Algorithm system

Lin Yuan’s loud sloganThe concept of algorithm tax proposed by Lin Yuan has a significance that far exceeds his current entrepreneurial success in the food delivery sector.

This idea quickly sparked a major public debate, as a cloud of doubt had always lingered in people’s minds over the years: how exactly should technology develop, and is technological development necessarily beneficial?

In earlier years, ”technological progress” was hailed as an unshakeable truth.

Technological progress was seen as an increase in productivity, and thus technology was imbued with a sacred glow akin to religious fervor. Anyone who dared to question it seemed like an obstinate relic from a feudal society.

The most important argument for this view was that technology would increase productivity, allowing the same human input to produce more goods. The surplus labor could then be reallocated to other fields, leading to prosperity in those areas.

When industrial technology was still in its infancy, this logic was perfectly sound, as industrial capacity was insufficient at the time, requiring a large workforce to be invested in production.

However, production capacity cannot expand indefinitely, because the goods produced must eventually find buyers.

Thus, overcapacity arrived.

After industrial overcapacity, the surplus labor could only be redirected to the tertiary sector.

But the core of the tertiary sector is the service industry, and what is the core of the service industry? Of course, it’s serving people; it’s impossible to serve machines, right?

The appropriate proportion of the tertiary sector is an extremely complex issue that will not be discussed for now. Let’s first return to the topic of ”overcapacity.”

Overcapacity is driven by technological development, and after pushing a large number of people into the tertiary sector, it did not stop there.

Broadly speaking, overcapacity refers to industrial overcapacity in the secondary sector, but as technology develops, people will eventually realize a painful truth—overcapacity will spread to the tertiary sector.

If Lin Yuan does not control the ”AI Manager” algorithm he developed, it will foster a large number of medium to large-sized chain catering enterprises in the dining sector. These chain catering enterprises will largely replace small and medium-sized catering businesses due to their more efficient operation.

As a result, the catering industry, part of the tertiary sector, will lose a large number of jobs, because with increased operational efficiency, fewer service staff are needed.

Furthermore, with increasingly powerful AI technology and smart hardware, these medium to large-sized chain catering enterprises can also largely replace human labor with robots.

Small and medium-sized catering businesses cannot establish unified central pre-prepared food kitchens. Here, pre-prepared food does not refer to pre-prepared dishes in the traditional sense, but rather to pre-processing ingredients, such as: pre-washing vegetables and flash-freezing them via cold chain—in fact, many vegetables sold on the market today go through a cold chain. Another example is the pre-configured, standardized preparation of hot pot ingredients.

To give a simple example, a local specialty hot pot restaurant’s cost advantage definitely cannot compete with Haidilao’s unified production and distribution.

Small and medium-sized catering businesses cannot invest heavily in equipment to automate the catering production process as much as possible, but chain catering enterprises can, because they have volume. As long as there is volume, they are not afraid of large upfront capital investment in equipment, because costs can eventually be spread out through high volume.

Thus, we will see this scene in the future.

Every city will have one or several large central kitchens. Within them, vegetables and meats will be pre-processed on automated assembly lines according to the city’s estimated daily dining consumption calculated by AI.

The meat chunks needed for braised pork will be pre-cut and marinated, and their dimensions can even be precisely controlled to millimeter-level shapes by introducing optical recognition systems. Even the weight of the meat chunks can be provided with a controllable deviation range, for example: each piece of braised pork weighs 10g +- 1g.

The thinly sliced lamb and beef rolls used for hot pot can be freshly produced on the same day, meaning the process from live lamb/cattle to meat rolls can be completed within the same day.

As for vegetables, they can naturally also be picked from the ground and delivered to various restaurants on the same day, and with the help of advanced production lines, they can be used directly in the pot without needing to be washed after opening the bag.

If drone technology and the low-altitude economy develop further, the catering industry can become even more radical.

For example, most of the cooking can be centralized in a terminal cooking kitchen. The so-called terminal cooking kitchen is the place where the final dishes are prepared.

The kitchens that each restaurant originally needed to have can be greatly reduced in size and staff under unified cooking. This is because a unified terminal cooking kitchen can centrally receive orders and then use drones for delivery.

This is not a joke. In fact, the key reason each restaurant has its own kitchen is that if the kitchen were located elsewhere, the food’s temperature could not be guaranteed. However, drones can perfectly solve this problem.

Imagine a unified cooking kitchen set up next to a large shopping mall, responsible for cooking dishes for numerous restaurants within that mall. After the dishes are prepared, drones use dedicated low-altitude aerial channels to deliver the food in insulated boxes to each restaurant.

There’s no need to worry about dishes becoming homogenized. In the face of programming, homogenization doesn’t exist; it’s simply a matter of writing more code.

That’s right, as long as humans aren’t doing the cooking. Once a unified central cooking kitchen is established, it will eventually be a row of robotic arms stir-frying dishes.

Robots only need electricity and don’t need to be paid, so why would you hire people?

Moreover, robots can accept incredibly customized settings.

A human chef cannot accept a wide range of adjustable spiciness for the same dish; at most, he can accept: mild, medium, extra spicy, and so on.

The definition of spiciness between two strangers is very vague, but with robots, diners can be given a chili pepper beforehand to anchor the spiciness. Spiciness can be subdivided into 1 to 10 levels. After tasting, diners can indicate their preferred spiciness. And robots will absolutely not get the spiciness wrong, because programs only have bugs, not errors.

Just imagine how a human chef would compete with such a robot chef.

You say humans have a handcrafted touch? What a joke. In an age where even math competition problems can be solved by AI, your human chef’s so-called unique touch can be copied in minutes, as long as the robot is provided with the learning data.

None of this was Lin Yuan’s wild fantasy. Lin Yuan held a simple view—standardization inevitably leads to mass production, mass production will in turn promote standardization, and standardization and mass production will ultimately lead to automation.

Isn’t that how the Industrial Revolution unfolded? Once automation became widespread, the demand for human labor decreased.

Thus, people will eventually discover: the tertiary sector no longer needs so many people either.

So what happens then? Where do the surplus people go? They will lose even the right to be exploited.

Lack of value means lack of dignity. Humans are not mindless animals; they cannot just be fed and be content. Without economic status, one loses social status, and then human dignity, eventually choosing to just give up.

Therefore, Lin Yuan put forward a resounding slogan—the widespread adoption of new technologies in the tertiary sector must be approached with caution, because we humans do not have a fourth sector to absorb the unemployed.