Pizza Hut is taking us into the future, apparently. The fast food chain just announced that its teaming up with Toyota to make self-driving pizza cars a reality, with plans to test the vehicle as early as 2020.
The US president of Pizza Hut, Artie Starrs, released a gibberish statement about how they’re focused on “technology-based solutions” and want to enable their drivers to “deliver even better customer experiences”, which is a fancy way of saying that automation is coming for the service industry and lower income workers are screwed.
But the announcement comes uncannily soon after Netflix dropped the fourth season of Black Mirror, which featured an episode where this very technology unknowingly paved the way for death and mayhem. (Of course it does. This is Black Mirror. What, like you think technology will be good????)
How it goes is this (and spoiler warning for the Crocodile episode, though as it’s arguably the weakest of the offerings this season, you’re not really missing much if you haven’t seen the episode but want to know what happens): a simple insurance claim for a man hit by a driverless pizza delivery van inadvertently uncovers a murder, and leads to three more.
Insurance investigator Shazia (Kiran Sonia Sawar) uses a tech innovation that extracts memories to track down the details after a pedestrian is hit by the aforementioned pizza truck.
A woman in a nearby hotel room, Mia (Andrea Riseborough) turns out to be a star witness, except that she literally just murdered her old boyfriend to keep a dark secret hidden. Shazia accidentally uncovers the murder, and sets off a chain of events whereby Mia goes on to kill Shazia, her partner, and their baby to keep her original crime hidden. Drama!
Which brings us back to the main point: if it wasn’t for the driverless pizza delivery truck hitting the first dude, (almost) none of this would have happened. Get rid of the pizza delivery truck, get rid of the murder!*
*None of this is correct. If you’re a lawyer looking to sue, please reconsider, I’m a huge idiot with no money.
Anyway, the similarities were not lost on anyone.
https://twitter.com/kingsleyyy/status/950456581564411904
this is so black mirror
— hamises (@SPIDERMAN2O99) January 8, 2018
https://twitter.com/MADBLACKTHOT/status/950445418948722693
I think tf not pic.twitter.com/f1ntJqBMLK
— Murna (@taniO__O) January 8, 2018
Did you just finish watching season 4 of #BlackMirror? I liked the “Crocodile” episode too, but not nearly as much as you did!
— Chuck Lai (@chuck415) January 8, 2018
See you in 2020, when Pizza Hut says it’s looking to start testing its self-driving pizza cars. And while it says this could create more jobs…
It actually could create more jobs by opening the pool of “drivers” to those who do not own vehicles. They might act more as servers, focusing on hospitality.
— Pizza Hut (@pizzahut) January 9, 2018
…who is it even kidding. The path to hell is paved with tasty convenience.
