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We have this today - McDonald’s, Chipotle, Jimmy John’s, Dominos, etc. Sure there are some humans, but there is also an optimized supply chain and in the case of McDonald’s, a fair bit of automation.

> 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.

Actually, some of the best food I've had has been frozen but cooked correctly, ie. using convection. For example, Healthy Choice used to have a Marsala Pasta steamer in a balsamic wine reduction. If microwaved properly it was tastier than 90% of the expensive pasta meals I've had at 4 and 5 star Italian restaurants. And I live in NYC so I know good food.

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..

Automating society paves the way for people to do creative work about which they truly care.

One of those things is doing 20 covers of handmade tagliatelle every night.

> Automating society paves the way for people to do creative work about which they truly care.

Automation alone certainly does not guarantee this.

Great restaurants are like art, in the eyes of patrons and creators. They will continue to find each other among the robotic masses.

True, and even if the meal is not "Tate modern", even a workday lunch can make me feel that someone actually cared and reinvigorate my soul in the middle of work. Most of the time I will choose to pay a premium in time or money instead of cheapest/convenient-est.

Plot twist: Tate Modern is all about the industrialization of art.

Art, yes - theatre especially, but also visual, along with the obvious of taste and smell.

* 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.*

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 something completely different then restaurant for date or familly dinner.

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.

Lunch during work is a great chance to add some joy to the middle of your day. You spend so much time at work, why not leaven it with something delightful?

(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.)

Sometimes yes, other times you just want to eat. But even if you look for nice place, itis different.

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.

Wow that sounds like 10's of thousands of opportunities to meet, network, whatever, squandered. I always choose a quiet conversational place for lunch, and always with somebody. If not somebody on my project right now, then a contact I haven't visited with in a while.

There is powerful stuff in sharing lunch. Especially if you pay.

Even in The Culture there were restaurants, some people just like making and serving food

Even cpt. Sisko's dad ran a restaurant on a world where anyone can walk up to the nearest wall and ask for the very best of any food.

Right now restaurant work is too complicated for robots to do it as accurately and quickly as humans. There are hundreds of micro-skills that a prep and line cook needs to perform very well in a restaurant and most of those are specific to the individual restaurant. Mcdonalds will be the first to be automated since they serve the same stuff at every location in America, but expect regular restaurants to be the last places to be automated.

This reads like it was written by someone to whom food is simply a chore that is imposed on them rather than one of lives great creative pleasures.

Work is what gives life meaning for many people. You can't just say we'll automate most productive tasks then expect everyone to be mozart or do yoga all day or something. That's not a future I want.

There’s plenty to do even if you’re not a talented musician: volunteering for a good cause, inventing, crafting...

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.

The same things that are preventing small restaurants also stand in the way of that sort of thing. If you could install a machine like a kiosk where people walk up to it, press buttons and insert money and out comes a hot sandwich made to order, people would be renting space to install them all over the place.

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.