With the increasing automation of various industries, people are understandable worried how many of them are going to be made redundant for robots.
At the very least, it seems many in the hospitality industry are going to be fine, at least for now anyway.
Images courtesy: Henn-na Hotel
The Henn-na Hotel in Japan gained Internet fame in 2015 for setting up with a mostly robot workforce. With a total of 243 robots, it was the first automated hotel of its kind. Apparently, it really sucked.
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It turns out the robots were so bad at their jobs that they were just creating more work for the few human staffers present. Now, the hotel has laid off at least half of the robotic workforce in favour of human replacements.
One of the robots named Churi was present in every single room in the hotel. It was a doll-shaped device sitting on a nightstand that was supposed to act as a digital assistant. Unlike Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa however, it couldn't really answer questions about local businesses' open hours. That was a major problem, because it was supposed to help guests with at least simple and common answers about the area so human employees wouldn't have to divert their attention.
Two other velociraptor robots (because why not) from the check-in desk are also being put out to pasture. Apparently the employees had to do their work for them and manually photocopy guests' passports. The robot at the concierge desk is also being decommissioned, being utterly shit at its singular job of telling guests about flight schedules and local tourist attractions.
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And lastly, two bellboy robots are being junked, since they constantly failed in helping guests with their luggage. Not only could they only reach 24 of the 100-plus rooms, they also couldn't maneuver in rain or snow. And they kept getting stuck passing each other in the halls. Yeah...it seems like less of a robot hotel and more of a workshop for anger management.
According to the Wall Street Journal, most of these robots had been in service for years, and were thus outdated. As such, the company thought it cheaper to get rid of all of them rather than upgrade to newer models, especially since they had to keep on human employees anyway.
So it might be some time before a true Sci-Fi-worthy hotel becomes reality.