I'm not thinking of anything like a subway. Having each person's food prepared individually is ridiculously inefficient. I'm envisioning a facility tied to an Amazon warehouse or something similar that might be preparing food for >10000 people every day, not a huge kitchen with hundreds of chefs running around to fill maybe a couple thousand or so individual orders per day. There's no reason the production of something like a sandwich, soup, or really anything else needs to be done by a human.

The problem is that to get the kind of economies of scale that an Amazon-style digital cafeteria could offer, you need to concentrate a lot of equipment in one place (and rent/build a huge place capable of processing large amounts of food coming and going). This is where distribution models fail, because the only place you can build places like this is in suburbs, where you can't efficiently deliver to the well-earning young people in the cities that form your target dmeo.

And I highly disagree with saying that "the market isn't waiting for it, people are waiting for it". People, or rather consumers, are the market. Yes, I agree that basically every would of course want a product that is faster, higher quality, and cheaper. But $5 for one meal really is quite a lot when compared to the cost of food, especially when bought in bulk, and automated delivery/preparation could indeed make this food both faster and higher quality (or rather, give near-professional quality at a much lower cost).

So I'm not trying to pick on you, but have you ever stopped to think about how absolutely dystopic this future you're positing is? And the parts of the community--set aside "consumers" for a second, the point of being human is not to consume, is not to be an economic actor in your model--who could most use price improvements of economies of scale will be frozen out, because they're always frozen out.

We don't need impersonal drones delivering your Food Packages so you don't need to see and interact with human beings and maybe generate some flavor of empathy somewhere inside of you. We need the exact opposite of that.

Personally I don't mind it. I'm not invested whatsoever in involving human contact in getting my food; I don't mind talking to people to get my food or having to interact with a waiter or cashier, but I wouldn't care if I could order on a kiosk or do checkout-by-RFID.

People probably decried the automation of textile manufacturing, that clothing was losing its personal touch. Now we don't seem to have a problem with it. I'm sure food will go a similar route.

Although I do agree that removing the human element in retail/food will be weird at first, I'm sure we'll get used to it. It's more efficient, so I think it's better.

Have you considered the knock-on effects of minimizing human interaction with regard to actually creating an empathic community? That the people who you would like to avoid interacting with (sorry, "don't care" about avoiding, while you implicitly cheer it on) are a part of the local community around you--generally of a lower social class, which emphatically does not make them less important but does make them less visible and thus less considered to you when voting or suggesting policy?

That empathy that develops through knowing and understanding the people around you is what makes society actually work. The idea that "efficient = better" is one of the most profoundly dehumanizing pictures I have ever seen painted of the future and you do nothing to shake that. Monstrosities like the one you posit are what we should be working to avoid because it makes all of us mere grist for the mill.

What do you suggest to do to prevent things from moving this way? Do you think that it will never take off because people are uncomfortable with the idea, or that this is simply not technologically going to happen? I of course would respect anybody's right to vote with their wallets. Just as there are premium goods such as Rolls Royce that are hand-crafted versions of products that are normally mass-produced, I'm sure there will be premium services in the future to replace automated ones, such as food preparation.

The other solution is what is, in my opinion, a sort of neo-Luddite reaciton to automation where we either ban hugely efficient economies-of-scale infrastructures as a make-work program, or a regulation requiring sufficient numbers of humans in the loop.

I think you are really over-interpreting the way I see this. Replacing jobs with more efficient services is pretty unequivocally better in my opinion. If it weren't better, people would keep using the less efficient services that give them some form of empathic pleasure. In particular, I find the allegations of classism a little baseless. I have no problems interacting with those of a lower class, and if they do indeed lose their jobs due to mass automation, I definitely think the government will need to implement programs to retrain them or to provide for their needs a la basic income. But it doesn't make sense to pay someone to do a job that could be done better, especially ones like in food service, just so we can pat ourselves and say that "they at least have a job."

Sorry, dude, you're not getting me. I'm not talking about the jobs. I'm talking about the profound dehumanizing isolation that the future you posit implies.

It's not about jobs. It's about people. It's about not encouraging the shrinking of individuals into tiny-little-boxes where they don't have to interact with people unlike them. Epistemic and social-stratifying closures are pernicious and dangerous to society in ways "inefficiency" never, not once in human history, has been.

I'm with you. Your concept need not be an every day thing too. Get your human experience on restaurant nights, or having friends around to eat.

I'm not necessarily an introvert, but I'd be happy to remove the human element from ordering takeaway, or get it from something other than the phone order and delivery components which I find pretty boring.

But at its logical conclusion, does it risk ending with megacorp/state-mandated food plans delivered to the majority of people?

Freshly made sandwiches? Don't supermarkets sell those?

The UK has shops like Pret A Manger where the selling point is that all the sandwiches are made fresh in the shop every day.

We also have Subway franchises who tweak your sandwich ingredients.

Or independent sandwich shops who do the same thing.

But the cheapest sandwiches are ready made in Tesco or Sainsburys or Coop or Boots or Waitrose or WH Smith's or Marks and Spencer or whatever.

I guess the public transport in UK cities makes distribution easier because you can pick up a sandwich at the station on you way to work.