“Fast-casual chain Sweetgreen in May opened its first restaurant staffed by a proprietary robot that shoots kale, cheese and other ingredients down tubes into bowls traveling on a conveyor belt. A handful of employees add finishing touches, such as spiced cashews,” reports the Wall Street Journal:
The system can slash the number of workers and time it takes Sweetgreen to make a bowl by more than half, executives said. Eventually, the company intends for salad-making robots to staff all of its new restaurants, working alongside human employees.
Sweetgreen is preparing to center future restaurants around the system, which can take up 10% of the location’s floor space, with workers preparing ingredients for its tubes and others dispensing the meals it makes. …Restaurant chains for years have experimented with automation, though robotics haven’t taken off as they have in manufacturing and retail. Chopping lettuce and flipping burgers involves working with soft, squishy ingredients and a variety of tasks that are hard for a machine to duplicate.
Wall Street analysts are generally upbeat on Sweetgreen robots to help the company’s profits in the long term but want more details about how the chain will mass produce the salad-making machine and make sure it runs without hiccups.
“It will be very expensive and hard to scale,” said Robert Goldin, co-founder of the Pentallect food consulting firm, who thinks Sweetgreen’s food quality is superior to most of its rivals but isn’t convinced of its robotic experiments.
Sweetgreen’s robotics bet is bigger than others, and so is its need. The pandemic crippled the chain’s mainly urban operations, driving same-store sales down 26% in 2020. Sales have improved in the past year, despite price increases. But the company has yet to turn a profit since going public in 2021, and its stock trades for around a fifth of its public-market debut of $52 a share.
Robot waiters are spreading in restaurants in Korea.
The world’s first humanoid robot factory is opening.
Doctors recently used a surgical robot to carry out incredibly complicated spinal surgery. Doctors recently did the first robotic liver transplant in America. Robots can fit in small spaces in people’s bodies that a surgeon can’t reach without cutting through living tissue, or doing other collateral damage.
Scientists recently engineered bionic silkworms that spin fibers six times stronger than Kevlar.
Scientists also recently came up with an “inverse vaccine” that has shown it can treat auto-immune diseases in a lab setting, creating hope that doctors will be able to use it to reverse devastating diseases like multiple sclerosis. But the FDA commonly takes years to approve new vaccines, so thousands will die waiting for the vaccine to be approved, even if it is perfected.
In other news, artificial wombs could be coming soon, to prevent premature babies from dying or being permanently disabled due to premature life outside the womb. Doctors are already beginning to do womb transplants. A woman who was previously unable to have children recently received her sister’s womb in the first womb transplant in the United Kingdom.
A new ultrasound therapy could help treat cancer and Alzheimer’s disease and skull implants could fight depression.
Artificial intelligence is now developing highly-effective antibodies to fight disease. Doctors overseas are using artificial intelligence to detect cases of breast cancer more effectively.
Scientists recently developed a treatment for alcoholism that reduces drinking by 90% among lab monkeys.
90% of those with cystic fibrosis will get a new lease on life with a new breakthrough drug, assuming the FDA doesn’t block it.
