Technology is Undefeated*

Why your restaurant job is safe from Artificial Intelligence.

*(Author’s note: this is a two-for-one edition of The Industry Standard … I asked ChatGPT and myself the same question as a prompt for this essay. ChatGPT’s answer is in italics below my own. )

December, 1995; Kelvinside. My buddy Derek and I were walking through the Botanic Gardens in the West End of Glasgow near dusk, on our way to the shops of Queen Margaret Drive to buy corsages for our dates to the evening’s dance.

A skinny guy about my age, walking with a girl, shouldered past me on the broad path between the flower-beds. “Avyagoh two fivahs fara tennah?”

“What?”

“I said, avyagoh two fivahs fara tennah?!?” He spun and strode towards us, the girl at his side.

“No.” I started to back away.

She opened her purse with a sneer as they crowded into us. “Gyim a slash!” He reached in and took out a scalpel and leveled it at me, close. “Gie us that!” He grabbed for the wallet in my back pocket; I took it out and gave it to him. Other than that movement, Derek and I were frozen.

They turned and strode away just as quickly. Derek and I followed at a distance. The park was somehow empty but for the four of us. She turned back and saw us. “Git tae fook!” (Glaswegian cusses are almost singularly threatening.) The guy advanced on us again with the knife; we turned around and walked out of the park. Derek bought the corsage for me, and when we got back to the dorm, I called the police. Instead of drinking beer with my friends, I spent the hours before the dance at the Maryhill police station, leafing through mug shots of local criminals.

I lack sensitivity and perception in face-to-face interactions. I tend to be gullible and not particularly street-smart (although that mugging, another at gunpoint in New Orleans, and a botched robbery in Long Island City taught me to be a lot more aware of my surroundings).

My condition is not a diagnosis, it’s just an empirical fact of my DNA, and one of many reasons I would make a terrible dining room or bar employee. I coach the servers, bartenders, and managers who work for me in the best practices of guest service, but get me tableside talking awkwardly to four seated dinner guests, and I’m almost physically aching to retreat to a loud, bright, chaotic kitchen. Some people—I believe they are known as extroverts—draw energy from conversations with others. That ain’t me.

But (even) I am flesh and blood, not ones and zeroes. I can inspire my team members with leadership principles, stories, or core values, and they will smile at guests and look them in the eye. Sure, AI will someday soon know us better than we know ourselves. But AI lives in the past, churning through endless seas of ones and zeroes that make up our history, looking for patterns, probabilities, and predictions. It has no insight into the human randomness that creates the evergreen Now.

With the acceleration and automation of our current and near-future lives thanks to AI, our urge to put down the phone and engage with a human will grow stronger than ever. As Yuval Noah Harari posits in Homo Sapiens, language first evolved to facilitate social bonding, not utilitarian ends. Of course you must reply “yes”, “no”, or “I need more time” to the bank’s answering bot when you’re reporting a fraudulent charge on your account, but to explain what the hell is actually going on, you need a human being to pick up. And when guests sit down in your restaurant, the more genuine the human interaction they receive from your waitstaff, the more value they will find.

Corollary to the desire for authentic human interaction is my opinion that the increased time that younger generations have spent in front of screens has honed their street-smarts to an edge as sharp as Damascus steel. By the time they are fourteen, they’ve come to recognize the expressions and body language of SO many scammers, tricksters, liars, jokers, fakers, and thieves that none of them will grow up into a country bumpkin who loses his wallet to the first hustler he meets in the big city.

I’m not anti-AI. Saying “I’m anti-AI” isn’t much different than saying “I’m anti-weather”, because the two seem equally inevitable. In fact, I’m currently learning to build an AI agent to help me with tasks that can be automated—so that I can focus on pursuits like writing, cooking, menu creation, and business development that require unique mastery and a beating heart.

In my version of the future, evolved AI looks a lot less like The Entity and a lot more like Zaphod Beeblebrox. It may well be that anchored restaurant work—short-order cooks, mixologists, cocktail servers, and pastry chefs—will find terra firma amidst the relentless swell of technology.

***Below is the “Substack post” generated by ChatGPT when I asked it if restaurant workers should be worried that AI or AGI will replace them.

Read it and weep … I think that you’ll realize, as I did, that it bears an alarming resemblance to several Substacks that I will no longer subscribe to, including (seriously) one that pinged on my phone as I was typing this sentence on my laptop:

🧠 Will AI Replace Restaurant Workers? Let's Talk About It.
by The Industry Standard

There’s a lot of noise out there right now about AI. Will it take your job? Will robots run kitchens? Will the restaurant industry ever be the same?

Let’s take a breath and talk real.

🍽️ First of all: restaurant work is human work.

Hospitality is about more than food. It’s about people. Atmosphere. Storytelling. The warmth of a great host, the charm of a seasoned bartender, the eye of a sharp line cook who knows exactly when that steak hits medium rare.

AI doesn’t have that. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

🤖 So where is AI showing up in restaurants?

It’s here — and growing. But mostly behind the scenes:

• Self-ordering kiosks at fast casual joints

• AI voice bots at drive-thrus (McDonald’s is testing it)

• Chatbots handling reservations or guest messages

• Scheduling, inventory, and kitchen management systems powered by algorithms

• Robotic arms flipping burgers or pouring coffee in some test kitchens

But here’s the thing: these tools aren’t replacing hospitality — they’re replacing repetition.

🧠 And what about AGI? Should we be scared?

AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is the sci-fi version of AI — the kind that can do anything a human brain can. It’s not here yet. It might not arrive in our lifetime. And even if it does, it’ll come for office jobs first, not kitchen shifts.

So no — don’t panic. But don’t ignore it, either.

🔥 What should restaurant workers and owners do?

1. Double down on the human side.
   People remember a smile, a story, a moment of connection. That can’t be automated.

2. Embrace tech where it helps.
   Learn the POS system, the reservation app, the inventory tool. Be the person who gets it.

3. Think like an owner.
   The most powerful workers in the AI age are the ones who combine craft with strategy. Learn operations. Learn branding. Learn how to think like a business.

This industry has always evolved. From charcoal fires to wood ovens to gas to induction. From handwritten checks to tablets. From yellow pages to TikTok. Change isn’t new — it’s just speeding up.

And the ones who ride the wave instead of fearing it?

They set the standard.

---

💥 Follow The Industry Standard on Substack + Spotify
For restaurant entrepreneurs, aspiring chefs, and anyone bold enough to bet on themselves.