I've been hearing talk of mechanised coffee makers/baristas taking over for over 20 years now. In this current AI hype environment it's pretty easy to believe that now's the time. And sometimes hype can make that happen if everyone believes it's the time for it.

I'm not in the robotics space but I can imagine that more pervasive ML and/or DL techniques can bring the field forward. Whether they translates to better automatic coffee machines though? I think I'm doubtful just because of how much of the job is random fine motor control stuff. Though, to be fair, so many coffee places, even good ones, have so much variance in the quality of their product that they don't control for because they don't have to that I can see machines doing on average a better job in many cases ... where again, with AI hype, people may just be happy to accept and embrace that. I'd certainly go try coffee from a coffee robot now.

Which of course gets to the potentially oncoming reality for a lot of people ... climate change + job automation ... over a 5-30 year time scale, shit's about to get whack.