Robot Bartenders Invade San Francisco

David Calkins, one of the organizers of the San Francisco version of Roboexotica--an event that has been taking place in Vienna, Austria for a decade--had set up his robot, Chapek, and, determining it was ready, instructed me to tell the machine what I wanted to drink.

This was after, of course, Calkins had finished getting Chapek ready to go.

"Let's see if it turns on and explodes," he said, "which it has in the past."

He flicked a switch and Chapek was ready.

"Hey," he said, pleased. "It didn't."

Until recently, no attempts had been made to publically discuss the role of cocktail robotics as an index for the integration of technological innovations into the human Lebenswelt, or to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication. Roboexotica is an attempt to fill this vacuum. It is the first and, inevitably, the leading festival concerned with cocktail robotics world-wide. A micro mechanical change of paradigm in the age of borderless capital. Alan Turing would doubtless test this out.