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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Makr Shakr Launches “Automation Stipend” to Retrain Humans Impacted by Robots

One of the biggest questions looming over the future of an automated workforce is what happens to the human workers replaced by robots? Makr Shakr, the company behind the robot bartender Toni, has come up with one solution: help pay for training for the humans being replaced.

Makr Shakr, in partnership with State University of New York (SUNY), today announced the launch of its “Automation Stipend.” For every bartending robot sold, Makr Shakr “assigns a $1,000 monthly stipend to a selected person whose profession might be impacted by the automation” according to the press announcement. The stipend is meant to help provide training “with special attention to the relation between tech and the food and leisure industries.”

The Automation Stipend is starting this month in Buffalo, NY in collaboration with the SUNY Erie Community College and SUNY Erie Foundation. The first candidate Makr Shakr sponsored is Brian Townsell, a 50 year old hospitality worker, who is getting a scholarship in the Brewery Science and Service Program for a period of four months.

According to the Brookings Institute, food service will be one of the job sectors hit hardest by automation. One of the solutions Brookings has suggested is a “Universal Adjustment Benefit,” which would include career counseling, retraining, and “robust income support.”

Robots are already taking over human jobs across the food industry. Whether that’s Picnic’s conveyor-style robot that can assemble 300 pizzas in an hour, Bear Robotics’ waiter and busser robot, Dishcraft’s dishwashing robot, or Starship‘s robot delivery rovers.

One of the complications of all this is that robots aren’t uniformly bad. They can take over dangerous and repetitive tasks (like working a fryer), provide food around the clock (like Chowbotics’ Sally), and perhaps even reduce the price of some food by reducing the labor cost for a restaurant.

But that reduction in labor has its own cost, and it’s something that we as a society will need to deal with. There will need to be a lot of participation from governments and the private sector, and there won’t be one magic panacea. Makr Shakr’s Automation Stipend might be a marketing ploy, but it seems like a good place to start.

From Power to Perception, What Challenges Do Drone and Robot Delivery Need to Tackle?

The devil is in the details, as they say, and this became more apparent then ever after I moderated a panel on robot and drone delivery at GreenBiz’s Verge 19 conference in Oakland, CA this week. These devilish details, however, are important for everyone involved in the food space: retailers, delivery services, governments and even consumers to consider as autonomous robotic delivery moves from sci-fi to sidewalk.

On the panel were Jill North, Innovation and New Technology Program Manager for the City of San Jose; Natasha Blum Founder & Principal Director, Research & Strategy at Blumline; Matthew Lipka, Federal Public Policy Lead for Nuro; and Connor French, General Counsel at Zipline International.

The biggest takeaway from our lively discussion was just how complicated it is to deploy robots and drones, and how we are learning about these complications in real time. This was perfectly illustrated with news this week that the University of Pittsburgh is pausing its robot delivery with Starship because the robots may have been blocking people from wheelchairs from accessing the sidewalk. The real world has a way of bringing up complexities that may not have been foreseen while testing or were perhaps just ignored.

As a government employee, the real world is very much where North works. As an employee of the city of San Jose, she has to find a balance between pushing innovation ahead and not leaving people behind. Robots can’t be implemented just because they are cool, or because they get tech bros their burritos faster. She needs to answer questions like who has access to these new services? How will they interact with emergency services? How will they get electrical power? And because all this is so new, there aren’t a lot of answers right now.

Blum, however, is in the business of finding answers. Her Blumline research and design firm helped work on Postmates’ Serve robot by taking an ethnographic approach. Her team went into specific communities to learn what would be considered friendly or off-putting in a robot design. For example: should a robot sit higher and be more visible and sacrifice maneuverability or the other way around? One interesting outcome of Blum’s work could be that robots are customized for each community, featuring different colors or designs that make people more comfortable with the emerging automation in our lives.

Another technology that faces an uphill battle when it comes to getting people on board is drones. As French explained, drones are either associated with battlefield killing machines, tools of a surveillance state, or just the loud, buzzy nuisance that someone flies at the park. This puts the drone industry in a bit of a conundrum. It needs to expand into more benevolent purposes (e.g. medicine and food delivery to remote or hard to reach areas), but it can’t do so until more people are more comfortable with the idea of drones flying over their neighborhoods.

One company already in neighborhoods is Nuro, which has been using its pod-like, low-speed vehicles for grocery delivery in cities like Scottsdale, AZ, and Houston, TX. Lipka pointed out was that even if you work and engage with cities, communities and consumers, Mother Nature can still come along and throw you a curveball. A curveball like haboobs, which are intense dust storms that spring up in places like Arizona. These storms can do all kinds of damage to the sensors and cameras on a Nuro. Learning to interact with the idiosyncrasies associated with different environments is something robot and drone designers must pay attention to as well.

Finally, the big, yet-to-be-answered question from all of this innovation in the drone and robot delivery space is: Who pays for what? As North pointed out, more autonomous robot delivery means fewer people paying for parking, a major source of municipal income. Who pays for the upkeep of roads or new infrastructure like expanded sidewalks or special lanes on roads? The taxpayer? The private company?

This is all new territory, and again, it’s evolving in real-time right in front of us. But discussions like the one from this panel will help more people think about and develop strategies around solving the issues before they happen, rather than trying to fix them after the fact.