Will the barista disappear one day?

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A living breathing person, managing the coffee machine and making the traditional espresso, stands behind the coffee machine, waiting to serve coffee: this is a barista.

At least, it used to be.

When we talk about the "next stage" of coffee, few baristas' conversation centers leave coffee machines and equipment, which are almost constant topics among baristas.

Founded by Henry Hu, a 23-year-old college dropout seeking to automate the production and service of professional coffee, during an interview in 2012, Mr. Hu created a robotic arm to do human work, a trend we know of to rewrite coffee service rules.

San Francisco's "X" Cafe (another in Hong Kong) is located on the staircase on the ground floor of the Metreon Shopping Center. The robot arm and its required accessories are medium-sized fiberglass housing. There is only one person in this cafe, a waiter who is proficient in the X program, who can help you deal with this process and answer the strange process of coffee making.

There are two options for buying a cup of coffee: order the coffee through the touchscreen, or download the Cafe X app and order it on your phone. Their application function allows customers to order on the way to Cafe X, ensuring that drinks can be delivered in a timely and prompt manner.

The robot arm grabs a cup, puts it on top of the espresso machine, and waits to receive espresso and milk. When the drink is finished, the machine sets it aside, and the person can click on the touch screen, enter the code sent to the phone, and drop the coffee from the circular elevator to the receiving area illuminated by LED.

The coffee itself is good, and the milk is smooth rather than very hot. Quite frankly speaking, during the whole process of buying coffee drinks, there is no mood, error or expectation compensation for the work of the machine, and only a programming device can operate. We can see its high efficiency intuitively.

The rise of automation is a hot topic in the coffee industry, in part because it is similar to driverless cars. Automation threatens millions of jobs around the world, especially in manufacturing, and may even deal a startling blow to the fabric of western capitalist society.

Henry Huthod Forbes Magrine commented that his coffee X was intended to "save money" and that the cost of the robot would be much lower than the cost of building a full cafe, and drinks from Cafe X were a few cents less than most cafes: $2.95 for lattes and $2.25 for espresso. Daily coffee drinks in many cafes in San Francisco range from $4 to $6.

As an inefficient and persistently costly manual species, human beings will inevitably be eliminated in the face of Cafe X, which aims at efficiency and automation. after all, a large number of lossmaking leaders will not be tempted by the profit potential of full automation.

In other words, it's a cheaper and more effective way to reduce costs, but it also means that we have to separate baristas from cafes, and if we're in a good mood one day, I still want baristas to smile at me, inefficient but polite, and have an imperfect little conversation.

Will you go to see the robot take part in the coffee competition?

After all, I have to go to my usual coffee shop tomorrow and have a cup of coffee in the morning, because I like to chat with my baristas and know what they are reading, or who they went out with last night.

Human-to-human interactions make coffee taste better, and in this extensive human public test, it's communication quirks that are good for my brain, which we call life.

It may be a human design flaw that these things connect, communicate, communicate, fall in love, and pick fleas from each other's fur, but that's how we exist.

Automation is inevitable, but we want to at least meet the core values of automation. Service and coffee are not just about putting drinks into customers' hands immediately for maximum benefit. If life is full of cold automation, then I'd rather go farming.

The interaction brought about by coffee is related to the interaction between people, although the result is not always perfect, it is not always fast, but it is a satisfactory way, it is difficult to quantify, until that moment you spend less money, watching the robot do the same thing, but still want someone to chat with you and give you a cup of coffee with body temperature.