Future of drive-thru

McDonald's announced last week that it is buying the AI company Apprente to automate drive-thru ordering.  It will be interesting to see what they come up with and how they will revolutionize the drive-thru experience.

I have always been thinking of how the future would unfold in various areas including the drive-thru experience.

Imagine you are driving on the freeway around noon to meet one of your clients.  Your smart car wakes up and asks if you would like to order lunch.  The conversation goes this way:

Smart Car (SC) - Would you like to order some lunch?  It is close to your lunch hour. 
You - Sure.  Why not?  What is around here?
SC - There is a SubWay on your route.
You - Nah.  Not today.  Is there a McD?
SC - Yes, there is a McD on your route.
You - What are today's specials?
SC - There are no vegetarian specials today.  Would you like to order the usual?
You - OK.  Just add a chocolate milkshake to it.
SC - Chocolate milkshake.  Small?
You - Sure.
SC - Placing the order.  You will arrive at the McD in 8 mins and your order should be ready.  Anything else I can do for you?
You - Play the next podcast in my queue.
SC - Certainly.

What happened here?  The car is smart enough to figure out that you are on the road and it is your lunch time.  It also looks up all the restaurants nearby.  Especially the ones you frequent.  It finds a place that is on your route, not the nearest one.  It knows what you generally order at the various restaurants.  It knows you are a vegetarian.  It calculates the approximate time it takes to prepare the order (dependent on the order) and places the order at the location nearest to where you will be at that time.  Even though there was a McD a minute away, it still places the order at the McD that is 8 mins away.  It wants to reduce the wait time to almost nothing.  It automatically takes care of paying the restaurant with the credit card attached to your application.  It now knows that on certain days you prefer McD over SubWay.  It also learned that you like to have chocolate shake with your veggie burger.  The Smart Car keeps getting smarter everyday. 

How did the customer engagement and experience improve? 

You don't have to stand in line at the drive-thru.  You don't have to speak to anybody to place your order.  You don't have to wait for the order to be ready in order to pick it up.  You are saving time and reducing pollution.  The traditional drive-thru experience changes dramatically and the only thing needed is the pickup window. 

As far as technology is concerned, everything is available.  You just have to expose your geo-location to the app as well as the restaurants.  The app tracks where you are, maps your location and route and determines the restaurants en-route.  It places the order at the restaurant and notifies the arrival time.  It also allows the restaurant to track your geo-location so they can be ready to deliver your order in time.  Similar to how you track your Uber ride as it arrives to you.  The technology is readily available.  We just need to work with the restaurants that are ready to jump on the platform. 

Waiting to see how the drive-thru experience will transform. 

Driverless cars are here to stay!

I have always owned a manual transmission car, until recently.  I switched to an automatic recently and have not looked back.  Once a while I do get the itch to drive a manual transmission, and that is when I switch to the manual mode in my Steptronic transmission and hit the winding mountainous roads of Pacific North West.

The Steptronic is incredibly quick and smooth in shifting (thanks to the paddle shifters) as well as forgiving on inexperienced drivers.  Even with this clutchless manual transmission experience I cannot shift at the right RPMs as does the automatic transmission.  I know the main reason to shift to manual is to rev up the engine before shifts so you can feel the power and have complete control over it.  After some fun time, I get back into the Auto mode so I don't have to think anymore. 

That is when I realized how dependent we are on the automatic transmissions.  In the early days of the auto transmission, it was still clunky in shifting and you could feel the jerk and it did not always shift at the right RPM.  But, with technological advances the awkwardness is gone and nobody ever realizes that gears are shifting underneath (unless if you keep any eye on the tachometer).  Today's auto transmissions are so smooth, quick and efficient that it is better than a human shifting gears.  Some times during my travel to Europe I rent manual transmissions for the fun of it.  Even for an experienced driver, the modern cars instruct when to up or down shift if there is a slight delay in shifting. 

Similar to the early auto transmissions, the driverless car is going through its growth period.  Soon, the time will come when we realize that they are much more efficient than us and we will accept them as the better drivers.  I know the driverless cars are much more complex than a transmission, but the journey to maturity is still similar.  With technological advances and inexpensive compute power, the day will arrive sooner than later.

Amazon Go Store experience

Living in Seattle, I had to go and experience the Amazon Go store.  It is an awesome concept.  When everyone was thinking of self scanning shopping carts and RFID tags and such, Amazon went for the moonshot of completely getting rid of the checkout process and they have nailed it.

You enter through the turnstile by scanning your QR code in the Amazon Go app.  This code identifies you and the store lets you in.

