First they came for the pizza makers.
Alex Garden, a former head of production of online game developer Zynga, is the co-founder of Zume. His company is automating pizza making.
“It’s going to be a long time before machines can do everything people can do, probably not in my lifetime,” he tells Bloomberg.
Pizza making though isn’t already untouched by automation. A visit to the local Pizza Hut or Domino’s shows how the process is already standardised and partly automated at many fast food chains.
Like coffee making, the machines are supplanting many skilled tasks and service industry jobs that were once thought to be beyond automation. The nature of work is changing and in turn invalidating many of the assumptions about employment held by policy makers.
Those with a 1980s view on how service sector industries will be the drivers of employment may have to reconsider their theories.
Zume and Gaden may have some way until they fully automate the pizza supply chain, but humans will increasingly be a smaller part of it.