The Future Arrived With My Coffee: No Jetpacks, No Teleportation, Just Starbucks on Wheels

Someone sent me an article about food delivery robots at Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport. Normally I open things people send me, skim them, think “interesting” and then life continues. This one was different because, by coincidence, I had a flight shortly afterwards. The article said that in the international departure area you can now order food or coffee on your phone and have a robot bring it to your gate. Obviously I had to try it. Some things you simply cannot read about and then carry on like a sensible adult. So there I was, sitting at the gate, ordering Starbucks mainly because I wanted to see whether a small box on wheels would actually come looking for me. My passport was safely in my pocket. I checked. Then I checked again. Airports do this to me. I can zip the passport into an inside pocket, pat it, walk ten meters and suddenly think: passport? Meanwhile my coffee was somewhere in the terminal, travelling independently towards me. Which raised a fairly reasonable question. When exactly did this become normal?

The timing was perfect because the evening before I had watched Weird Science again. The film came out in 1985 and two teenagers use a computer to create their perfect woman. Watching it now, you realize she is basically a living chatbot. They tell the computer what they want, the machine does some 1980s computer magic, and suddenly there is a woman in the room who talks to them, answers questions and seems considerably smarter than the people who created her. Back then the whole thing was wonderfully ridiculous. Today you watch it and think… well, apart from the woman physically appearing in the room, we are getting uncomfortably close. We simply replaced the giant monitor and floppy disks with a phone. Then there is Total Recall. That came out in 1990 and takes place in 2084. Johnny Cab, the robotic taxi driver, was there to show the audience that this was a distant, slightly crazy future. And now I am sitting in Shenzhen in 2026 waiting for coffee delivered by a robot while cars are already driving around without anybody touching the steering wheel. Some parts of 2084 seem to have turned up early. The rest is obviously stuck in traffic. I still cannot teleport anywhere, Mars remains inconveniently far away and the promised jetpack has failed to materialize. But Starbucks can find my gate.

The airport robot is hardly alone. Shenzhen already has delivery drones, robotic arms making coffee and ice cream, self driving cars, restaurant robots carrying trays and hotel robots riding elevators. The elevator ones are almost irritatingly competent. They get in, press the correct floor and get out again. Meanwhile I have watched adults press the wrong button and somehow manage to stand exactly where everybody else needs to walk. The robot just gets on with it. One day there may be an awkward discussion about who should actually be allowed to operate the building. And nobody here really seems impressed anymore. A robot can roll through a restaurant carrying two milk teas and a plate of noodles and half the room will not even look up. Thirty years ago it would have been on television with dramatic music and somebody explaining that the world was about to change. In Shenzhen the same machine gets sent to table 17 because somebody ordered spicy chicken.

Give people a few days and the miracle is over anyway. If the robot takes too long, nobody sits there admiring the navigation system. You start looking at the app thinking, where is the bloody coffee? That is much closer to reality than all those old science fiction films. They imagined us standing around in silver clothes staring at machines in amazement. In reality we accept the machine almost immediately and then become irritated when it is slightly inconvenient. A robot has managed to navigate an airport full of suitcases, children and people who stop walking without warning… and five minutes later you are wondering why the cup is not already in your hand. The first time you see one, you photograph it. The second time you point it out to somebody. A week later it blocks your way and you mutter something unpleasant at it.

I do wonder what comes next, because there are airport jobs I would happily hand over to robots immediately. Start with the people who fall asleep two meters from their gate while their name has already been announced six times. A robot could roll over, tap the chair and say, “Sir, everybody else is on the plane.” Then send another one to security. It should watch the person who has stood in the queue for twenty minutes and, only when reaching the front, suddenly remembers the laptop, three bottles of water, power bank, coins, keys, belt and half the bathroom cabinet in the bag. Turn him around. Back to the end. I would also like one assigned to moving walkways, purely to deal with families who decide halfway along that this is the ideal place for a conference. And perhaps one for the passenger who turns up at the gate carrying enough hand luggage to relocate a small apartment and looks genuinely surprised when the airline starts counting.

The one I really need, however, is the passport robot. Not passport control. There are already enough people and machines wanting to see the thing. I want one robot whose entire professional purpose is knowing where my passport is. “Chris, inside jacket pocket.” “Sure?” “Yes.” “Still there?” “Yes.” “Check again.” At some point the machine would probably request a transfer. Airports make otherwise reasonable adults behave strangely. At home I can misplace my car keys for hours and think they will eventually appear. At an airport I put my passport into the safest pocket I own, zip it shut and immediately start monitoring it like a heart patient. Walk to the gate. Check. Sit down. Check. Look at the screen. Check. Order coffee. Check. There is probably a point where the passport itself thinks: for God’s sake, I’m still here.

And maybe this is why the whole thing amused me so much. The future did not arrive with Arnold Schwarzenegger walking through the terminal. It arrived carrying coffee. A small robot comes down the concourse, finds the right gate, stops in front of you and delivers exactly what you ordered. Everybody else carries on as if nothing unusual happened. Which, after about thirty seconds, is exactly what I did too. The coffee was there, the order was right, the robot turned around and disappeared back into the airport. I watched it go, took a sip and thought: Not bad. Not bad at all.

Then I reached into my jacket.

Nothing.

Damn.

Where’s my passport?

Chris Gassner