In 1959, William Larson sold his parents’ furniture for a down payment on some real estate. He drew up a back-of-a-napkin blueprint, his father built some redwood tables, and a few months later the first Round Table Pizza opened its doors in Menlo Park, California, with an confrontational motto, “The Last Honest Pizza.”

In 2015, a few miles down the road from the original Round Table, Julia Collins wanted to start a food company of her own. Together with her cofounder Alex Garden, a serial entrepreneur with a background in industrial robotics, she raised a round of venture capital to open Zume Pizza, a pizza shop unlike the world had ever seen.

If you ask Larson’s son Bob–who has run store number one since his father died in 2006–what differentiates Round Table, his answer is simple: a human touch. “We still sheet our own dough,” he’d say. “There isn’t another place that does that with the volume that we do.” In 1959, they would unhinge the restaurant’s front door to double as a rolling table. Now the shop has a 700-square-foot basement where an employee rolls dough for seven hours a day.

If you ask Collins what differentiates Zume, she would say it’s their proprietary technology. The first is their patented “Cooking en Route” system. In the morning, a machine learning algorithm takes into account historical data, weather, and zeitgeisty events like a Game of Thrones premiere to predict customer demand for the day. After prep, the pizzas are partially baked at Zume’s brick-and-mortar shop in Mountain View and then transported to a network of mobile food trucks across Silicon Valley. When a customer places an order through the Zume app, software determines the most efficient truck to activate, and the pizzas finish cooking in mobile ovens on the way to the customer’s home.

Zume’s other claim to fame is their pizzaiolos: Pepe, Giorgio, Marta, Bruno, and Vincenzo, a team of anthropomorphized robots that work alongside prep cooks to roll out the dough, sauce, and bake the pizzas at Zume HQ. The Zume kitchen can churn out 372 pizzas per hour.

Zume and Round Table might seem like bookends that flank the economy-wide conversation on automation: the family owned business that’s still the go-to spot for the local Little League team’s postseason party vs. the dystopian pizza shop, where cooking as an act of love goes to die. But that simplistic logic leaves out the nuance of what happens before industries reach full automation. The famed robocalypse will not come in the form of machines knocking on doors with pink slips. In the interim, businesses like Larson’s will need to figure out how machines and humans might be able to work together. And Zume, though perhaps horrifying to some at first glance, lends insight into how that near-term future might look.

A Slice of Dystopia?

From a labor perspective, there’s little distinction between displacing a taxi driver or a pizza prep cook. Economists classify both jobs as routine physical labor, which researchers from Oxford and Yale believe is a category of work that will likely be fully automated in the 2020s.