[throwawaykeno]

Automating good baristas in a cost-effective way is actually a pretty hard problem, but automating your typical Starbucks espresso machine button pusher is trivial -- machines that can make passable cappuccinos already exist. But people don't go to Starbucks for the coffee; they go to Starbucks for the same reason they go to bars.

I think a lot of the service sector automation that will happen in the next 20+ years is analogous. Anything customer-facing is bound to stick around as long as people have spending money, while anything that's not customer-facing will slowly become automated.

E.g. The person at the counter in a McDonalds is the easiest person to replace -- all you really need is an iPad and a couple accessories. But if I were a betting man, I would bet that McDonalds will replace food prep jobs before replacing humans with kiosks in most locations.

[bsder]

> E.g. The person at the counter in a McDonalds is the easiest person to replace -- all you really need is an iPad and a couple accessories.

Except that most people are REALLY BAD at operating a kiosk. You want a person at the kiosk so that they can gently guide the SUV driving suburban wife with the high maintenance order gently out of the way of the rest of the customers.

The backend jobs will be the first to get automated.

[vitus]

Actually, Sheetz (think fast food meets convenience store; based out of Ohio and only present in a few mid-Atlantic states) has been using kiosks for ordering food for years. Granted, payment is still at a register manned by an actual person, but it's not like that's uncharted territory, either -- Chili's allows you to pay at your table without needing to hand your credit card over to your waitress.

[throwawaykeno]

Right, but that's a captive market. No one goes to Sheetz for food; they stop there for gas and grab something to eat while they're stopped. So making the food ordering process a bit less pleasant is NBD.

McDonalds has to compete with other chains and prices are already bottom barrel. In McDonal's case, taking human interaction out of the equation seems like a losing proposition.

[phyllostachys]

In western Pennsylvania, where I'm from, people definitely do go to Sheetz just for food.

[thearn4]

Funny, Sheetz immediately comes to my mind too when I think about the topic of automation. It works a little too well!

[epalmer]

We have a gas station that serves food that is cooked to order. It is a WaWa station. All orders are by kiosk and the kiosk is pretty well designed. My family and I don't have problems using it. We are however, all educated.

It uses pictures and text. I will have to watch next time I'm in there to get coffee and see how well people use it.

[vitus]

Ah, Wawa's adopted that model, too? That must be relatively new. Guess PA likes kiosks for ordering food.

[CodeCube]

can confirm ... same at wawas here in Orlando, FL

[jontas]

These have been at Wawa at least since 2010.

[douche]

So we instead rely on the equally bad, minimally trained person behind the counter to input the order instead?

My success rate for getting my order correctly at fast food restaurants is somewhere south of 50%.

[ricree]

> You want a person at the kiosk so that they can gently guide the SUV driving suburban wife with the high maintenance order gently out of the way of the rest of the customers.

Even if that's the case, you could still plausibly turn three to four people manning a register into four kiosks and one person to assist.

[Grishnakh]

>But if I were a betting man, I would bet that McDonalds will replace food prep jobs before replacing humans with kiosks in most locations.

Panera Bread proves you wrong. Go into any corporate-owned store (not the franchise ones, they're behind), and they have iPad kiosks for taking your order. The food is still prepared by hand. They frequently even give you a bonus, like a free cookie, if you order with the kiosk instead of going to the human. And the kiosk does a far better job too: there's little or no line, you can easily look up your old orders or favorites and re-order them, you can easily make changes to your order (more or less salt/pepper, more or less lettuce, different bread selection, etc.) which you can't easily do with a human because the human won't present dozens of different options to you when you order, they just ask "what do you want?". Visual communication systems are far more information-dense than verbal ones.

[Zigurd]

The goal for coffee roasters and shops is consistent coffee. With machines you could get personalized coffee.

[eric_h]

My favorite coffee shop in NYC is The Roasting Plant, their coffee is roasted, brewed and poured by a pneumatic (well the process of sending the beans to their destination is a set of pneumatic tubes) coffee robot[0] (and handed to you by a human barista).

Really fucking cool, and the coffee is excellent, too.

0) https://roastingplant.com/our-story/javabot

[retox]

Why is replacing baristas a difficult problem? Not being sarcastic, I'm genuinely curious.

[throwawaykeno]

A good barista pays attention to their work:

* A good barista will notice when they screw up the shot and pull pull another.

* A good barista will not burn or under-steam milk.

* A good barista will make sure you have the proper amount of milk and foam. (Getting a perfectly consistent result when steaming milk isn't really possible using a dead-reckoning controller or when using simple sensors like temperature AFAICT.)

* A good barista will make sure the drink looks as good as it smells and tastes.

  * A good barista will have no problem customizing drinks.

Note that I didn't say impossible. Just difficult. You can probably get to better-than-Starbucks quality without too much AI. Auto coffee shops that beat starbucks already exist. But I'm not aware of any auto espresso machines that can compete with the baristas at my local coffee shop. And even if they could, I'd probably only use them at work, at airports, and at hotels.

[retox]

I confess to not knowing very much about the black ambrosia that I love so much, but it does sound from your checklist that a lot of those qualities could eventually be automated. That said I have taken part in several 'artisanal' coffee tasting sessions and while they have given me some appreciation for the growing and roasting process there wasn't much time spent on the brewing.

[throwawaykeno]

> but it does sound from your checklist that a lot of those qualities could eventually be automated

Totally. But the current generation of dead-reckoning-and-maybe-a-bit-of-very-simple-sensing style of control for grinding/tamping/steaming/pouring won't be sufficient. I would be unsurprised if substantially improved sensors (perhaps even vision) are necessary before we see computers over-taking the best baristas in an abssolute sense.

