So, one of the latest internet viral video phenoms is of some restaurant in Germany where “the staff has been replaced by robots.” I keep seeing this same YouTube clip pop up over and over. Well I’ll post it here, and you tell me what you see:

OK, I’ll grant you that you order by touch screen rather than talking to a waiter, but that isn’t exactly new (nor is it preferred, at least by me). And then the food runners put your meal on a little cart and slide it down a ramp to your table. At which point you and the rest of your part open up the carriers and peer at each others’ food and decide who gets what. Unusual, sure. But how the heck are people seeing this as, to quote Gizmodo “a new restaurant […] staffed entirely by robots.” (It isn’t just Gizmodo, the story is everywhere from Sci-Fi.Com to BotJunkie.)

By the way, if you want to follow the story back to its original source (which I always recommend…we bloggers are such parasites, feeding off of each other and hard-working writers):
World’s First Automated Restaurant Opens In Germany