Flippy The Burger-Flipping Robot Just Destroyed the Case for Minimum-Wage Hikes
6th March 2018
On Monday, CaliBurger started its newest “employee,” a learning robot that can cook 150 hamburgers an hour. Flippy doesn’t just flip hamburgers, he exposes why raising the minimum-wage hurts workers.
Flippy, built my Miso Robotics, uses thermal imaging to tell it precisely when to flip each patty, allowing for more or less perfect consistency. And it supposedly will get smarter the more burgers it flips, and various attachments will eventually let it handle other aspects of the burger-making process.
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In some respects, automation like Flippy is an inevitability, as computers and robotics get increasingly sophisticated. Replacing workers with robots has been going on for decades.
But raising the minimum wage will accelerate this trend by making even costly robots a better deal than increasingly expensive, minimally skilled workers.
Yup. Minimum-wage raisers are terminally ignorant of elementary economics, and their constituents are the ones who will suffer for it.