Autonomous taxis today, restaurants tomorrow: the future of robotic service is here

Herrara, who considers himself a tech geek, was very impressed.

“I think the ride is great and I don’t feel unsafe or anything,” he said, adding that he absolutely trusts the robot drivers more than humans. “They are more cautious.”

By “they,” he means the lidar-equipped unmanned vehicles that Waymo has been pushing through local and federal regulatory hoops for years. It is now testing its self-driving vehicles in Austin, while opening a waiting list for access in Los Angeles. Service was made available to parts of Phoenix in 2020.

After a years-long waiting list, Waymo has finally opened to the public in San Francisco, adding to the city’s mix of options that range from an extensive public transit network to traditional taxis and ride-hailing services run by Uber and Lyft.

Herrera said that for him, choosing Waymo over other options was obvious. It’s cleaner, private and, based on his experience, safe, he said. He recalled a time when his Uber driver got into an accident after getting too close to the car in front of them.

“I’m always worried,” he said of human rideshare drivers at home — or in Toronto, where he often visits on business trips and the roads can get icy. “I’m always concerned about how their record drives in these conditions.”

Waymo’s robotaxi presents one of the most visible cases of 21st-century automation posing directly as a service worker rather than hiding in the assembly line of a factory. Today, they offer you a ride to work; tomorrow, it might be preparing and serving lunch. Some experts predict that humanoid robots are next in the next decade, whether customers like them or not.

As Waymo’s tagline says, “The future is now.”

The rise of the robots

Until the recent advent of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, robots that directly performed services for humans were largely the stuff of science fiction—much like the Jetsons’ Rosie the Robot.

The first major instance was in the operation of the elevator. Before about the 1950s, human elevator operators had control over the speed and direction of the elevator cars. But in 1945, a strike by operators in New York City set the stage for the wider adoption of automation.

Carl Benedikt Frey, an economist at the University of Oxford, sees similarities between this and the current surge in AV taxi travel. Elevator users initially had similar safety concerns that we hear about today with self-driving cars.

“People were very concerned that they didn’t have a human being directly responsible for their safety,” Frey said.

But over time, people became more comfortable as studies showed that automated rides were actually safer and made fewer mistakes than those driven by humans.

While elevator operators and AVs aren’t an apples-to-apples comparison, the example serves as a reminder that Americans have a history of being comfortable with new technologies — even if they replace workers.

The next industry to see this kind of transition could be restaurants. Sweetgreen and White Castle have used robots to peel avocados and fry potatoes, and Chipotle has tested robots that cut avocados and make tortilla chips. Brian Niccol, the CEO of Chipotle, where some customers have complained about the burrito bowls, said the robots could help provide customers with larger portions.

In February, Chipotle founder and former CEO Steve Ells opened a restaurant in Manhattan called Kernel with just three employees. Ells told The Wall Street Journal that the robot arm flipping burgers initially confused customers. In July, it closed the location for 10 days to make renovations designed to make the restaurant more welcoming and signal that it serves food.

While it remains unclear whether customers like being served by robots, in the coming years, high labor costs and slowing restaurant sales could push more companies to explore automation in hopes of boosting profitability, Stephen Zagor, a professor at Columbia Business School and the food industry. expert, said BI.

For now, where robots have been introduced, human workers stick with them. In the short term, Zagor said it’s likely that only larger restaurant chains and well-funded startups will have the resources to experiment too much with automation.

“Robots aren’t perfect, they’re hard to clean, sometimes they break, they’re not easy to customize, and they’re expensive,” Zagor said.

In 2022, Chili’s put the robot server program on hold so it could focus more on other investments that would have a greater short-term impact on profitability. Non-robot AI technologies aren’t always a cakewalk either. In June, McDonald’s announced it would remove AI ordering technology from more than 100 drive-thrus after flaws in the technology went viral.

Despite such setbacks, Zagor said the potential for automation to replace food industry workers in the long term remains. He pointed to the threat of automation as among the reasons more workers in the industry have pushed to unionize in recent years.

This means that Americans may one day be faced with the choice of a largely automated fast-food chain or a local restaurant run by humans.

“I think most of the time customers aren’t really going to be concerned about how the burger or taco gets to them,” Zagor said. “When all of a sudden the human touch is completely gone or minimal, I think that’s where the customer might start to see a little bit of a change in how they feel about the business.”

The future of AVs for riders, drivers and city dwellers

In the automotive industry, robots have become commonplace behind the scenes with the rise of automation on the assembly line. Robots have taken over some of the most dangerous and repetitive jobs in a factory, increasing productivity and speeding up the production rate in most factories.

But unlike the replacement of elevator operators with automation and Waymo’s entry into the streets of San Francisco, robots in car factories do not interact with customers.

It’s still very early days for this kind of human/robot interaction – and progress can be delicate. The auto industry has spent the last seven or so years grappling with the question of what works when it comes to AVs.

Several automakers have suspended or withdrawn their self-driving plans, and investors have fled after some serious accidents: A self-driving Uber struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona in 2018, and a self-driving car autonomous Cruise was involved in an accident in downtown San Francisco. year. In the past few years, Ford and Volkswagen have spun off their self-driving car companies, and Apple has officially given up on its self-driving electric car project.

“In 2017, everyone thought AVs would be everywhere by 2023… They’re almost nowhere now,” Nico Larco, director of the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon, told BI. “This thing – it’s hard. Things definitely change, but you have to figure out where it works and where it doesn’t.”

While ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft initially set out to be leaders in the development of driverless technology, these ride-hailing providers have moved into more of a partnership role. Uber lists Waymo as one of its self-driving partners and in July announced a partnership with China’s BYD to collaborate on self-driving.

In an email, an Uber spokesperson told Business Insider that self-driving vehicles will play a crucial role in the company’s business, becoming “the partner of choice for the industry.”

According to statements made by CEO David Risher on an earnings call in August, Lyft also envisions such partnerships. Some drivers and labor organizations have expressed concern about the potential for AVs to compete with and eventually replace drivers.

Nicole Moore, a part-time Lyft driver and president of the driver advocacy group Rideshare Drivers United, told Business Insider that without proper regulation, the rollout of AVs could “kill a lot of jobs.”

“Right now, on a day-to-day basis, AVs pose a threat to all workers in the transportation industry,” she said, including pickup drivers, bus drivers and delivery workers.

In addition to affecting drivers and drivers, more driverless cars could also lead to lower levels of car ownership, freeing up spaces currently used for parking to be repurposed for housing, Larco said.

Additionally, if people don’t have to pay attention to the road during their commute, they may be willing to travel longer distances to work, which could lead to more people moving out of cities. While this could allow more people to seek more affordable housing, he said the resulting urban sprawl could have a negative impact on the environment.

There is also a lot of room for taxi rides to change. At this point, a ride in one of Waymo’s driverless Jaguar I-Paces isn’t all that different from a regular taxi ride. Some in the AV industry would like to completely rethink the interior of a car now that a driver will not be at the center of its operation.

With your self-driving driver, you could soon be taking appointments—or taking a nap—during your commute.