92% of fast food jobs to be performed by machines by 2034

Posted by Ariel Levin-Waldman Categories: Smart Home, Science

Would you like fries with that, puny human?

Don't laugh, it is a question you might be hearing more of in the near future as more and more industries mull over replacing their workstaff with robots. And it isn't in the far future either. It's already happening.

Every time I walk into a Walmart or a Wegmans I see automated registers. I use them too. Gear Live recently looked at how the modern consumer would prefer to use an app rather than  speaking with sales representatives. And a San Francisco company (Momentum Machines) invented an automated burger maker.

According to an Oxford University study, there is a 92 percent chance that fast food jobs will be done by machines within two decades.

When I head news like this, I start preparing my bug-out-bag because robots and apocalypse seem to fit together all to often. But it isn't as grim as it could be if you ask the folks over at CNN. According to them, mechanization of services will only knock a maximum of 10 percent off the workforce.

Wait, 10 percent? Isn't that about one and a half times the current unemployment number? As in the current recession?

Maybe we should have learned something from Terminator. I'll rest easy knowing I have a few decades until a drone with a sorting algorithm can perform field reporting.