Personally I'm techy and I still prefer the human aspect. In fact part of the appeal of going to a restaurant is to be waited upon - otherwise I might as well just order a takeaway online. Sure they might occasionally screw up your order but this doesn't happen nearly as often as this thread would suggest. I do eat out a lot and I honestly don't think I've had my order messed up in the last 2 years. I wouldn't say I eat at particularly posh places either though I do actively avoid most fast food establishments (not a snobby thing, I just don't like the taste of McDonalds et al) so maybe the issue of reliability is more subject to the lowest paid positions in the food service?
In any case, even if you did have your way and entered your orders directly into a computer, you'd still have to deal with the fallibility of humans with the chef cooking your food, waiter / delivery driver distributing your food, and anyone else who exists along the chain. In fact I wouldn't be at all surprised if many of the mishaps described in this thread were actually failings of those individuals rather than the order takers whom you assumed had messed the order up.
But if I'm at a good restaurant, a server is actually part of the service. They can give you recommendations on dishes, and wine matches, and help you get exactly what service you want. Also the human experience is just part of the fine dining experience.
It would be really strange if I want to Eleven Madison Park or Bouchon and they just handed me an iPad to order my food from.
That just sounds like a very poor database.
It's not just simple pairings, but includes nuances that would take many different fields to capture: Dish X can be made vegan, but tastes better if you then order with extra seasoning.
With a tablet, you could filter the list with a single tap. I've thought about building such an app a few years ago because I'd love to use it, but I have no idea how you could sell it to restaurants. It seems most places are too conservative and cash-strapped to tie themselves to proprietary tech.
Once I went to a McDonald's and ordered some double cheeseburger with no onions, when the order came it was just the buns with no meat.
Especially in a place like McDonald's where they serve several people familiar with the menu, the staff seems annoyed if you don't know what the ingredients of one of their menu items are and often don't handle specific requests well.
It's not just language issues, my ex-girlfriend always asked a lot of questions when ordering at restaurants, sometimes checking with me, you can visibly see the waiter getting tired or annoyed because of this, not coincidentally, there is always some minor screw up with the order because they forgot to write something down. The same happens if you go to a restaurant with 20+ people and the waiter comes in to take everyone's order, the chances of making a mistake goes up.