Is the Shawarma Robot the Beginning of the End for Humanity?

First, the robots came for the assembly line workers and we didn’t speak out because we weren’t assembly line workers. Then, they came for the nerds, and we didn’t speak out because we weren’t nerds. But then they came for our shawarma, and there was no one left to speak out for us.

And so it has come to pass that the succulent turkey meat at Dabush, a respectable Tel Aviv establishment, will now be sliced automatically and largely without need for a human hand, courtesy of the Shawarma Bot, a machine manufactured by Australia’s IDM Instruments, which uses multiple burners to roast, cut, and serve up to 330 lbs. of meat at a time.

Such volume, and such precision, may soon put the shawrma guy—the Shawarmier, if you will—out of work. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of moseying up to a fine shawarma palace anywhere in Israel, you know that the hand that rocks the carving rules the world, and that the great Shawarmiers always approach their tasks with an air of serene contemplation. Each trip to the spinning skewer is a fresh opportunity to examine the world and everything in it. Each movement of the arm calls not for brusque and choppy cutting but for elegant and calculated strokes, beginning with the reservoirs of fat up at the top of the hunk and gliding downwards, towards the leaner, crisper parts.

A good Shawarmier also knows that the perfect pita, like the well-lived life, is never uniform, that some chunks should be meaty and thick while others should be barely a whisper of turkey, and he lets his hand quiver to deliver the perfect equilibrium in every bite. And when the sandwich is finally delivered, the right meat master will never deliver it without admonishing you if you fail to ask for amba, the fragrant mango chutney that exudes, like hope, from each of your pores. The Shawarmier is not a laborer; he is a teacher and a friend. And now that machines have made him, too, obsolete.

Let us pray, then, for a new Asimov, to rise and rewrite the rules of robotics: not only may a robot not injure or disobey a human being, but he may not handle our meat either.

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