Baristas will soon find themselves competing with a clone army of 'baristabots' who can brew perfectly personalised flat whites without ever taking a sick day. And they aren't the only workers at risk, writes Mark Pesce.

The humble barista, who toils at a job that barely existed a generation ago in Australia, has become one of the fixed stars of Australian urban life. Anyone can pull an espresso shot, but a good barista knows how to balance time, temperature and motion to produce the right crema and the right taste. It's not as easy as it looks.

From the arrival of a bag of raw beans, to the moment the customer puts a cup to their mouth, every step in the preparation of coffee has been automated. Vast roasteries use numerically-controlled machinery to heat and stir the beans, packing them into bags. Other machines grind them, brew them, squirting the brew into tiny capsules for reconstitution in the home.

Every aspect of coffee is automated - except in the local cafe. Here, we pay $4 for a latte because its preparation involves a fair bit of labour. The cafe remains a space dominated by people doing things that machines can do. It remains mostly automation-free.

That may be a good thing. After all, machines make terrible coffee. Contraptions that grind the beans and brew the espresso on the spot have never produced anything but a very ordinary cuppa. Something's missing: the human touch.

In our very mechanised civilisation, it feels as though we've approached the limits of what we can automate. A robot can build a car, but can't teach you how to drive. We've established the limits of what can be achieved.

Or so we thought.

In October, on the campus of the University of Texas, a strange new contraption appeared: the Briggo 'Cafe Haus'. Four-and-a-half square metres of floor space encompasses an entire cafe, powered by a sophisticated robot that's been 'taught' how to make a perfect cuppa by Patrick Pierce, an award-winning barista.

Briggo has hundreds of sensors to read temperature, pressure, and anything else that might in some way shape the outcome of the final product. These sensors feed back into the wealth of information imparted by Pierce, so Briggo can constantly adjust to the ambient situation, fine-tuning its brews.

It's not quite the human touch, but a near thing to it.

Briggo produces a completely repeatable coffee experience. Once you've decided what you like, it can be reproduced endlessly, on demand. It will never forget the particular settings that make your cuppa unique. And it can email those settings to a Briggo in another city, so your perfect brew can travel with you.

Briggo itself is completely repeatable. Build the robot, download Pierce's professional capabilities into it, turn it on, and watch it go.

Fire up a production line (robot-powered, naturally) and soon there'll be a clone army of 'baristabots', every one of them knowing how to brew the perfect flat white just the way you like it.

These baristabots learn on-the-job, just as humans do, their experiences improving their capabilities, refining their skills, consistently producing better and better brews. It will not be long before a baristabot crafts a much better cuppa than can be had from any except the most outstanding barista.

All that, and no need for sick days, nor penalty rates for overtime. A capitalist's dream - and a unionist's nightmare.

A generation ago Australia had just a handful of baristas. Within the next generation we will return to our starting point, as baristas across the nation get replaced by baristabots. The few humans left pulling shots will survive as local colour for artisanal cafes. Hipsters tolerating crappier cuppas in a search for authenticity. Barista as museum piece.

I write this within view of my two favourite baristas, who pull my morning jolt, laugh at my lame jokes, and send me on my way with a smile. They enjoy their jobs, but I don't see any future in which they continue to hold them. My cafe may not disappear, but those jobs will.

They are not alone.

Decades spent holding the line against the complete robotic re-engineering of automobile production left Australia with an industrial 'overhang' that has finally collapsed under the weight of its own costs.

We could not envision a future where good jobs meant highly skilled employees tending hundreds of highly intelligent and adaptable robots. We persistently believed automobiles required the human touch, and that our economy required front-line assembly workers.

I've heard it said, "Reality is that which kills you when ignored long enough." We've ignored reality for far too long, blinded by our valuable rocks and golden soil.

With field trials both of mining bots (such as automated trains in the Pilbara) and a 'farmbot', what will be left? As robots displace the human element within the Australian economy, how will we survive?

Many believe safety lies in education into a profession, thinking that lawyers and teachers and bankers and doctors will hold the line against the robot onslaught.

They are wrong.

Over the next several weeks, I'll draw a picture of how this industrial overhang has infected nearly every sector of the Australian economy. Almost everything we imagine as a safe harbour is under immediate threat.

Three professions seen as fortresses against this disruption - medicine, finance and education - are particularly vulnerable. That's where we'll start, because the robots are coming for our doctors, bankers and teachers.

We may not be able to choose the times in which we live, but we can fearlessly face the challenges of a new world of baristabots and self-driving trains, of embedded intelligence and its explosive growth in capability.

The Industrial Era is coming crashing down. We needn't be crushed underneath its wreckage.

Mark Pesce is the Honorary Associate in the Digital Cultures Program at the University of Sydney. Visit his website. View his full profile here.