> Restaurant cooks/servers are the equivalent of hand washing clothes
Both are a skilled trade. Can you not tell the difference between the best meal you’ve ever eaten at a restaurant and a cup of fried cheese balls from Sonic? If not, then your post is entirely logical.
> technology has enabled humanity to do a great deal more with their life
More than cook good food for people? Are you surprised that there are people who dream from a young age of cooking, or cutting hair, or working on a construction site? That people have different skills, aptitudes and interests?
I’d rather see people flourish while doing what they love to do - especially if that thing is as central to the human experience as preparing a good meal.
That said, it's very possible healthy choice employs very skilled chefs to either do small batch production or has figured out a way to do large batches without sacrificing quality.
Their microwave steamer container technology also factors in, since most microwave meals taste bad due to excess moisture.
I don't think automation and quality have to be mutually exclusive. The same goes for spirits. Some small batch Icelandic vodka I had was absolutely horrible compared to the mass produced Grey Goose, despite costing more.
I see the benefits of covid. Culling the inefficiencies in our markets. Shale fracking, unnecessary luxury services like mid-tier restaurants, etc..
One of those things is doing 20 covers of handmade tagliatelle every night.
Automation alone certainly does not guarantee this.
Maybe you might as well drink Soylent. Washing clothes or dishes is a chore. Cooking food is a social event and lots of people like cooking and creating food.
If anything automation of mundane tasks will lead to more food being cooked by humans. I’ll also eat my hat if you can get a robot to cook an 8 course degustation.
The robot restaurant is for lunch during work - you care about price and speed and nutrition. That is it. Self service checkout is fine. SittIng close to other people does not matter.
For date, meetups with friends, celebration or filly dinner I want calmer, more intimate place.
There is powerful stuff in sharing lunch. Especially if you pay.
(I understand the expense arguments, but I think it's a false economy, without specific goals, and isn't worth much regard on software engineering salaries.)
Date, familly dinner, celebration and similar all take time. You are comfortable being there for two hours. With lunch, you want be shorted then that.
I strongly suspect that if the most tedious jobs were automated away, so long as people had their needs met, they’d find something much more meaningful than the work they were doing before. I know I sure would!
“So long as they have their needs met” is a big assumption, though, and one that wouldn’t hold up in our current society.
But the machine doesn't take up that much space. If the zoning requires you to rent 200 times that much space, the economics go away. So you still have to solve the original problem.
The way forward is not by enabling people who can serve 500 people/day to exist when we can have a robot serving 5,000.
We want automation, we want people doing what they choose to do because we've automated away things they had to do, such as work for a living.
The way to get there is more automation.
Restaurant cooks/servers are the equivalent of hand washing clothes. We have washing machines - technology has enabled humanity to do a great deal more with their life, let's move in that direction please.
The other piece of the puzzle is this - technology alone is not enough - technology alone is why we have nuclear weapons and idiots with nuclear codes. The time will come soon, when we have to have a frank conversation about the number of idiots inhabiting this Earth and that it's not climate change, it's idiots, that will be the end of all of us if this keeps up.
Anyhow :)