Pretty soon, there will be no more restaurants, cafés, or trendy one-item shops — just a post-apocalyptic landscape of vending machines. There are already ones that make latte art for hot coffee in Japan, others that dispense live crabs in China, and now some mad scientists in Shanghai have invented a vending machine that makes and dispenses beef noodles in just two minutes. At first, this seems like a potentially good idea (more noodles!), but there’s a twist: The inventors apparently see their invention as a solution to the so-called “problem” of noodle shops, namely that they cost money and require people to operate. But noodle shops are great. The world needs more noodles, not fewer noodle shops — as long as these noodle machines wind up in places like airports or train stations, that seems fine. Just leave noodle shops alone.
