I agree with a lot of that, but they keep cashiers because they need subs for cooks when they go on break and drive thru to hand the food over.

When robots gets a little further along we'll see a feasible shift.

5-10 years ago everyone said fast food would be automated in 5-10 years...

Ok buddy. Apple & Google have shitty UX? Do you work for them? Do you know their KPIs? Stfu. You're ridiculous. You have no idea what you're talking about .

Branding is not even remarkably close to creating a product.

That's absolutely not true. Every problem requires a different approach. If you are following the same process everytime, you're not doing good UX.

Those 2-3 year designers are guided and mentored by 15 year veterans.

90% of businesses with no strategy or product can be covered by a shitty template because their real marketing is Facebook.

Real companies with real products that actually hire real engineers/designers don't use that crap. Tell me exactly how AI is going to interpret qualitative opinion and make ROI decisions? How is AI going to do journey mapping? How is AI going to run Usability tests?

I intentionally made the switch from being an engineer to UX many years ago because I knew it could not be automated, it's too human. Code on the other hand will definitely be automated.

Design has very little to do with visual aesthetics in the product world. Designs value is in creating useable experiences by solving user problems.

Let me know when AI can make interfaces that solve people's problems without understanding human emotion.