Cafe X. Creator. Star Trek. Robots making Coffee. Robots making burgers. Robots replacing human jobs. Robots replacing human minds.

We are the automation of all jobs, the artificial intelligence that will assimilate even humanity, replicating everything humans do, replicating even human consciousness, your biological distinctiveness will be added to our own… resistance is futile.

Article by Micah Blumberg, Journalist, Neurohacker, Researcher

‪The message to coffee chains and restuarant franchises is this: Resistance is Futile. You will be assimilated by Robots. Cafe X and Creator are leading examples. Is it any coincidence that Sir Patrick Stewart (age 78), aka the Locutus of Borg, now returns to Star Trek in a new Star Trek series just as Automation threatens to replace all human jobs on this planet. It’s almost like science fiction as a new mythology exists to prepare humanity for a real future. A future once barely imagined possible.‬

I went to check out the latest efforts in robotic to automatic tasks that were previously performed by humans by ordering a cup of coffee from Cafe X and a burger from Creator.

Cafe X and Creator represent the latest trends to bring advanced robotics into the food service & retail sector. Perhaps soon self driving lunch trucks, or autonomous drones will be delivering your robot made robot coffee and or your robot made hamburger. Maybe automation can bring down the price of the impossible burger and help attack the problem of global warming by helping people to transition away from cattle consumption?

I tried the latest in robot automation in San Francisco first at Cafe X and then at Creator. First to try a robot that makes coffee, then to try a robot that makes a burger.

Cafe X link https://cafexapp.com/

Cafe X: Robotic Coffee Bars in San Francisco

I did a live broadcast of my experience at Cafe X from 1 Bush Plaza, (near Sansom St) San Francisco, California https://www.facebook.com/worksalt/videos/2349847648375202/

Hours after I tried Cafe X I am still thinking about that delicious coffee. It’s really good. I’m planning to go back. Cafe X is popping up all over San Francisco and threatening to force major coffee chains like Starbucks and Peets to either develop their own robots or be replaced by up and coming chains like Cafe X that can automate better.

The message to Starbucks & Peets Coffee IS SIMPLE: Resistance is Futile. You will be assimilated.

Creator is located at 680 Folsom St San Francisco: Today I also tried the Creator burger in San Francisco, I walked to Creator from Cafe X. Creator is the first robot hamburger chain that perfectly cooks a hamburger by robot, but unlike Cafe X you can’t just walk up and order a burger, you need to get an appointment from their website which is connected to eventbrite at the moment althought I would expect this to change soon as the company is probably working on developing their own inhouse online menu for making an appointment. http://creator.rest/

I did a live broadcast in 4 parts of my experience (and Bernice’s experience) at Creator in 4 parts ( I live streamed each part to Facebook)

Part 1 https://www.facebook.com/worksalt/videos/2349895068370460/

Part 2 https://www.facebook.com/worksalt/videos/2349907148369252/

Part 3 https://www.facebook.com/worksalt/videos/2349929735033660/

Part 4 https://www.facebook.com/worksalt/videos/2349944898365477/

Cafe X is a little bit older than Creator and it shows. Cafe X seems to be a little bit more polished both in terms of the web user interface and onsite touch screen with customization options, and in terms of their robots ability to function with minimal assistance and few errors when compared to the brand new Creator which stopped several times while it was making lunch and they promised that the ability to customize your lunch options would come later but was customization was not currently available.

Creator’s robot needed to be fixed a couple of times while we were watching it make burgers. Although it appeared that both machines were working fine for the majority of time we were there. It was really interesting that I had to buy a ticket to a burger on Eventbrite, but the eventbrite itself did not include any customizations for that burger, and it didn’t include side items, so when we arrived at Creator we had to wait in line to enter the building, and then we had to select all the additional items we wanted like fries, salad, and deserts. With Cafe X you select all the customizations you want in their electronic touch screen menu or on your phone. With Cafe X you get a pin number and a notification that your coffee is ready to be picked up with that pin number.

If you go to Cafe X you are going to probably find a couple people from the company standing by to help out just incase you have a question or two, and if you go to Creator you are going to see lots of people available to restock the buns, lettuce, tomatoes, all the ingredients of a hamburger, take orders, hand you food, and even clear away tables for new patrons. However the workflow seems to be very simple. While these stores represent the cutting edge of innovation in robotics in the service industry in particular they do not yet signal the end of human jobs in the service industry, there is for the moment still plenty of work for humans to do around these machines, mostly providing supervision and support. A quality assurance job, one that is a little closer to a security officers job, more watching, less doing.

