Automation, in rudimentary forms, is already part of many restaurants. Reservations are made online, orders arrive at the kitchen electronically, and bills are paid with a swipe on an iPad. Chains like Chili’s and airport restaurants use tablet computers for ordering and paying, to speed the process and cut personnel costs.

It might be a harbinger of a future in which eating out no longer involves waiters. Restaurants with servers could become the novelty, reserved for occasions when you want more ambience and hands-on attention than Eatsa’s “food delivery system.”

“What percent of our currently human interactions are going to remain human as technology really advances?” said Andrew McAfee, co-founder of the M.I.T. Initiative on the Digital Economy and co-author of “The Second Machine Age.” “I think for a lot of the meals I’m going to want to eat out in five years, if I don’t deal with a person, that’s not going to be a net negative for me at all.”

Eatsa is one more example of how rapidly machines have moved beyond routine jobs like clerical and manufacturing work to knowledge jobs and service jobs — like waiting tables. Economists disagree on whether technology will create more jobs than the ones it destroys, as has happened historically.

Mr. Friedberg, a lifelong vegetarian and passionate apostle of quinoa, said opening a restaurant without people was not the point. Rather, it was to open a fast-food restaurant that aimed to be faster, tastier and less expensive. He and his team determined that automation would achieve that.

Quinoa “is a much more efficient way to deliver protein to people than animal protein,” he said. He believes that changing consumers’ tastes is a way to change modern corporate agriculture, much of which is focused on feeding animals.

“The objective is over time we want to automate more and more to increase speed and reduce cost, so we create a food product that’s much cheaper and also happens to be healthy,” he said.