A machined preparing drinks is not ‘AI’.

And you’ll still be expected to tip

I’d rather buy a cocktail from a vending machine than a person tbh. If well programmed it should be able to get proportions perfect, there’s a fighting chance it might know what a right hand cocktail is, and if not it should have an option to let me select components. I don’t need to be an ass about being particular with what brand rums and vermouth I want, I can clearly see what’s available from the selection. It could also let me pick the most popular drink of the night or very quickly give me a mini sampler of a drink if I was feeling curious.

Went to VMware explore and there was one of those robots… saw people using it one time in the entire week I was there.

Every bar was packed to the brim with attendees.

Robots pouring drinks has been a thing on cruise ships for years. The big money is using AI to keep people gambling.

I can see this sort of thing being interesting - but the article says they still need an employee to pick up drink glasses it knocks over, and top up drinks it doesn’t properly fill. For now, it’s more a novelty, and one that I’d guess might wear off sort of fast.

This doesn’t seem like new automation - we have had all sorts of drink vending machines for decades, and I believe we’ve had cocktail ones for at least a few years. And if it sold, people would have already been using it. This seems more like the automatic fountains and such that’s as much the “show” as the practical effect.

The other issue IMO has always been age checking - so there’s probably a legal challenge to just replacing all bartenders with one of these. What it might eventually do is replace bartending as a skill in so much as making the drinks, but it’ll need integrated facial recognition and ID parsing, as well as a lot of speech to text and back via a likely better / tuned ChatGPT to really take over. Though anyone who’s going to a bar to interact with the bartender probably won’t for these.