All fast-casual dining won’t likely be automated nor will restaurants with human staff soon be an overwhelming minority. It will not in the near future resemble the way a few shoes are still made by hand while almost all of them are manufactured by machines. I don’t think that happens so quickly or absolutely.

But not all (or almost all) of these jobs have to disappear for the sector’s workers to be devastated. In most places, anything out of sight in the kitchen that can be robotized will be, and some visible positions will as well. Of course, some restaurants and hotels and other corners of the hospitality industry will go all in and completely disappear the human element.

I’m not suggesting we dash robot heads with rocks, but we probably need to have some political solutions at hand, should, say, popular dining and the trucking and taxi industries no longer be there to employ tens of millions of Americans. A Plan B would be handy then.

One of the trailblazers in disappearing visible workers is the new digital automat known as Eatsa, the San Francisco cafe I blogged about a couple of days ago. In a smart Atlantic piece, Megan Garber looks at the underlying meaning of this nouveau restaurant beyond its threat of technological unemployment, how it’s selling not just meals but social withdrawal. An excerpt:

The core premise here, though, is that at Eatsa, you will interact with no human save the one(s) you are intentionally dining with. The efficiencies are maximized; the serendipities are minimized. You are, as it were, bowl-ing alone.

That in itself, is noteworthy, no matter how Eatsa does as a business—another branch is slated to open in Los Angeles later this year. If fast food’s core value was speed, and fast casual’s core value was speed-plus-freshness, Eatsa’s is speed-plus-freshness-plus-a lack of human interaction. It’s attempting an automat-renaissance during the age of Amazon and Uber, during a time when the efficiency of solitude has come to be seen, to a large extent, as the ultimate luxury good. Which is to say that it has a very good chance of success.•

The opening of “Tower of Light,” Megan Garber’s new Atlantic piece which recalls how Americans created “artificial moonlight” in the years before electrical infrastructure was available:

“First they tried to make moons.

In the early years of electricity — a time when steady illumination was new and expensive and unwieldy — Americans knew one thing clearly: They wanted light, and lots of it, and as quickly as possible, please. What they were less sure of, though, was how they would get that light. A grid of electric lamps, studded throughout towns — a system that mimicked and often repurposed the infrastructure of gas lamps — was the early and obvious method. But street lights required wires, which, when hastily assembled, had an annoying tendency to disentangle themselves and fall into the streets below. At best, this was an inconvenience, at worst, a deadly danger. Street lamps were also investment-intensive: Towns needed a lot of them to provide the bright light that people found themselves craving. They were also expensive. They took time to install. They meant pockets of bright light punctuated, where the lamps failed to reach, by complementary swaths of darkness.

City leaders, racing to bring their towns into the future and encouraged by electric companies seeking the same destination, tried to find better ways, cheaper ways, quicker ways to illuminate the American landscape. And in their haste to vanquish nature by erasing the line between day and night, they ended up looking to nature as a guide. They looked up, seeking a model in the largest and most reliable source of nocturnal light they knew: the moon.”

The introduction to Megan Garber’s excellent history of mechanical horses in the Atlantic:

“For most of human history, horses have been, primarily, a technology. An intimate technology, yes — people named their horses, and groomed them, and sometimes loved them — but horses were, for the most part, tools: They helped humanity to get around and get things done. Once steam power and internal combustion came along, though, that relationship changed drastically. As horses were eclipsed by more efficient methods of moving people and things — trains, cars, planes — their role in human culture shifted, as well. We quickly came to see horses more as what they had been, of course, all along: fellow animals. 

That shift is evident in a longstanding dream that is a little bit fanciful, a little bit practical, a little bit silly, and a little bit wonderful: the quest for the mechanical horse. While some creations — theScammel mechanical horse, the Iron Horse — imagined themselves as horses’ mechanized successors while not actually resembling them, many others have engaged in biomimicry of a more specific variety. While they are only one species we humans have seen fit to imitate with our machines — the world now hosts, among other automatons, the mechanical dog, the mechanical dinosaur, the mechanical pack mule, the mechanical elephant, the mechanical flea, and the mechanical shark — horses have held a special place in human hearts.”