The Kitchen of Tomorrow Doesn't Need You

 I grew up in a world where music came on plastic discs. You'd scratch one and lose the song forever. Then one day, someone handed me an MP3 player, and just like that — the disc was dead. Nobody mourned it for long.

Then came the smartphone. A camera, a map, a bank, a library — all collapsed into a slab of glass that fits in your pocket. I remember thinking: this is it, this is the peak, it can't get more surreal than this.

I was wrong.

I've been cooking professionally long enough to have seen trends arrive and die. Molecular gastronomy. The quinoa explosion. Avocado on everything. Food comes in waves, and so does technology. You learn to read the tide.

But AI feels different. Not like a wave — more like the ocean floor shifting.

We're already seeing it creep into hospitality. Reservation systems that predict no-shows. Inventory software that orders before you even notice you're running low. AI-generated menus optimised for margin. Front-of-house chatbots that handle bookings at 2am without a single human involved.

And then there are the robots. Not the clunky factory arms of the 80s. Humanoid robots — ones that walk, that have hands, that are being trained right now to perform complex physical tasks. The kind of tasks that, not long ago, we assumed were safe. Human tasks. Kitchen tasks.

Here's the thought that keeps circling back to me.

In ancient Rome, the empire ran on slaves. Millions of them. They built the roads, worked the fields, cooked the food, raised the children. And Roman citizens — at least the ones with status — didn't have to lift a finger. That was just the system. Nobody questioned it. It was simply how the world worked.

I'm not drawing a moral comparison. I'm drawing a structural one.

What happens when the machines do everything? Not just the dangerous work, not just the repetitive work — but all of it. The cooking. The cleaning. The service. The labour that right now fills the lives and pay cheques of millions of ordinary people around the world.

The robots won't ne
ed wages. They won't call in sick. They won't get tired at the end of a double shift. They'll just work.

And someone will own them.

That's the part nobody really wants to sit with. Every technological revolution we've lived through — CDs to streaming, Nokia to iPhone — eventually created new jobs, new industries, new ways to earn a living. The optimists always pointed to that. Don't worry, new opportunities will emerge.

Maybe they will this time too.

But AI and robotics are moving faster than anything that came before. Not in decades. In years. Possibly in months. The people who were laid off when factories automated had a generation to adjust. I'm not sure we have that luxury anymore.

We could be heading somewhere that looks less like a technological utopia and more like a new kind of feudalism — a small class who owns the intelligence and the machines, and a much larger class who've been quietly made redundant by them.

The Romans thought their world was permanent too.

I don't have an answer. I'm a chef. I work with my hands, I taste with my tongue, I read a kitchen with instincts built over years of burns and failures and late nights. I'd like to think that means something irreplaceable.

But I also used to think CDs were here to stay.

— The Chef