First our jobs, then our world. The robot apocalypse may be closer than we think.

Robots are not just a vision of the future; they are already among us. With robot battles becoming an actual thing that people do and high-tech, realistic androids occasionally popping up in the news, we might be quickly approaching a time when technology starts becoming smarter than we want it to be.

For now, though, the biggest threat we have is of technology taking our jobs, which is happening all around us. Take this completely automated restaurant in China for example, which was shared by Japanese Twitter user Shao. There’s not a human worker in sight, and yet it’s a fully operational restaurant.

From the video it’s clear that the robots haven’t yet mastered the smoothness, friendliness, and gentleness of human workers, so the robot apocalypse may still be preventable at this point. Undoubtedly, though, those traits will come with time, as the robots adjust to their new positions.

Regardless, the ordering process seems pretty easy; the customer chooses what they want on a huge touch screen order menu. It looks like it’s even cashless! It seems like the customer paid with their smartphone.

▼ His purchase is probably funding the robot revolution.

After the payment is processed, the screen directed him to a pick-up window, where his food would arrive once it’s prepared by our future robot overlords. This customer ordered some kind of noodle dish, and after a little while a robot arm carrying a plastic bowl of noodles arrived and placed it down on a surface behind some glass, which then revolved the food out to the customer. Futuristic.

At this point the customer himself was responsible for carrying the food to the counter to eat, but maybe one day the robots will take even that privilege away. In any case, for now we can enjoy such freedoms.

After he finished eating, the customer pushed a button on the counter, and the surface slid back to drop his trash into a garbage receptacle underneath the counter! This method is a little rough around the edges, but surely the robots are working on perfecting this tactic, too.

Who knew there was a trash can hiding under the eating surface? Doesn’t that make you wonder what other kinds of robotic secrets are hiding in this restaurant? Japanese netizens had a few concerns about it, too:

“What if it suddenly opens in the middle of your meal! What if it’s like a multipurpose toilet stall and the door automatically opens after 30 minutes or so?”
“What about separating the trash?”
“I’d be worried about accidentally losing my keys or phone. Scary!”
“Unsanitary.”
“Eating on top of a trash can? lol”
“It looks like it would stink!”

Of course, these concerns are legitimate, though they pale in comparison to the threat this robotic restaurant poses to our human rights and freedoms. But if we’re talking petty concerns, the biggest one, for me at least, are the last ones: how dirty and smelly are those receptacles, and how dirty are those tables getting each time it opens? How often do they clean out the trash? Who wipes the tables?

Or, is the goal really to eliminate the human race through disease spread by trashcan tables? Clever, robot rebels, clever. This way they can kill two birds with one stone: the destruction of humans, and the taking of their jobs. Considering unemployment is already a problem for models in Shanghai, this new development could pose a serious issue for the human race.

Source: Twitter/@shao1555 via Hachima Kikou
Images: Twitter/@shao1555