Momus writes in Wired of the robomediation of society:

...the process by which bank tellers are being replaced by ATMs, telephone operators by automated touch-tone and voice-recognition systems, soldiers by gun-toting Talons, financial journalists by report-writing programs and the taciturn guy at the video rental store by the wall-mounted DVD automat. If it's bad for humans to be reduced to robotic inauthenticity, isn't it preferable that real robots should step in to execute our mindless tasks for us?

He compares the "disintermediation" provided by certain web services, for example buying your car insurance or flights direct without the need for a broker or agent, with this alternative means of cutting out the middle men - in this instance replacing them with a middle robot.

I hadn't thought before of ATMs, automatic phone machines and their ilk as robots, but in a general sense I guess these are the heralds of the robot age. Momus goes on to point out that 4 million household "robots" are expected to be sold this year, increasing to an estimated 39 million by 2010. He argues the potential importance of such devices in a country with a rapidly greying and shrinking population like Japan. He also takes a more tongue-in-cheek view of the potential advantages of the robotisation of service sector jobs in the UK:

...British people are spectacularly bad at services -- shining examples of Sartrean sincerity and authenticity, they're unlikely to wish you a great day if they aren't having one themselves. The sooner these grumpy, reluctant, inefficient people are replaced by robots, some might say, the better. (Unemployed, the British can go off and do something usefully authentic and human, like inventing some new kind of punk rock.)

Anyone who has come from a more service-oriented country (ie anywhere outside Europe and many countries within), and been confronted with the horrors of the modern British high street will know the unfortunate truth of the above, but he's right about the by-products. Punk at least should make us proud to be British.