The Robot Will See You Now (For Popcorn Only)

The line stretched around the block on Santa Monica Boulevard, hundreds of people waiting hours in the July heat for the chance to order a $13.50 burger from a touchscreen and maybe, if they were lucky, get popcorn from a robot. Welcome to the Tesla Diner, where the future costs extra and comes with wooden utensils that don't actually work.

I keep thinking about that robot. One Optimus unit, Tesla's $20,000+ humanoid creation, stands behind the bar on the second floor, methodically scooping popcorn into paper containers while 140 human employees do literally everything else, the cooking, the serving, the cleaning, the actual work of running a restaurant. But guess what everyone's filming?

The popcorn robot.

There's something deeply unsettling about watching people lose their minds over a machine performing the most basic possible task while completely ignoring the humans making their food. It's like we've become so starved for technological spectacle that we mistake expensive theatre for actual innovation.

Because let's be clear about what's happening here: this isn't automation solving a real problem. This isn't AI making our lives measurably better. This is a very expensive puppet show designed to make you feel like you're witnessing the future while you eat a mediocre smash burger out of a cardboard Cybertruck.

The economics alone should make us suspicious. Tesla spent years and billions developing humanoid robotics, and the best use case they can demonstrate is... snack service? If robots were truly ready to revolutionise the service industry, wouldn't they be handling the complex choreography of a busy kitchen rather than the repetitive motion of scooping kernels?

But complexity doesn't photograph well.

The real innovation happening at Tesla Diner, the integrated charging infrastructure, the supply chain management, and the energy systems, none of that generates the viral moments that Tesla's stock price increasingly depends on. So we get the robot instead, performing the kind of simple task that makes automation look accessible and non-threatening while the humans handle everything that actually requires intelligence, adaptability, and skill.

The whole place reeks of this kind of performed progress. Those wooden "Cyber" utensils that are so aggressively futuristic they're actually unusable, customers are bringing their own silverware because Tesla's design team prioritised the look of innovation over its function. The roller-skating servers gliding around on vintage wheels while ordering happen on screens that sync to your car's computer. It's like someone fed an AI every retrofuturistic fantasy ever conceived and asked it to design "authentic nostalgia."

Even the menu pricing reveals the performance at work: "Epic bacon" for $12, a cup of wagyu chilli for $8. These aren't prices that suggest efficiency gains from automation; they're premium prices for premium feelings. Instead of food service, you're buying the experience of feeling like you're in the future, even when that future mostly involves waiting longer for worse service.

But here's what really gets me: we're eating it up. Literally. People are driving across the city, waiting hours, and paying premium prices for the privilege of participating in Elon Musk's therapy session with his own childhood fantasies. And for what? A tuna melt that happens to come in branded packaging?

The robot is the perfect symbol of everything wrong with how we think about technological progress. It's not there because it's needed. It's not there because it's better. It's there because Tesla has invested billions in humanoid robotics and needs to justify that spending with viral moments and headlines about "the future of service."

Meanwhile, the actual future of service, those 140 human workers- remains largely invisible. The robot gets the photo ops while real people in the kitchen figure out how to make hundreds of burgers with equipment that probably broke down twice on opening day. But you won't see those workers trending on TikTok.

This reveals something troubling about our relationship with labour itself. We're so eager to celebrate the replacement of human work that we'll applaud a machine doing a job badly, as long as it looks sufficiently futuristic. The robot's inefficiency becomes part of its charm; it's trying so hard, just like in the movies!

Meanwhile, the humans actually keeping the place running are rendered invisible by our fascination with their mechanical replacement. This is a preview of a future where we celebrate automation not for its practical benefits but for its symbolic value in confirming our sci-fi fantasies.

This is the strange reality of our current moment: we've become so obsessed with innovation's performance that we've lost track of what innovation actually looks like. Real technological progress usually isn't very photogenic. It's incremental improvements to boring systems, better accessibility features, and more efficient logistics. It's not a robot slowly dispensing snacks while humans do all the actual work.

And yet here we are, documenting our interaction with a popcorn dispenser like it's a historical moment. Because maybe, in a weird way, it is.

Not because the technology is revolutionary, but because it reveals something troubling about how we relate to progress itself.

We want to believe we're living through a rapid technological transformation, even when the evidence suggests we're mostly living through a rapid technological marketing. The robot doesn't make the popcorn experience better; by most accounts, it's slower and more awkward than human service. But it makes the popcorn experience feel futuristic, which is apparently worth more than actual efficiency.

This is the Tesla Diner's real innovation: it's figured out how to monetise our anxiety about being left behind by the future. Every person waiting hours for robot popcorn is essentially paying for the psychological reassurance that they're witnessing progress, even when that progress is mostly cosmetic.

The tragedy is that there are probably dozens of genuinely innovative things happening inside that restaurant, such as new point-of-sale systems, supply chain optimisations, and energy management solutions, none of which generate viral content or make customers feel special. So we get the robot instead.

What does it say about us that we're more excited by the simulation of progress than by progress itself? That we'll celebrate a machine doing something badly that humans do well, just because the machine looks like it walked out of a science fiction movie?

Maybe the real story of the Tesla Diner isn't about robots, retrofuturism, or even burgers. In my opinion, it highlights how desperately we want to believe we're living in the future, even when the future looks suspiciously like an expensive theme park built around our own nostalgia.

The robot will see you now. For popcorn only. Everything else requires humans.

But don't worry, they'll stay out of your photos.