I would also like to add that large scale bread production is already mostly automated. You will still have local bakeries because fresh bread is nice, and the automation needs large factory halls that are unlikely to be near your home or match your schedule.
Indeed, but the point is that man-made bread > industrial bread in the end. It's not because you can automate something that it create better goods in the end.
If that was the case we would replace cooks with robots for a long time as well.
And of course the list goes on for many, many other professions.
It's obvious that the ones who predict massive automation of most jobs are thinking WAY AHEAD of their life. It's not going to happen anytime soon, no matter how much software and hardware is "eating the world". Making predictions is always a risky business... after all we were all supposed to have flying cars by 2015 and whatever, yet the best piece of tech we have is just a tiny computer in our pockets - that's a great achievement, but it's a little short of the dreams we had 30 years ago.
It's also more expensive, and I am fine with industrial bread. I know many, many people who only buy their break from the supermarket and that is all industrialized. Bakeries still exist, but many less do than several years ago.
For automation to be a success it doesn't have to replace 100% of the market, and it's unlikely for it to ever truly reach 100% for the reasons you mention. But that's fine, it'll just slowly keep growing.
Then I hope you will also agree that "extinction" is too strong of a word, and we use it too often around here while in reality most jobs have a hard time disappearing completely, if at all.
On top of that, not sure about where you live, but some supermarkets also have reversed their trend about industrial bread and hire "baker-workers" who actually bake bread on-site (from industrial paste) instead of it being purely delivered for consumption, which is slightly better and fresher, and require human workers.
To be fair, I never did use the word extinction. I used deprecated and obsolete, which I stand by. Deprecated jobs may still exist because some people prefer it that way, they'll just become specialists. And they may also be obsolete for the primary market, but as we already discussed some people prefer a higher quality which these specialists might provide.
I'm from the Netherlands, and I haven't heard about the industrial paste thing. I don't think it happens, but maybe it does. In any case, if they do do that, there is no doubt in my mind that they need less workers to perform these tasks than to bake the bread from scratch. So that is still a win for automation.
I've seen that reversed trend, and it's the reason I go to bakeries - the bread in bakery shops is fresher and better even though they don't bake it on-site, but get it delivered from somewhere (I assume a big industrial bakery providing for the entire city) two-three times a day! The supermarket baked-on-site bread is much worse, and looks like a desperate attempt by supermarkets to keep people buying bread there.
Are they? Two local markets near me that bake bread on-site use the already employed staff. Putting dough into oven and setting a timer isn't much work, so usually the person behind the meat counter does that.
