HyperActive Technologies: Tyler Durden’s Worst Nightmare

Hyperactive Bob is the name of the “predictive kitchen management solution” from HyperActive Technologies, based in Pittsburgh, PA. Talk about having a Big Brother around, HyperActive Bob is for quick service restaurants to sort of, well, spy on their employees through a collection of cameras that then report back on several factors. According to their website, here’s what Bob does:

• Predicts what you’ll need to cook and when you’ll need to cook it more quickly and accurately
• Provides customers with the hottest, freshest food possible, while minimizing both food costs and training costs
• Frees your managers to spend more time on their other work, and at the same time, let your cooks perform like seasoned professionals

If you’ve seen the movie, Fight Club, you will understand why Tyler Durden would view the cameras in restaurants as an invasion of privacy. You also probably hope that every restaurant has an equivalent apparatus for ensuring “food quality”. If you’re like me, you just hope that most people do the right thing most of the time, and don’t feel a need for infringing on employee freedom.

I discovered HyperActive Bob while reading last week’s tech section in the Economist. Read the whole article on ‘machines that can see’.