And unfortunately I don't think there's much demand for that sort of investment for the reasons outlined in other posts on this thread (even if robotic baristas could smash the human competition in coffee making, they still wouldn't displace the neighborhood coffee shops.)

[anigbrowl]

Yeah, but who the fuck cares? Ultimately it's an infusion made from roasted beans. I made my own coffee for years and was perfectly happy with the simple french press method. No doubt a skilled barista would do far better, just as a skilled chef cooks better than I do. But the gourmet market isn't big enough to drive the rest of the economy. We are not headed fora future where people have amazing jobs as amazing baristas and then go to be gourmet consumers of something else when they quit work, such that everyone is simultaneously an employee and an epicurean. For a tiny few, being a barista may approach the heights of being a sommelier in a top-rated French restaurant, but for the majority they'll be slinging coffee, just as most people who serve wine in a restaurant are just waiters, and none of these people will enjoy the fabulous life when their shift ends, just some discounts (official or otherwise) on the same product they serve to the customers.

[throwawaykeno]

Sorry, I wasn't implying that anyone cares. I even state a few times in this thread that people specifically don't care in aggregate. And even if people did care, it wouldn't have a major impact on the extent to which barista jobs are automated.

But it is just interesting, from a technical/hacker perspective, that good barista work is a pretty hard robotics problem!

[dogma1138]

Because allot of the "marketing" of the "experience" has been focused branding the individual person behind the coffee rather than the coffee it self.

Go into any "artisan" coffee shop and the barista would pretty much look identical, many of them will engage and have their own "shtick" to make the experience of drinking their coffee "unique". The coffee it self is also going to be heavily branded and sold to you as some fantastic story with many images which again will be heavily focused on the people who were involved in the entire process from growing the beams to your cup.

This is what we are buying now, 20$> an ounce "fair traded organic beans" with some nice retro photographs of Bolivian coffee farmers combined with some 20 year old millennials inspecting the beans to make sure you get the "best" ones in your cup.

This is what you can't replace, brewing the coffee and even foaming milk is something that a machine can do easily, and arguably better than most people, heck even latte drawing can probably be better done with a 2-axis drip nozzle than a barista with a bamboo stick but when you pay 7$ for a cup of coffee you aren't paying for coffee you are paying for the experience that no machine can actually give you simply because you don't want it. You want the human contact because at least in my personal belief that is a coping mechanism we have adopted to make for the isolationist life style that many of us live today in which we spend more time with our phones than with people, and so we care now more about how our coffee and burritos are being made and by whom than ever before.

[throwawaykeno]

> brewing the coffee and even foaming milk is something that a machine can do easily, and arguably better than most people, heck even latte drawing can probably be better done with a 2-axis drip nozzle than a barista with a bamboo

Is this true?

I'm mostly convinced about the brewing part (except that even the most meticulous machine will make mistakes, and a good barista will throw out a bum shot whereas a machine probably won't know the difference).

But I'm not convinced about the milk part. Do you have links?

(FWIW I totally agree with the tone and overall thesis of your post. And I really wish someone would deploy freshly ground-or-vacuum-sealed/fresh milk machines in airports/cafeterias/hotels/anywhere there's only a starbucks. But I also feel like better-than-average humans are still better than state-of-the-art machines.)

[Grishnakh]

Screw the human contact; I'd rather pay less for my latte and get it made correctly, and more cheaply, by a machine.

For human contact, just have a nice coffee shop with comfy chairs where people can sit around and read, chat, etc. You don't need humans making the food for your human contact, you just need to be in an environment with other human customers.

You can also have a human server who brings the drink you ordered to you. One human can run the whole establishment, filling in in all the ways the robots can't, but letting the robots do the more skilled work. When I go someplace for food or drink, I want to sit down and relax, not talk to the guy prepping the food. And since the food prep necessarily has to be done someplace away from the seating area (because that's where the foaming-milk machine is), I don't see any value in having a human back there when a machine can do it better. Now I do see some value maybe in being able to chat up the girl who brings the drink to me where I'm sitting. But the person behind a counter making the drink, who I can barely even see because there's a giant milk-steaming machine in the way? No, I don't see the value there.

[retox]

I'm inclined to agree with your assessment, even if it seems to drip with bile. I've not much experience with genuinely interested baristas, but those that I have known made drinking coffee more of an event rather than just a forgettable occasion.

There's still room for the human touch but sometimes you just want a decent double espresso and to be left alone.

[Godel_unicode]

Artisan coffee shops are like vineyard wine-tasting that way. Maybe slightly better product, but what you're really paying for is ceremony.

[st3v3r]

A good barista is like a good bartender. Their interaction with the customer goes way beyond simply making and handing off the drink. A robot would largely make that interaction like a soda machine. Not very personal, and not really something that keeps people loyal to your shop vs the one on the other side of the street.

[metasean]

Considering my own ratio of canned and fountain soda bought in restaurants, grocery stores, and convenience stores (at least a couple times a week) versus soda pulled by a soda jerk (never, nada, not even a single time), this does not bode well for the good baristas of our world!

While I have bought alcohol from a bar, the ratio of my non-bar alcohol still dwarfs bar-purchased alcohol. And frankly, even with the bar-purchased alcohol, it was social events with friends, the bartender could just as easily been a serve-yourself machine.

[st3v3r]

Depends. I have been to bars where the bartender is a large part of the experience. Good bartenders joke and make you feel good at the place. Bad bartenders ignore you, don't get you drinks in a timely manner, and generally make you feel small and ignored. I would vastly prefer to go to an establishment with the good bartenders than to have a soda-machine like experience.

[ZeroGravitas]

My local McDonalds already has touch screen self-service. A human still cooks it and brings it to your table, but ordering and payment is automated.

It's currently optional, but I could see it becoming standard fairly soon.