German Robot Restaurant Replaces Waiters

A restaurant in Nuremberg, Germany has been the first to automate restaurant service. And by that, I mean that a customer orders from a touch screen TVs and their food is teleported to them via metal rails and tracks extending from the roof (where the kitchen is) to the customers table. Gravity provides the power.

The touch screen TVs can also be used to send texts and emails while you wait for your food. Apparently it's a real sight to see, because food whizzes down roller-coaster like rails all the way down to the customers down below. Apparently, the customers order a meal via touch screen TV's, the order gets sent to the cooks' monitors up on the top floor of the building, the cooks (which are human..no robot chefs just yet) cook up the meal, put it in a bucket, tag it with the customers respective table color, and send it down its respective chute. The food then goes flying down spirals and tubes to the customers table. People order bottles of wine, bratwurst, pancakes, you name it. Sounds pretty fun.

The place is called " 'S Baggers " and no, that's not a typo.

It cuts down on labor costs for the owner, and those savings translates into cut costs for the customer as well. What does this mean? Obviously, waiters aren't all going to be done away with which is the big story that the media (and I...I admit it) is pitching to get everyone's attention, though I'm sure we'll find a copycat restaurant soon in a city near you. Everything, sans the touch screen monitors, is powered by humans (the cooks) and gravity. So it's not as robotic as it sounds. What it does show us, however, is that anything that can be automated will, and as a result, there will be an increase in machines doing menial work and a decrease in humans doing menial work. I think that everything that makes us human- our ability to create, innovate, reflect- all those abilities will be the only things that robots won't be able to do for us. Artists, entrepreneurs, composers, even salesmen I think, jobs that require creativity on a daily basis will be the ones safe from our own self-inflicted techno takeover.

Another sad reality is that human interaction and technological progress have an inverse relationship. The more we progress technologically, the more we miss out on human interactions. And we can all wax philosophical about what that means.

And you can catch a video of this restaurant in action here.