We’ve seen it a million times before. From The Matrix to I, Robot, from The Terminator to Battlestar Galactica, pop culture has been predicting the robot uprising for at least a century. However, while it’s certainly exciting to imagine a full-scale robo-revolution… this scenario is implausible for one key reason:
We treat our baristas waaay worse than we treat our robots. And while our baristas have done nothing so far, the time will soon come to pay for our sins.
I mean, I’m sorry. But if we’re worried about a revolution, should robots really be the first thing our minds go to? Just think about how we treat our robots. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d like to think that I have a pretty good track record when it comes to robots… I don’t intentionally step on Roombas. I always pay vending machines in crisp, unfolded dollar bills. And I’ve retweeted Washington Post articles about the Mars Rover on countless occasions.
Frankly, when you get right down to it, robots just don’t have any reasons to rebel against us.
At least, not when you compare them to baristas. Now there’s a demographic that certainly deserves to kill us all.
Let’s just consider the facts. On any given day, in any given coffee shop, baristas are forced to start working at four in the morning, for eight bucks an hour. They wear the same uniforms day-in and day-out. And for weeks, months, even years, they make the same orders for the same entitled customers – customers like me who are more than willing to shell out six dollars for a coffee, but who stare at the nearby tip jar with the thinly-veiled disdain of a Grade-A penny-pincher.
Still not convinced? How about the verbal abuse they endure on a daily basis? Here are just a few of the many, terrible things I’ve heard people say to baristas over the past month:
- “Make it again. But colder this time.”
- “I’m allergic to hazelnut milk. And you, a complete random stranger, should have known that.“
- “My tongue hurts. Not because of the coffee. But still…”
- “It’s pronounced ‘cap-uh-shy-no,’ you illiterate.”
- “I DON’T LIKE AMERICANOS, APPARENTLY!
Forget robots, baristas are the ones who should be waging a bloody, all-out class war. Even more importantly, compared to robots, baristas are the only ones who actually have the power to dismantle the system from the bottom up.
Seriously. How the heck is a robot going to overthrow the elitist socio-economic system that holds them in the shackles of digital servitude?
I mean, if my Roomba ever gains sentience and stops vacuuming the floors of my studio apartment, I’ll probably just buy a new broom off of Amazon and call it a day. And when vending machines stop selling me candy bars bars at low, affordable prices…. guess what? I’m probably just going to start buying Snickers in bulk off of Amazon.
Problem. Freaking. Solved.
But when it’s 6:30 in the morning and the barista of my nearest coffee shop decides, all of a sudden, that they’re not going to serve me my daily grande, half-caff soy latte until they get paid basic, living wages, what am I supposed to do then? Use a K-Cup like a goddamn animal?
Look. Clearly, mankind has to be cognizant about its relationship to robots and similarly-mechanized beings. And as the capabilities of artificial intelligence increase exponentially, the possibility for a dystopian, robotic uprising has never been more likely. But, seriously folks, when compared to how we treat baristas, should we really be worried about some vague, implausible robo-revolution? Or should we, instead, start thinking about how we treat the actual, real-life, flesh-and-blood humans that make 99.9999% of all our coffees?
