After reading this article, because of the tone it was written with I think it would be easy to dismiss the authors entire premis of replacing customer service agents with AI to improve efficiency and cut costs as a cold, heartless rant from an elitist that doesnt understand or worse even care about how important those jobs are to maintaining our social fabric...
but I won't, the fact is those jobs are being handled by machines right now and the author is somewhat correct, the bad employees need to be replaced but there are valid reasons why people are used instead of machines and I will try my best to give a few of them to address the authors points. Here goes..
Airports are very stressful for a certain amount of people, these people tend to get upset when say, they arrive late for a flight check in, it is much better for that person to be able to vent their frustrations towards a trained rep than another passenger without the social skills and training to de escalate a situation, who most likely is also upset as this would most likely result in further problems requiring police, courts, prisons etc.
Airline reps also however little it may seem are an athority figure and as such require passengers to treat them with certain level of decorum either by law or just social convention which tends to make othe rise unruly travelers toe the line. AIrvine reps are much more effective at moving people along than you may realize. There is a reason why during big events the police are called out to direct traffic and pedestrians instead of relying on the light controllers with all of their algorithms and that is because things run smoother, granted the example of an empty airport may not support that argument but all airports get busy and you cannot expect people to be available only when things get busy. (well you can but then you get bad workers)
When it comes to customs agents, I agree that being questioned is annoying and can make you feel like they are searching for a reason to arrest you, but that is their purpose and the fact that you felt that way is actually a good thing, yes scanning a passport is much better for the travelers but not necessarily better for everyone, just as swiping your drivers license into a kiosk might be better for the majority of people going through a drunk driver checkstop it would defeat the whole purpose.
The cashier that was too busy talking to their co worker to serve you should be fired. But there are vending machines in airports for everything now, they do tend to breakdown, get vandalized, run out of product. Yes you can solve these problems and as I said there are machines already doing this.
Finaly the McDonald's example, yes people do tend to up size their orders at kiosks just like how slot machines tend to encourage people to keep gambling, as a matter of fact though there was a certain movie called Super Size Me that attacked McDonald's for exactly what you see as a virtue but that is another argument all together. I live in an area that has McDonald's with these kiosks and they provide a value added service called create your own burger which allows you to mix and match McDonald's products together to create hybrid burgers like a quaternary pounder fillet o mac!! but again for some reason they do not accept cash and considering many of mcdonald's customers either prefer or are forced to use cash due to their financial situations there are still problems that need to be solved.
In conclusion I tend to agree that there are many benefits to automation and computer services, I myself use the self checkouts at my local grocery store but that does not mean that we can discount the benifits of real people, both systems have value and smart companies realize this and as such use both, choice is always better.