[claudiulodro]

I agree 100%.

Baristas are great for customer loyalty, and a good barista will have dozens of daily regulars that look forward to interacting with them and are emotionally invested in the coffee shop. A robot-staffed coffee shop won't.

A barista is not just someone that makes and brings coffee; there are a bunch of other tasks that need to happen at a coffee shop. This robot misses a ton of tasks that would be critical for any real coffee shop:

- Pastries, paninis, food handling of any sort in general.

- Bussing tables, cleaning messes, washing dishes.

- Refilling/rotating creamer, sugar packets, etc.

Most importantly, robots have no passion for coffee so your customers will have no passion for your coffee. Good baristas have pride in their craft. May as well drink office or 7/11 coffee if a robot is making it.

Also I think the goal of this project is ethically questionable; it's not freeing people from the tedium of the assembly line. It's replacing fulfilling, social, OK-paid jobs that many people enjoy, and for the exclusive benefit of the capitalist class.

[magduf]

This is ridiculous. By your logic, people who have a "passion" for cars wouldn't want to buy a car built on an assembly line that has lots of robots on it, which every car factory does today.

I don't know about you, but when I go to a coffee shop, I never talk to the barista. The barista is behind a machine, where I can't talk to them. I talk to the person at the counter where I place my order, and who takes my card, gives me my pastry, etc. Why do I need a human making a drink when a robot can do it better.

It's insane how tech people, of all people, will try to claim that humans can do easily-automated, repetitive things better than machines.

[sexyflanders]

I’d say it’s more like a car enthusiast scratching their head at the new self driving car model that is controlled by a giant robotic arm and a giant robotic leg that occupy the entire drivers seat.

The machine is already a machine. it doesn’t need an external machine to physically control it. Thats what networks are for.

[magduf]

No, that's an entirely separate issue and only particular to this one dumb machine in this article. Yes, I completely agree, having an automatic coffee machine run by a big mechanical arm that just presses the "start" button is really stupid and inefficient. But that's not the issue here in this comment thread about replacing human baristas with machines, in an ideal situation where the machines really can make drinks as good as, or better than, the humans. People here are decrying this automation and claiming that "human interaction" is oh-so important, and it's not. I don't talk to baristas: they're standing behind a big machine, and are busy doing something, so why would I interrupt them? If I want to chat with someone, that's what the cashier and/or server are for. Do these silly people go and talk to the cooks at restaurants too? And do they decry the obsolescence of telephone operators and elevator operators?