Perhaps you are aware of the popular fast-casual salad shop called Sweetgreen. They’re a semi-iconic brand here in Boston, and I’ve eaten a metric shit ton of their salads. They’re delicious!
Yesterday, I walked into a Sweetgreen here in my town in the Boston suburbs—a location I’d never been in and quite honestly didn’t know was there—and I was shocked by what I saw. Instead of a counter with several friendly employees behind it making salads to order, I saw iPad ordering tablets and two guys silently packing bowls. Silently.
Moreover, it seemed like all they were doing was putting dressing on these salads. Where were they coming from? Who was making them? Why weren’t they talking?
Friends, the reverse centaur has come for our salads.
First, let’s get square on the terminology. I’ll directly quote Cory Doctorow here because he’s my favorite prolific, activist sci-fi writer to cite:
In automation theory, a “centaur” is someone who is assisted by some automation system (they are a fragile human head being assisted by a tireless machine). Therefore, a reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a peripheral for a machine, a human body surmounted and directed by a brute and uncaring head that not only uses them, but uses them up.
Read Doctorow’s full piece, Checking in on the state of Amazon’s chickenized reverse-centaurs.
I dutifully approached the bank of iPads and placed an order. Admittedly, this is convenient, and certainly it is accurate. I have selected exactly what I want and there can be no debate about it. Still, there’s something so weirdly antiseptic about standing five feet from a person making the stuff you’re buying while you tap away on a screen. Our technology erects invisible walls between us sometimes, and once you notice them you can’t un-notice them.
As I stood waiting for my order and observing, as I do, I realized what was happening here. This made the news years ago, so my apologies if you already knew about this (and in which case, you may stop reading now unless you’re here for the scathing editorialization). One of the guys grabbed an empty bowl, took it to a counter where a smaller iPad was hovering at eye level.
He glanced at it and placed the bowl onto a little holder and pressed a button. The bowl was whisked away on a conveyor belt. It made a journey under a whole bank of stainless steel refrigerators, each containing four clear glass tubes, each tube filled with a familiar salad ingredient.
I watched as the ingredients in some of the tubes descended slightly, mechanically, precisely, as their contents were dispensed into bowls below. It’s a fucking salad machine! I was honestly amazed. This is brilliant, I thought.
Sweetgreen calls it their “Infinite Kitchen.” Great name.
As I stood there, agape, contemplating this salad robot in front of me, many thoughts coalesced in my feeble human brain. I will attempt to enumerate those for you now.
First of all, wow, it’s a salad robot. I can’t overstate how impressive this thing is. Here, go watch the video embedded in this article in “QSR” and then come back. It rotates the bowls, for god’s sake.
I love that they decided to make it part of the store experience; there’s no other reason to put glass doors on the things, and have glass cylinders inside. It’s so that we (the customers) can watch it work. It’s impressive, it’s futuristic.
At the same time, it felt icky.
This Infinite Kitchen gadget sits on a spectrum that runs from full-centaur to full-reverse-centaur and I’m grappling with what that even means. On the full-centaur side is a robot vacuum. You just turn it on and it essentially performs a menial job for you with little oversight. It is entirely under your command and control and all of the benefits of the automation accrue to you.
On the full-reverse-centaur side is the Amazon delivery driver, as Doctorow describes in his many posts. An app tells them where to drive, what packages to drop, and punishes them if it is detected that they are singing (this is a true story). The human is simply doing the things that the machine cannot, and is also under the machine’s control in very real ways.
These folks packing the salads are “in between” because they’re reverse-centaurs in the ways that they’re doing what the machine cannot (putting a bowl on the conveyor belt, mixing in the dressing), but they’re also not behaviorally controlled by the ordering software, or (I presume) punished for singing.
It still makes me feel kind of weird, though. I think what feels weird about it is how these humans are doing things that, for now, only humans can do, but they’re doing it in this silent, non-interactive way that wage slaves in factories do. They’re utilized only for the bare minimum of what they can provide as humans, and otherwise treated as though they are machines.
These people are employees, though, so at least they have some labor protection, unlike the industries that have been “chickenized;” a term applied to poultry farmers who have no practical control at all over their own operations. I would venture to guess that these stores still have managers and that employees have the same limited autonomy as in any fast casual restaurant.
The Infinite Kitchen has yet to subsume all human management, which sounds like it would be an episode of Black Mirror or even Doctor Who.
Still, watching someone stand above the Infinite Kitchen, feeding it, while these other two guys silently retrieve its delicious excrement and pack it for me and the others waiting… It felt like a bright, fluorescent dystopia.
Is this innovation? Is this the future? Or is this a nightmare? You tell me.