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Comment by tantalor | Hacker News Reader

> no human hand... clearly a health benefit

That is a non sequitur. The most dangerous illness associated with fast food (poor nutrition aside) such as E. coli[1] and Hep A[2] are most readily attributed to ingredient suppliers, not improper food handling.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/ecoli/2015/o26-11-15/index.html

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm

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That doesn't mean that labour aren't a more frequent source of food-borne illnesses, just not the most serious cases. I'm not likely to die from someone sneezing in my food, but I don't want to catch what they have nonetheless.

I was assuming he meant something like the flu. Fast food workers have awful benefits and low pay thus working while sick.

True, but with a full automatic system to convert those ingredients to food, you could add a test step, where you filter out the contaminated ingredients.

I feel like waiting for the labs to come back on e coli and salmonella tests might inversely impact wait times.

And who handles the ingredients improperly? Doesn't refrigerate them sufficiently? Uses expired ingredients? Fallible humans. Lets remove them from the equation.

A robot chef is programmed by a human, so the human element has not been removed.

It has been reduced from O(n) to O(1), so much easier to check.

Doesn't chew enough? Doesn't wash their hands before eating? Eats too much?

There's more to the equation! Robots feeding robots built by robots and programmed by robots! A clean solution for a clean planet earth!

Robotic slaughterhouses would still have problem keeping fecal matter out of meat. The best way of preventing most food illnesses is radiating the food, but our irrational society won't go for that.

Irradiation does have issues of it's own, like making things taste funky [0]

[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03091...

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