Once inside, you can freely pick up anything and stuff it in your shopping bag.  Cameras in the ceiling (there are a ton of them.  Look at the picture below) are used to recognize you and your activity.

Every item had a large bar code that is read by the camera (I assume) when the item is picked up by the user.  The system is smart enough to recognize if you put something back.  I tried to take a few items and put some back, and take them out again, and it worked flawlessly.

Once you are done with your shopping, you just walk out of the store through the turnstile you entered through.  It is as simple as that.

On a subsequent visit I noticed another nuance that is purely Seattle.  I had enthusiastically bought a lot of stuff in my previous visit and wanted to return a few items.  I walked into the store and asked the employee at the front door.  BTW, this employee is positioned at the front door to help new comers use the app to get into the store, or allow visitors (without the app) into the store.  To my surprise, he said that the Amazon Go store does not accept returns.

What?  I was flabbergasted.

Then, he corrected himself and told me that I could "return" anything on the app and I get money back instantaneously, BUT, the store does not take back any items.  He told me that if I didn't want the items, I could give it away to a friend or someone.  The store is completely trust based.  This seemed weird since the items I was returning were fully sealed packages.  Still, I left the store with a good feeling, looking for a homeless person to give the packages to.  All in all, a great experience.

The store is small and carries a few categories of groceries, lots of packaged meals and drinks.  They have an onsite kitchen to make the packaged meals.  But, the same concept could be extended to all kinds of stores.

The future of grocery shopping has arrived!

Robot meets Trolley Problem in an Autonomous Car

Isaac Asimov's Laws of Robotics states that:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.  
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders conflict with the First law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second law.

What is an autonomous vehicle but a robot programmed to ferry passengers and cargo around.

The famous Trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics.  The general form of the problem is:
There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks.  Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move.  The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever.  If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks.  However, you notice that there is one person tied to this track and is unable to move.

What do you do?
Do nothing and kill five people or pull the lever and kill one person.
Which is the most ethical choice?

Ever since Artificial Intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles started getting closer to reality, this question of ethics is haunting the designers of autonomous vehicles and the algorithms governing them.  Imagine an autonomous car speeding along when it suddenly encounters a bunch of unexpected pedestrians on the road.  If it continues forward, it will kill the pedestrians.  If it swerves to avoid the pedestrians, it will fall off a bridge killing all its passengers.

Autonomous car meets trolley problem.
Robot meets a situation violating its laws.

How do we program a car to behave in a situation like this?
Eject all the passengers to safety and drive off the bridge.  Wish it was that easy.

There has been a lot of research into this area and MIT has even set up a web site to crowd source the opinion of the masses.  [side note: It will be interesting to go through the judging process as: a) a passenger, b) a pedestrian and c) as a third party onlooker.  I am sure that will skew your answers..]

One way to look at this problem is to equate the autonomous car to a chauffeured car.  In this case, the decisions are driven by the chauffeur.  As a human being, the driver's main motive is to stay alive and this skews the decision making.

The outcome of solving this problem may be that people will hesitate to buy or board a driverless car because of the fact that protecting its passengers may not be in the best interest of the vehicle.  What a dilemma!

Again, these are extreme end cases we are talking about.  Maybe, we should use a crowd sourced decision tree and apply it to all autonomous vehicles.  Today, the driver takes responsibility to the actions of the vehicle.  Tomorrow, we should not be blaming the manufacturer for the actions.  The actions should be governed by a set of rules appointed by a global body.

The reality is that millions of people are killed by vehicles manned by people.  This would dramatically reduce with autonomous vehicles and that fact will pivot people into accepting this new transport.  Similar to how horses made the decisions for us while we rode buggies, and when cars came around, no one wanted to trust a human being to make these decisions.  And, look where we are now.  One thing you have to give to the horses, though, is that they don't drink and pull carriages.

All along, designers of vehicles had been concentrating on protecting the passengers by installing seat belts, airbags and other safety equipment in vehicles.  Because of this new ethical dilemma, the designers of autonomous vehicles will have to start thinking of not only protecting the inhabitants of the vehicle, but also those in its vicinity in case an unfortunate event was to occur.  Designers are currently concentrating on the algorithm that powers these vehicles and assists in decision making.  That is all fine and good, but we need to start thinking outside the box to find the solution.

Thinking outside the box could lead into external airbags for vehicles which deploy when they detect an apparent (planned) collision with a living being.  It could also lead to apparel manufacturers designing safety wearables like jackets with airbags.  These could be for people who have high exposure to autonomous vehicle traffic, like construction workers.

But again, these are extreme edge cases we are talking about.