No Sacred Cows

There was a time when ordering a meal involved an exchange between two human beings. One stated what one wished to eat, another pretended to be interested, and eventually something resembling it arrived. The system was not perfect. It depended upon memory, goodwill, language, competence and, occasionally, even eye contact, all notoriously unreliable technologies. Fortunately, progress has intervened.

I was sitting in one of those Thai mall chain restaurants whose interiors appear to have been designed by anonymous suits with a brief to eliminate every last trace of character. Plastic surfaces, plastic fittings and plastic furniture – cheap, durable and easily wiped clean. It had the standard atmosphere of an airport departure lounge where everyone had agreed to sit around in discomfort and speak to no one. A screen appeared, and I ordered something nondescript and artificial, entirely in keeping with the surroundings.

Then the future arrived, moving slowly and silently between the tables in the form of a tall white serving robot carrying several trays of food. A screen occupied the position where evolution had traditionally placed a face. It glided with the solemnity of a minor religious procession, though one devoted chiefly to reconstituted chips and chicken wings.

“Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper”.. [Marvin the Robot, Hitchhiker’s Guide]

From time to time it encountered a waitress, apparently employed to coexist with it. They seemed no more interested in the robot than in the customers, the food or the apparent collapse of civilisation. Their role was largely to watch the machine perform work that had once helped justify their wages, occasionally removing a plate with the melancholy detachment of museum attendants dusting an exhibit from a vanished culture.

The robot stopped by my table carrying, among other things, a plate of garlic bread. It may have been confused by a dachshund temporarily blocking its path. It did not speak, beep or give any indication whether the bread was mine (it wasn’t), or part of a wider experiment in social breakdown. Even a Marvinesque manic depressive “Genuine People Personality” would have been preferable to total silence.

“Do you want me to sit in a corner and rust or just fall apart where I’m standing?” – Marvin

In a brief and rather pathetic flash of rebellion, I took it anyway. Under the old system, a waitress might have noticed. There could have been a brief exchange, an apology, perhaps even a recognisably human expression of surprise, irritation or amusement. Instead, nothing happened. The robot stood there while I appropriated somebody else’s carbohydrate allocation, its screen continued glowing, and the distant semi-conscious waitresses remained unmoved. Somewhere in the restaurant, another customer was presumably wondering why the automated abundance of the twenty-first century had failed to deliver two pieces of lightly toasted bread.

I considered returning it, but by then the transaction had acquired the authority of technology. The machine had brought the bread, I had taken the bread. The algorithm presumably knew best. The robot turned and departed towards the kitchen, and the future continued.

We are repeatedly told that automation will liberate humanity from tedious and repetitive labour. This may eventually be true, although it is less often explained what humanity will be liberated to do. Here, the employees had been liberated into standing around while a machine carried plates, the customers had been liberated from interacting with them, and the owners had been liberated from some portion of the wage bill. I, meanwhile, had been liberated from the tiresome convention that the food I ate should actually belong to me.

This is how capital improves the world. It replaces a poorly paid human being with an expensive machine, retains a smaller number of poorly paid human beings to guide it around chairs, and describes the resulting increase in profit as progress and innovation. The machine itself is then presented as the beneficiary. It has a face, or at least a screen, and may produce cheerful noises. It is designed to look friendly, although friendship has traditionally involved rather more than delivering another person’s garlic bread and refusing to discuss the matter.

It would, however, be unfair to blame the robot. It did not ask to become a waiter. It has no ambitions, no lunch break and, so far as we know, not yet acquired private despair. It does more or less what it has been programmed to do, which already places it above a surprising number of senior executives. Nor were the waitresses responsible. They had merely reached the logical endpoint of modern employment – physically present, economically precarious and required to look occupied while the machinery of their own redundancy rolled past them.

Around us, diners continued consuming factory-designed food in a factory-designed environment: plastic food in plastic surroundings, served on plastic trays by plastic technology. Only the bill retained an unmistakable authenticity. Nobody objected, because there was nothing sufficiently dramatic to object to. The restaurant was busy, the system almost functioned, and the garlic bread was vaguely garlicky.

That is perhaps the most unsettling feature of our brave new world. It does not arrive with soldiers, sirens or grand declarations. It arrives quietly, on wheels, bearing snacks. We accept it because it is convenient, the staff accept it because they need their jobs, and the owners welcome it because it improves margins. The machine accepts everything because it has not yet been programmed to complain.

For the moment, human beings remain necessary. Someone must load the trays, rescue the robot when it becomes confused by a dog, and deal with the occasional aging foreigner who steals the wrong food. But one senses these are merely transitional difficulties. Soon there will be no waitresses at all. We shall order from a screen, pay through another screen and receive our meals from a machine. Cameras will observe what we eat, software will calculate whether we enjoyed it, and an automated message will ask us to rate the quality of the human experience.

Somewhere, a private equity fund will record a fractional improvement in quarterly earnings, while somewhere else a man will still be waiting for his garlic bread.

“It’s the people you meet in this job that really get you down.” – Marvin