Maybe not rack and stack, this will definitely not fully replace traditional datacenter operations but complement it and make it more streamline.
Thinking about how we currently do disk and cable swaps,memory or even system boards misses the point. Of course it can't be automated because there's no unified standard. There needs to be one for such tasks to be fully automated with robots, the rack, server, network switch and even hot/cold aisles need to be redesigned to work with a standard that supports robotics arms instead of human ones. No more wires, maybe conductive rails.
This will take infinity to accomplish (barring disruption in compute/storage) because -
* Remote human hands are ridiculously cheap, and they can perform functions robots can't without extra pay or a paid for software upgrade (think shipment handling, etc). Only real use case that comes to mind is one without economic justification, but of necessity. Think datacenters in space or deep underwater, or hostile environments. So maybe innovation in this field will come from the government this time, and trickle to the private sector. Maybe.
* The cost of such investment far outweighs the financial gains. In the very competitive cloud business, it's the services you offer that matters most, and the reliability of your systems. Sending a person with a code scanner to verify and do a quick disk or cable swap is not a risky endeavour. Unplugging the wrong cable and causing an outage never happens on properly designed systems, with properly set maintenances, so this is irrelevant (when was the last time you've heard that in an outage retrospect?)
Back in high school. I had a Thinkpad running windows (I'm in my early 30s today), and 2 days before an assignment was due, my brother knocked it off a table, it hit every step down to the ground floor. The board was pretty much done (it was an old Thinkpad) and I had to figure out a way to salvage some of the data, so I did some research online.
I ended up downloading Ubuntu, created a bootable USB and managed to fish out my documents from the disks. Fast forward to today, and I'm part of an Ops team running and developing software to manage around 10K Ubuntu servers across several colocations.
I don't have children (yet), but for the parents out there - push your kids to tinker with technology, don't just buy a new one when it breaks.
For me it started out with breaking and assembling back almost every toy my parents bought me, to understand its internals. Please nurture this instinct.