It’s still expected for example that a human being is going to sit in the self driving car, or self driving truck, not to drive, but to oversee the driving, and to fix the machine if it breaks down. Mostly humans will watch more and do less.

I think however that even that job will one day be replaced by a robot with greater than human movement, and a human level grasp of concepts both sensory and abstract.

After there was a death involving a self driving Uber I asked the CEO of Nvidia if we were going to need a self aware network to final make the self driving car work, and his response was interesting, he indicated that Nvidia didn’t want to have a black box driving the car, they wanted to be able to understand how each component of the works. I think it’s implied that a self-aware network would be a blackbox.

I asked Jensen Huang the CEO of Nvidia if Automous Vehicles need to have self-aware networks.

But I think we can build a self-aware human level artificial general intelligence that isn’t a black box, I think it’s essential for saving this planet, and for bringing us into a world where money no longer has meaning, a work where robots can automate the replication of any kind of food or drink product.

A world where replicators from Star Trek are real, and no person needs to go hungry.

Let me tell you a story:

A long time ago life evolved neural networks, these neural networks gave organisms the ability to process signals, signal processing is something that a neural network can do in real time.

These signal processing neural networks that evolved in organic life was not only able to replicate representations of the world, but also to learn from those representations. An incoming signal to a grid of cells became a memory, and a memory became a prediction, a prediction for what might come next based on previous memories of representations of the world that came before.

This signal processed data, existing as point clouds of ions in brains, were able to react with the brain in a fractal (like a tree) of feedback loops of nerve activity in the brain, with data from the incoming sensors, sensors such as eyes and ears, traveling through nerves to the thalamus and then into the neocortex and back to the thalamus, in a massive feedback loop. From this learning feedback loop, the organism learns about everything in it’s ecosystem that it encounters and is able to perceive, eventually it learns itself, it become a self aware network.

NIST’s Grid on a chip distributes light signals showcasing a new design for neural networks: I think it’s a demonstration of the potential speed that real neural networks in brains can process signals such as light and sound to accomplish basic operations like semantic segmentation (or object segmentation & classification) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180728084146.htm

Study recommendations on predictive coding

1. Prediction Coding https://bit.ly/2L50owE
2. “Perception is in the Details: A Predictive Coding Account of the Psychedelic Phenomenon” https://www.noisebridge.net/images/e/ef/Perception_is_in_the_Details12.pdf
3. 3. A math theory for why people hallucinate https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-hallucinate-20180730/
4. 4. Jeff Hawkins Memory Prediction Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory-prediction_framework

Study recommendations learn about transfer learning:

1. Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition: Transfer Learning http://cs231n.github.io/transfer-learning/
2. 2. Neural Style Transfer: Creating Art with Deep Learning using tf.keras and eager execution https://medium.com/tensorflow/neural-style-transfer-creating-art-with-deep-learning-using-tf-keras-and-eager-execution-7d541ac31398
3. 3. A Gentle Introduction to Transfer Learning for Deep Learning https://machinelearningmastery.com/transfer-learning-for-deep-learning/

Can Neural Networks do signal processing, creating sparse representations of reality in real time? Yes they can. Here are some references.

1. Audio signal processing by neural networks Neurocomputing 2003 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Audio-signal-processing-by-neural-networks-Uncini/2a7974d9ad5784ffeb32c490541868de858192a7
2. Neural networks for signal processing applications: ECG classification. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9409015
3. 2017 Machine learning using neural networks in digital signal processing for RF transceivers https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8095513/
4. Audio signal processing by neural networks https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925231203003953
5. A Neural Network for Real-Time Signal Processing https://papers.nips.cc/paper/284-a-neural-network-for-real-time-signal-processing.pdf
6. Neural Networks for signal processing http://www.cnel.ufl.edu/courses/EEL6814/EEL6814.php
7. Neural Networks in Signal Processing https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-7908-1866-6_11
8. A scientists and engineers guide to signal processing: Chapter 26: Neural Networks http://www.dspguide.com/ch26.htm

“There certainly will be job disruption. Because what’s going to happen is ROBOTS WILL BE ABLE TO DO EVERYTHING BETTER THAN US….I mean all of us,” said Elon Musk.

If you like this story please be sure to catch the Neural Lace Podcast Season 2

and Humans are metal robots:

Humans are metal robots in a valid sense.