The Javabot Combines Engineering and Coffee

WormholeFiend writes "The Javabot is the coffee machine of the future — completely next generation. It is the fully-automated system that runs the Roasting Plant Coffee Company in New York and its design is illustrative of what can be achieved using new thinking and methodologies to something that was previously regarded as a black art. The system is part of the experience because the coffee system runs throughout the shop. It's the first walk-in coffee machine in effect, and customers sit there and watch as their coffee beans rush past in pneumatic tubes, as they move from storage bins to staging, roasting station, grinding and a brewing machine where they are dispensed with the repeatable accuracy of a purpose-built machine. Customers can choose from any blend of seven different beans and every aspect of the process is controlled."

Re:No roast on demand

[treeves]

Having tried roasting a small batch of coffee beans myself, and doing the attendant research prior to doing so that any engineer would do, I understand that coffee just roasted doesn't taste as good as coffee roasted yesterday. It needs time to outgas some volatile compounds, not dangerous, just bad tasting. I suppose you could draw a vacuum to speed up the process, but it might be excessively complicated and still take too long. I'm not sure.

Ah, a luddite. How cute

[Moraelin]

Eliminating all human labor is unwise and ultimately self-destructive. Delegating "black arts" to highly reproducible mechanical processes goes against esthetics and homogenizes into blandness the infinitely variable human process it replaces.

This is all just shallow thinking to maximize short-term profits. In that sense, it is just plain dumb, albeit in a spectacular bling-blingy sort of way.

Ah, a luddite. How cute.

I've got news for you. Your standard of living, or that you can afford to spew pretentious words on Slashdot instead of being out in the fields with an ox-drawn plough, is because things like that already happened.

E.g., look at the clothes you wear. There's been quite the movement against mechanical looms in the 19'th century. In fact, that was _the_ original luddite movement. Turns out that it wasn't self-destructive or short-term after all. Previously you'd have maybe one set of clothes, total, for a decade. And you'd stitch and patch them when they broke, because it would be too expensive to buy a new set.

E.g., the fact that they're clean. Previously washing the clothes was a very time-consuming manual process, and it wouldn't be done anywhere near daily. If you enjoy pulling a clean new t-shirt out of the drawer daily, or a pair of socks, or underwear, or whatever, then roll it around in your head that people used to just wear the same clothes through mud and dirt and whatnot for quite a while.

E.g., if you enjoy a nice office job with a computer, it's only because agriculture got heavily mechanized and a small number of farmers can feed the rest of society to do better stuff. We used to need 5 peasant families to support a knight. Maybe also add a burgher family, although those were a lot fewer than that actually. Almost three quarters of the population used to be out there ploughing dawn to dusk, just for subsistence, in the good old days of non-mechanized manual labour. By sheer probabilities, chances are that would be your lot in life, if we still were at that point.

E.g., for that matter, read that again: dawn to dusk. Literally, that was how the acre was defined: the surface that a peasant with one ox can plough in a day, from dusk to dawn. That would be your daily schedule, for 6 days a week. Not to keep some cushy office job by putting up with a PHB's demands for overtime. That would be the _normal_ schedule, and just for subsistence.

E.g., enjoy all that free TV and free content on the internet and whatnot? Well, that too is because society now makes enough of a surplus, that marketing can blow on subsidizing those in exchange for ads. Previously your only entertainment would be the pub, sitting and listening to the same stories around the fire, and maybe a village dance on sundays. Don't think even books, because those were quite the uber-expensive things before Gutenberg went and made it a "highly reproducible mechanical process".

Etc, etc, etc.

Turns out that none of that actually made us any poorer. We just end up producing more, and affording to divert more work into entertainment and services.

Ah, a llibertarian, How cute

[overtly_demure]

You can't see much further than your immediate surroundings. Forget the 19th century or the pre-industrial era. They're gone. Think of all the happy-cool things you mention in your post and who actually creates them, not the executives who run the companies but the workers who do the actual labor. They compete not against each other but against ever more powerful and low-cost automated systems.

I agree with the notion that much work needs to be automated, some things arguably must be automated. However, people must work. Carrying the practice of automation to its complete ultimate conclusion is foolish and self-destructive. We are not in a resource-abundant era like the one you describe, we are in a resource-scarce era. There are not enough resources on the planet for there to be a middle-class in China proportionately as large and as consumerist as in the US. Not enough metals, fuel, plastic feedstocks, lumber, wheat, etc. More automation will not magically reverse this, and would slow down the creation of acceptable jobs. It would probably be better to create human-operated machines that maximize human employment, not minimize it.

Your comparison with Luddites is certainly obvious, not to mention cliche, but is inapt due to the vastly different historical circumstances between then and now.

Re:Ah, a llibertarian, How cute

[Moraelin]

For a start, I'm nowhere near libertarian, and in fact I hate that ideology. But the world isn't that neatly divided. At any rate, what matters is whether my ideas are right or wrong, not what convenient label you can put on them.

There are not enough resources on the planet for there to be a middle-class in China proportionately as large and as consumerist as in the US.

So basically, someone else should be poor (and for no other fault or merit than being born in China) so you can be rich? It's such a self-centered egotistical attitude, it's not even funny. Most people at least pretend to have more empathy than that towards their fellow man.

Not enough metals, fuel, plastic feedstocks, lumber, wheat, etc.

Actually, there's certainly more than enough wheat around, and we the West have been working hard to get everyone else to destroy their agriculture to make them buy our subsidized crops. Wood can be produced as a _crop_, and mostly is. Metals, depending on which you mean, are everywhere and mostly limited by the energy to extract them. There's certainly no shortage of iron, at least. Etc.

E.g., the USA didn't get to depend on foreign ore and oil because it's poor in those, but because it simply was cheaper to buy them from third world countries than to pay someone to extract them at home. I fail to see how automation there could possibly make it worse.

Now I'm not saying that those resources are free, but there certainly is enough of them, so as not to justify that kind of "the Chinese should stay poor so we can stay rich" attitude.

Not to mention that even for that kind of blatant imperialism, maybe if China mechanizes, then it can dig up more ore for the West and sew shoes faster in those sweatshops. So even by that self-centered kind of view, what do you have to lose?

More automation will not magically reverse this, and would slow down the creation of acceptable jobs.

Acceptable by what criterion, pray tell? Ultimately the worth of any job is what you can buy with those money. Producing more stuff, including by mechanization, raises the worth of that job. "Creating jobs" by just making people cut the grass with scissors, just makes everyone poorer.

The standard of living of a country, or the "wealth of nations" as Adam Smith put it, is pretty much measured by how much you produce and how well that fits what the people want to buy. That's pretty much it. Of course, nowadays that means a lot more services too, but same idea. Just "creating jobs" for the sake of keeping people occupied doing things inefficiently, isn't really improving anyone's lot. It's just a way to push some resources off a cliff, for no benefit to anyone. Even if it were only human resources, it's nevertheless just shunting some work to /dev/null so to speak, instead of using it to improve the overall standard of living.

Having finite resources is already included in that. Yes, you have finite resources, including humans, which was always why you don't have an infinite production. But what matters is what you do with them. And even there we can do better.

Even if China would never get as many resources as the USA, mechanization can at least free more people to do more for society than working for subsistence. Maybe then they can afford more services for example. If less guys are needed to dig ore out and farm rice, maybe more guys can be used to, say, deliver pizza, or make movies, or be doctors and keep everyone healthier.