I can’t quite understand a world in which people will pay $4 for a cup of coffee… So I have no particular interest in coffee-shop culture, but the unrelenting advance of automation is worth noting. But note the word “could” in the headline.

The Briggo coffee kiosk knows how to make a perfect coffee because it was “trained” by an award-winning barista, Patrick Pierce. He’s since left the company, but no matter: as in the techno-utopian Singularity, whose adherents believe that some day we will all upload our brains to computers, once a barista’s essence has been captured by Briggo, his human form is just a legacy system. —An army of robot baristas could mean the end of Starbucks as we know it – Quartz.