Former McDonald's USA CEO: $35K Robots Cheaper Than Hiring at $15 Per Hour

[vivster]

Ganoncrotch said:
11 pages of discussion on this and the robot replacement of humans... yet no one seems to have picked up the obvious PR hole in the EX CEOs statement.

-- it’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging French fries

That is the same saying that there is no value in a PS4 console... which is broken, or that one human can run up stairs 1000x the speed of another... who is in a wheelchair.
He is comparing a 35k robotic arm to a worker who isn't doing his job, by the same logic you could say that same worker does a much better job than said robotic arm... when it's plugged out.
But everyone seemed to jump on the.... Robots replacing all jobs wagon instead, I guess it's more fun to talk about sci-fi?

Sorry, but 100% of human workers are inefficient, no matter their occupation. Inefficient does not mean incompetent or lazy. It just means that humans are not robots and as such do things that reduce efficiency like washing hands, taking breaks, look at the floor for half a nano second. That doesn't even include the mistakes and delay tactic every human worker does. A human will never do a simple repetitive task as efficient and fast as a robot. That's why we invented robots.