{"id":74312,"date":"2017-12-10T00:42:47","date_gmt":"2017-12-10T08:42:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/robots-will-transform-fast-food"},"modified":"2017-12-17T00:01:34","modified_gmt":"2017-12-17T08:01:34","slug":"robots-will-transform-fast-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/robots-will-transform-fast-food","title":{"rendered":"Robots Will Transform Fast Food"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/robots-will-transform-fast-food.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>That might not be a bad thing.<\/p>\n<p>V isitors to Henn-na, a restaurant outside Nagasaki, Japan, are greeted by a peculiar sight: their food being prepared by a row of humanoid robots that bear a passing resemblance to the Terminator. The \u201chead chef,\u201d incongruously named Andrew, specializes in <i>okonomiyaki<\/i>, a Japanese pancake. Using his two long arms, he stirs batter in a metal bowl, then pours it onto a hot grill. While he waits for the batter to cook, he talks cheerily in Japanese about how much he enjoys his job. His robot colleagues, meanwhile, fry donuts, layer soft-serve ice cream into cones, and mix drinks. One made me a gin and tonic.<\/p>\n<p>H.I.S., the company that runs the restaurant, as well as a nearby hotel where robots check guests into their rooms and help with their luggage, turned to automation partly out of necessity. Japan\u2019s population is shrinking, and its economy is booming; the unemployment rate is currently an unprecedented 2.8 percent. \u201cUsing robots makes a lot of sense in a country like Japan, where it\u2019s hard to find employees,\u201d CEO Hideo Sawada told me.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2018\/01\/iron-chefs\/546581\/\">https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2018\/01\/iron-chefs\/546581\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That might not be a bad thing. V isitors to Henn-na, a restaurant outside Nagasaki, Japan, are greeted by a peculiar sight: their food being prepared by a row of humanoid robots that bear a passing resemblance to the Terminator. The \u201chead chef,\u201d incongruously named Andrew, specializes in okonomiyaki, a Japanese pancake. Using his two [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":359,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,1506,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-food","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/359"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74348,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74312\/revisions\/74348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}