AI is such a big business right now that it has made Nvidia, the company you once knew for making your GeForce graphics cards, a the biggest business in the world. And yet the technology has so far been nearly useless in all but the most specific circumstances. McDonald’s, for example, has just announced The company is abandoning its disastrous artificial intelligence experiment after it turns out people didn’t want bacon on their ice cream.
The technology, which will be rolled out to around 100 McDonald’s stores in 2022, was supposed to be the future of drive-thrus, where a magical robot takes and processes orders instead of a low-tech human made of meat bags. It has, of course, proven to be far worse, with orders getting completely messed up. Well, according to a report from Restaurant businessThe fast food giant is ending the experiment. For now.
The AI was developed by IBM for Ronald and his pals, but that partnership is now coming to an end and the AI drive-thrus will be removed over the next month. For an example of how successful they’ve been, check out TikTok:
And my favorite, this guy is trying to convince the McBot not to add bacon to his ice cream.
OK, it’s too simplistic to call “AI” a specific thing, rather than a diverse set of technologies that are all based on some form of machine learning. There are the horrific generative AIs that we hear most about, the industrial-scale plagiarism machines like ChatGPT and Midjourney, but there are also the models that are being used to massively accelerate drug discovery and Cancer treatments.
But it’s safe to say that the vast majority of cases where we hear of a company “using AI” loosely translate to “seeing how many jobs we can destroy for profit.” And of course, that’s McDonald’s most likely intention, since they already had a largely functioning drive-thru system with humans taking orders.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the end of McD’s experiments with AI, as the company insists it will continue to explore the technology. And you know, all the other chains are trying it out too. Anything to stop paying these people their minimum wage.
But I’ll tell you something: As a Brit, I’m on the side of AI on this point:
