Like most Americans, I dream of a world where I can find a delicious, freshly cooked meal, 24 hours a day, with no human interaction whatsoever. No awkward small talk. No resentful teenagers adding onions to your order when you specifically ask for no onions and then they’re just like, “Oh, sorry.” No human foibles, fumbles, or foul-ups. Just cold machine logic serving up hot food. It’s a beautiful dream, but until now it’s been limited to the realm of science fiction. Is it finally within our reach?
Domino’s is taking a new autonomous delivery partnership for a spin.
The pizza chain announced Monday it is teaming with robotics company Nuro for a pilot program in Houston later this year. Nuro has developed a custom unmanned vehicle, called the R2, for delivering goods including food and dry cleaning…
Customers who order online from Domino’s participating locations will have the opportunity to use Nuro’s autonomous delivery. Once they’ve opted in to the feature, they can track the delivery via the Domino’s app and will be given a unique code to open the delivery compartment and get their order.
Now that’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout! Once they get automated delivery dialed in, they can work on teaching robots how to make the pizza in the first place. There are already burger-making robots, so pizza can’t be far behind. Take those dirty human hands away from the whole process.
This is just more terrible news for the #FightFor15 people who want restaurants to pay employees more than their labor is worth, in the interest of “social justice.” If government makes it prohibitively expensive to hire humans to do this stuff, employers are just going to give those jobs to robots.
If something can be automated, it will be automated. You don’t see a lot of rickshaw drivers in first-world countries, do ya?
You might recall that Pizza Hut and Toyota are also working on an automated pizza delivery machine called the e-Palette. That’s a pretty fancy name for an automated pizza-dumptruck, but whatever. I don’t care what you call the robot. Just give me that yummy, piping-hot pizza with no disgusting human beings anywhere to be seen. Just give me the future.
“Come with me if you want to dine!”
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