Shenwen | the death of the barista? Will the maturity of automation equipment lead to the demise of traditional baristas?

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Matt Perger vaguely mentioned the future of the position of barista in a question and answer about the fourth wave of coffee, and adopted the sensational title "death of baristas" in a lecture, mentioning that the maturity of automation equipment will lead to the demise of traditional baristas.

Perger's argument is based on the fact that machines are better at providing stable product quality, so let people do things that people are better at and machines can't do, such as quality control, such as service. As I distinguished the two aspects of the coffee bar in my last article, the future baristas will have two trends: one is to change to a "beverage producer" who controls the machine with the help of automation equipment, that is, the standard quality control setting for making coffee drinks through the parameter setting and adjustment of automatic equipment. The other is to become a "market service provider", to do more detailed customer interaction, to help customers choose and purchase appropriate products, community management, brand image and other marketing services.

This is the most likely future he has predicted. Such a future is likely to come, or it should be said that it has already come, for example, in today's Starbucks and 7-11, the leading coffee chain and the largest affordable coffee supply point, we can all see such an "image of the future".

After all, for bosses, under the premise that this kind of automation equipment can improve stability and efficiency, or even replace manpower and reduce control costs, it is definitely more in line with the need for mass production and large-scale business. However, from the perspective of labor and society, this wave of automated production equipment has actually caused heated discussion in various industries, and many people begin to worry that these machines will take people's jobs and cause a large number of unemployment rates. Some people even give an example, such as the invention of the car in history caused the collective unemployment of horses (people who are often monkeys say …... ).

In fact, as Perger said, it is the traditional baristas who die in this system, and they are greeted by the two new types of baristas mentioned above. This transformation of job content is as if the groom lost his job after the advent of cars, but was replaced by the so-called driving. Moreover, this transformation of food and beverage services, which used to be more labor-intensive, into a knowledge-based economy is a solution to a society facing a situation of fewer children, such as Taiwan.

At the very least, the future that really needs to worry about collective unemployment comes not mainly from such automated production devices, but from the shaping of artificial intelligence, or collective online intelligence. For example, on the online shopping website, according to the statistics, "other people have also bought …" Or like the Discovery Weekly on Spotify that actively recommends playlists based on your listening preferences. I can already imagine a super-large coffee machine monster, which combines the accurate automatic brewing system and the collective wisdom of cloud big data analysis, a vending machine that can be actively recommended through your previous purchasing experience or even personality profile analysis. Maybe in the future a long time later, maybe not that long.

But could this be the future panorama of the cafe? Absolutely not. This all-powerful mechanical equipment will become more and more expensive, and it will be easier to appear in chain business systems with higher capital and scale. More general small-scale capital cafes will be difficult to really import this kind of equipment. It has the taste of M-type development of capitalist society.

And not just because of capital considerations. Perger said in the lecture that consumers don't really care about how baristas make coffee (not that they don't care about safe and sanitary noodles such as spitting water in a cup). What they really care about is the quality of coffee. But Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a French gourmet in the 18th century, also said: "the pleasure on the table is not the same as the pleasure of eating." not all people who come to cafes come for good coffee. Perger is also very concerned about this, so he suggested that baristas who are freed from coffee making with the help of automated equipment may be more focused on creating "fun at the dinner table", such as "human connections" such as social interaction.

In addition, I would like to further point out that, as mentioned in my old article "Coffee style: looking at the connection between people and Coffee (Note 3)", people do not just want to pursue connections with others or certain communities. People also yearn for "connection with things" at the same time. Professionals, for example, often achieve themselves in the process of playing with things. We often don't just want a cup of good coffee made by professionals. We sit on the bar of a cafe and not just want to talk to the barista, but sometimes we want to silently and completely appreciate his process from preparation to brewing. There is a sense of beauty between the sophisticated barista's movements. In this kind of personnel, we can see the aesthetics of the blending of things and ourselves, just like "getting the Tao". We need to feel human value in such people and not be drowned in technology.

"I devote myself to dancing, jumping and whirling in the tunes sung by the coffee and in the slightly divergent fragrance, turning the process into a dance dedicated to your beauty" (but please remember that while appreciating it, you can also judge the quality in the cup. Otherwise, every cafe just needs to hire a model or dancer to be a barista. )

The strength of machines has always been precise large-scale production, and human creativity often comes from its own imperfect agitation: to find new possibilities between many mistakes and mistakes. British doctor of philosophy Zhu Lian. Julian Baggini said in his book on the philosophy of diet: "the practical wisdom of technology is that even if machines can match or improve the skills of talent, we still want them to continue to flourish, because what matters is not only the results, but also the process of reaching them." There has never been only a life-and-death competition between machines and talent, but we also hope to see them understand each other's strengths through competition, and then live in harmony. Machines can help us to achieve good results, but only talented people can understand the process and context of going to that result, and often a new future is born in this process and context.

The original article is published in C ³offee Coffee Journal April issue / 2016 issue 1