Pizza Hut Asia Bringing Robot Server, Cashier to Restaurant Floors

The notion of a robot working in fast food is one that makes a lot of people very nervous.

Leave aside the obvious loss of jobs, and the domino effect cataclysm mass job loss means for the economy as a whole, robots in public places leaves us with overtones of science fiction robot uprisings a little more plausible than ever.

Pizza Hut Restaurants Asia P/L will represent the first launch of a kind of combination server / cashier, a combined effort between MasterCard and SoftBank Robotics.

The robot itself is known as Pepper, and thanks to MasterCard, it now not only serves customers, but it can also take payments through the MasterPass digital wallet service.

Pizza Hut Asia will put it out on the floor by the end of this year, allowing it to take orders and offer personal engagement with customers.

Customers can start their experience with Pepper with something as simple as a greeting, or by tapping the Pepper icon in the MasterPass digital wallet. It’s even possible to just scan a quick response (QR) code on the Pepper’s tablet.

The good news, in the short term, is that this seems limited. It’s taking orders, and letting customers pay for them with a mobile payments system, generally MasterPass.

Though it’s a bit of a surprise that Pepper doesn’t come with a nice flat tray on its head for placing a pizza directly and carting it out to the diners.

That may be coming in a future version, but right now, most every food service person out there needs to be reconsidering life plans and updating the resume.

Once these get into wide use—from the kiosks at Wendy’s to the robots at Pizza Hut—there are going to be a lot of people without jobs. That, if not properly handled, could mean an economic Armageddon.

It’s inevitable, however, that this will happen. The robots represent cost savings and advancement for businesses, and that’s a hard proposition to pass up.

What will decide if this is an advancement for society or the beginning of the end is how we respond to it, and if we’re not careful, and not ready, we could have mass unemployment in a matter of years.