Purpose-built robots for things like &quot;making sandwiches&quot; will always be cheaper than general purpose robots. There really isn&#x27;t a culinary task today that can&#x27;t be fully automated (you can look at the frozen food section of a grocery store for examples of almost every cuisine type). The reason this hasn&#x27;t happened at your corner diner is that manual labor remains much more inexpensive in the short <i>and</i> long term for low volume production (ie, restaurant vs food factory). Additionally, before it becomes cost efficient to build a customized culinary robot for a restaurant, it is still less expensive to design a custom culinary <i>tool</i> for use by the human staff that will net 99% of the efficiency of the purpose-built robot.<p>Barring &quot;replicators&quot; (a la Star Trek), or labor costs rocketing through the roof (perhaps from something like a &quot;minimum income&quot;) I don&#x27;t expect the general composition of restaurant staff to change in the next hundred or even two hundred years.