think through what the impact will be. I’m excited to participate in Lin’s workshop to help think some of these through, and I hope to share some of the insights from the workshop. I will be limited in what I can share – Lin explained that the workshop would follow the Chatham House Rule, which forbids the identification of other participants without their expressed consent – but I do plan to write about some of the key insights discussed at the workshop in the future, so stay tuned.

For those who didn’t get an invite to this workshop and want to discuss this exciting topic, I suggest coming to The Spoon’s Food AI Summit, which is taking place in the Bay area this October!


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