Interesting Links for 06-12-2020

[andrewducker]

How 700 Epidemiologists Are Living Now, and What They Think Is Next

(tags:thefuture pandemic )

Once the transition period finishes the UK will be an outsider as far as GDPR is concerned. That's going to be difficult.

(tags:UK Europe dataprotection )

"Black" is not a dirty word

(tags:race language )

Vaccines arrive in Scotland - first injections to be given on Tuesday

(tags:pandemic vaccination Scotland GoodNews )

The man who crossed Groundhog Day with serial killers is doing the same with Freaky Friday

(tags:movies murder review )

Rewatching Lord of The Rings in 2020

(tags:lotr )

When you Kickstart a game and it gets lost at sea

(tags:games kickstarter Ocean shipping )

Companies are now writing end of year reports tailored for AI readers

(tags:AI business )

Books that give you insight into various professions

(tags:books jobs )

Minimalist! Nativity! Sets!

(tags:religion Christmas christianity art )

The robot kitchen that will make you dinner - and wash up too (this is just screaming "snake oil" to me)

https://youtu.be/E2evC2xTNWg
(tags:robots cooking )

Here's how Brexit will affect each ingredient of the full English breakfast

(tags:UK Europe breakfast food prices )

What will happen to closed High Street shops?

(tags:shops UK cities )

Comments

[mtbc]

While I don't object to clone towns as much as Bill Grimsey (I returned to the US after all), I congratulate you on finding a BBC story that asks an interesting question in its title and has anything approaching an actual answer beyond the click.

[danieldwilliam]

Assuming that the robot kitchen is not snake oil then, at £250k a unit I think the application is takeaway kitchens not domestic kitchens.

[andrewducker]

I do wonder about that. Whether automated kitchens with no chef would be significantly cheaper.

Most takeaways would take a very long time to pay off that investment I'd have thought.

[danieldwilliam]

What does a takeaway chef cost a year? £30k? This would replace two of them. Pay back in 5+ years depending on maintenance and support costs. Marginal I think. Depends if a) the auto-chef is faster than a human chef and b) if kitchen capacity is a limiting factor on sales.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. Replace the entire kitchen staff of a McDonald's and you might have something there.

[danieldwilliam]

Key thing to remember I think is that an auto-chef could work 24 hours a day most days.

So, you could replace the whole staff of a small restaurant if you got your process scheduling right.

[andrewducker]

Yup! I think you'd still need someone to help some people with orders, explain things, and make sure nobody vandalised the place. But you could certainly reduce your staff by a large percentage.

[danieldwilliam]

If one were taking this model to extremes then the person helping with orders etc could in the first instance be an AI chatbot and in the second instance remote.

The anti-vandalism could be dealt with in two ways - CCTV linked to a vigorous alarm receiving centre or just doing takeaway and having a shopfront which is basically a set of ATM for food.

But, if you have a place for people to sit and eat you still need a cleaner and I think that's harder to automate then cooking.

[andrewducker]

Separate booths with a shower and blow dryer?

[danieldwilliam]

Lol, and also not-lol.

That's an expensive way to get rid of a cleaner.

This is kind of the nub of the coming AI jobs apocalypse. Some jobs seem quite difficult for a robot / AI to do but very easy for a human - to the point where the human is not paid enough to make developing the AI / robot. Cleaning strikes me as one of the best examples of this. It's full of out of context problems that a human can solve easily. And the capital costs of a non-AI alternative are not cheap.