Still Locked in Jetsons-think

I've always been a techno-optimist, even if I'm not an early adopter.  Just ask Razor how long it took him to talk me into an iPod.  To my credit, though, it was an easy leap from there to streaming audio, which I have learned to love.  I still miss the sound of vinyl, but who the hell has room for all that crap in their living room?

Anyway, this article about robot burger-flippers set me thinking about places where technology can and cannot create change -- at least without other changes coming first.  Go take a look at the picture of the "robot" in the article.  I'll wait.

It's a big robotic arm mounted in front of an old-fashioned flat-top grill.  And this is my beef, so to speak.  Why would the "big thinkers" interested in robotic burger-flipping want to mess around with retrofitting?  This is exactly the thing that holds back real innovation.  Think of the time and effort that went into creating all the technology needed to simulate a 16-year-old with a spatula.  I think of this as first-order robotics, or Jetsons-think: creating a robotic replacement for labor.  A robot that holds a spatula is like Rosie, the Jetsons' robotic maid, who holds a standard vacuum cleaner,

What is needed is more second-order thinking.  Instead of designing a robot to fit into a human work environment, shouldn't we be building the work environments around the robots?  I mean, unless you think we're suddenly going to decide we've had enough innovation -- the robots flip burgers and do nothing else, forever.  Humans will always do everything else.

That's not the way it works, though, is it?  If you were McDonalds, say, with big bucks to throw at this, wouldn't you be blue-sky thinking right now?  Wouldn't you be at the drawing board, redesigning the kitchen to be more friendly to automation?  Instead of a big f*cking robot arm in front of the grill, wouldn't you make a grill that requires no arm at all?

Imagine building a washing machine (which is, after all, essentially a robot), but building it in a way that mimicked the actual movements of a human doing the job -- pulling wet clothes from a tub and putting them through a wringer, for example.  Idiotic, right?  That's what this kind of thinking creates, and it means that technology created this way will never be more than an expensive novelty, a dead end off the road of deep thinking and difficult problem solving, the real work of innovation.

Rethink the task, rethink the environment in which the task is done, and design for that.