At least they're trying not be less chav-appealing.

Great thought piece.
FYI, McDonalds has had automated machines in Europe for more than five years now, especially in France. Mechanization may be followed by increased wages or at least is not incongruent with them, depending on the country, but I'm fairly certain it also follows that employers making said wages are far fewer. This is a larger problem with making everything digital. Not just automated, mind you, as Henry Ford's automobiles and McDonalds burger flipping stations are of the same ilk--automated but largely dependent upon the human touch in one form or another. But if we talk about digitizing everything to the point where people are not needed at all? The minute you make employees redundant, the minute there becomes a need for fewer employees, except perhaps those to fix the machines.
Hotels are also doing this, by the way. Slowly, we're moving up the economic food chain. What happens when doing surgery with the aid of a robot (already here) becomes surgery via robot? What happens when all taxis are self-driving? There goes Uber and another economy collapses.
On one side, the argument is, complete mechanization will free us up to do all those things we normally can't do because of work.
Two points on that. First off-- free us up to do what? We've so devalued the worth of culture by piracy already, that all we'd be free to do is create music/art/books no one wants to pay for or consume unless its for free. So the audience naturally will drop and the culture, devalued as it is, will continue to plummet.
Point 2. What if-- just what if, the necessity of work (or at the very least, fear of not being able to pay the rent or eat) is one of the primary motivators that drive us to create? Everyone from Van Gogh (who basically never sold a painting in his life) to Paul Auster (who spent a decade plus toiling away and literally living Hand to Mouth had their toiling away years that produced an incredible amount of work that has had a long lasting effect on our culture. Same with musical innovators like Lou Reed, and more. For a lack of a better term, what happens from an existential standpoint if that need to create is removed because of freaking robots?
From my standpoint, it won't be good in bigger picture terms.

Why thank you so much for the great compliment! Of course, we had to remove your spam link, especially because it is related to pornographic materials and of course you lose one hundred points because the author of said article is not in fact a "he" but a "she" which you would have known if you'd looked, but I guess like, that's too much trouble isn't it.