I agree with much of what you have said -- I think you misunderstood my original post, I'm not claiming these jobs are going to be completely eradicated from society come another 20 years, I just simply think that they'll decrease in numbers by a considerable amount. So a restaurant that once used to have 10 servers working at any given time will need maybe 3 or 4 with automation going on.

> So I wouldn't count on robots replacing humans in actual customer service - on the contrary, I expect companies that do not provide proper human interface start losing customers to those who do.

Right, but that's for the /edge/ cases. Like when you're going through automated calls and the robot voice has you go through a process of giving information in various ways -- either by saying something out loud and it'll try to determine what you said, or you just simply type it through the keypad... and then when you fail to communicate properly you get transferred to a real human being.

I can tell you that a very high amount of my friends/family relatives (middle-class folks) cite the reason of their not going to restaurants to be the cost of eating out. Automation will help reduce that cost, so I don't think you have a very strong argument here that people will just stop going to restaurants. And, there is more to a restaurant service than just the 'server experience' -- there is the decor, the fine view, the washed dishes, the nice walk around the town it takes to get there and so on.

As for pubs and bars, yes they are the places that people go to socialize, but not all of that socialization is with the bartender or the server, it's with other people too who're there to also socialize. Bars and pubs will get help from automation, just lessly so than restaurants.