Peanut The Waiter Robot Prove that your job is safe

Robots also don’t have the intelligence, manual dexterity, and skills of people who rely on any good cook, host, or waiter to please their diners. Can Peanut talk to an angry customer about frying eggs instead of mixing them? Can he deftly make a tuna tartare and an avocado tower, and can a nice sauce bloom on the edges? Can a robot hold on because someone has called their creation to the chef? low level dog food? By no means.

Using a simple robot like Peanut requires some kind of negotiation between the machine and human colleagues. Basically: Keep it on your way, robot. “They don’t fit in and fit in well with us,” says Julie Carpenter, a researcher in the Ethics and Rising Sciences Group at the State Polytechnic University of California. “We are negotiating how it works around these – they are not intelligent enough to work around us. They are not cooperative. They are not collaborative. They obey orders. “

Because of this awkwardness between people, you can make a strong case that there are some jobs we don’t want from the robot to take. Part of the job of nurses, for example, is to calm patients and work with other doctors while a robot lacks the skills for empathy and cooperation. A policeman navigates a very sensitive emotional landscape; robots cannot even conduct simple security patrols without getting into trouble. In April, the New York Police Department has canceled a program With Boston Dynamics Spot the robot dog, Following the concerns of the people about the militarization of the police. Also known as “Digidog,” it was intended for use in kidnapping and reconnaissance situations.

Also, the restaurants and bars that we humans enjoy are absolute nightmares for mobile machines like Peanut. Robotists call this type of space an “unstructured” environment, where a robot has to explore all kinds of chaos, like chairs, spills, and wandering children. It is on the side of a “structured” environment like the factory, where a fixed robotic arm does repetitive work. Robots are great at this, making lifts, riveting or welding over and over again without much surprise.

However, in an automotive assembly line — the best environment for robots to work — machines are man-made. Robots do grunt work and humans do fine manipulation, like detail work on the inside of a car. If robots could do everything in a factory, humans would turn off the lights, go home, and let the machines take out vehicles in the dark.

“It’s much harder to try to automate the process of getting nuts from the soup, to divide the work and find places where humans can play to strengths, and to get machines to go to strengths,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Digital Economics at Stanford University Laboratory. (For robots, it’s a literal strength, plus the ability to handle repetitive tasks with tremendous consistency. Humans are better at almost every other.) to be bigger “.

So in an economic moment like this, when businesses are suddenly increasing hiring, they can’t mechanize what can be very complex jobs. Peanuts are a rarity, and yet they can only move food and dirty containers from point A to point B.

In fact, the primitivism of robots gives reason to the value of human labor. Right now, companies are claiming this job — and it’s not enough, which should be good for employees. “It means workers can be more eligible, presumably for higher wages, but also for better working conditions,” says senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research Dean Baker, a nonprofit think tank. “So if the manager finds out that it’s real nonsense or something, they won’t feel that they have to take that, because they can get unemployment benefits for a while and then get the job they think is best.”