Bring On the Boring Robots

malachiorion writes: After a successful 6-month pilot, Savioke's 'butler bots' are heading to hotels around the country. These are not sexy, scary, or even technically impressive machines. But they were useful enough, over the course of their 2,000 or so deliveries, to warrant a redesign, and a larger deployment starting in April. Savioke's CEO had some interesting things to say about the pilot, including the fact that some 95 percent of guests gave the robot a 5-star review, and only the drunks seemed to take issue with it. Plus, as you might expect, everyone seemed to want to take a damn selfie with it. But as small as the stakes might appear, highly specialized bots like this one, which can only do one thing (in this case, bring up to 10 pounds of stuff from the lobby to someone's door) are a better glimpse of our future than any talk of hyper-competent humanoids or similarly versatile machines.

Comments

Real purpose for this

[Waffle Iron]

I think this is mainly going to be an excuse for hotels to add a daily $7.99 (+ $1.39 tax) "Robot Fee" to your bill.

Re:Real purpose for this

[Dunbal]

Only $7.99? We must stay at different hotels...

Ultracompetent robots

[tmosley]

Well, "boring" robots might represent the IMMEDIATE future, but highly integrated AI is already the present (search, siri, etc), and highly integrated AGI will follow with high probability, with highly integrated ASI highly likely to follow after that. There is no reason that I can find to think differently, outside of handwaving "it's impossible" arguments, which are immediately disproven by the existence of our own brains and the incredible things we have been able to do with neural nets on par with insect brains.

Re:Ultracompetent robots

[tmosley]

Yes, in the sense that I, as a human, could interpret signals from a keyboard. Not nearly as efficient as the digital method.

There is now an AI which can be shown a picture (or a hundred trillion of them) and label not only what is in the picture (say, a little girl and a dog) but can identify what is going on in the picture (the little girl is playing with the dog). There is another that can look at a picture and identify the sentiment being expressed by that picture. There is yet another that can take a sample of writing and give a fairly accurate and fairly reproducible psychological profiles on the authors.

Also note that you have again proven how little you actually know about the field by trivializing visual processing by comparing it to keyboard recognition. We are creating little parts of brains here, but you don't understand that for some reason. I suspect it has something to do with your advancing age.

Garbage disposal most assuredly not a robot

[SuperKendall]

I am rather grateful every time I go to fetch something that has slipped down into the drain that my garbage disposal is not evaluating the probability my fingers should constitute moving to the Destroy All Matter mode on its internal state diagram.

Re: We already have these

[Anonymous Coward]

What's interesting is, today we'd like to give these jobs to really expensive machines instead of people -- right at the moment when jobs for people are disappearing. We are no longer interested in "the lobby boy who knows what you want before you do"; we'd rather interact with machines, because you don't have to say "Thank You" to a machine. I guess we're too busy putting the "ad" in Advanced Civilization to remember the "civil" part.

Re:Tomy

[Headw1nd]

No, the point the article is trying to make is that you will not be impressed by the robots of the future. Rather than amazing high tech marvels, what will become common is everyday robots that are just good enough to do what they need to.

Re: We already have these

[Kiuas]

today we'd like to give these jobs to really expensive machines instead of people

The machines are capable of working 24/7/365 (minus the maintanance hours) for no pay. In the long run, the reason menial jobs are being replaced by machines is that in many cases the machines are capable of doing the same job with far less cost per hour, and in the end that's what matters, not how much the machine costs out front.

right at the moment when jobs for people are disappearing

Jobs for people aren't disappearing, they're changing. The demand for low-skill physical labor has been going steadily down since the 1700s because as I already said: if you can do the job with a machine, chances are it's going to be cheaper and faster in the long run. At the same time as many jobs have disappeared, new ones have emerged and keep emerging.

we'd rather interact with machines, because you don't have to say "Thank You" to a machine.

Thank you has nothing to do with it. The two possible scenarios for me to charge my local travel card (ie. train ticket) here in Helsinki are as follows:

1) Go to a kiosk or a store, wait in line, hand the card to the person and state the amount of money/time I want entered, wait for the person to do that, then pay and take the card
or
2) go to an ticket vending machine, put the card in, press literally 4 buttons to renew my last purchase (I usually buy a month at a time), slap in my debit card, punch in the pin and be done

The fact of the matter is, there's usually way less waiting in line at the machine, and the actual buying itself takes less time. I've no problem telling thank you to the sale's lady, but in most situations using the machine is just more handy unless I happen to have some other business to take care of at the store at the same time.

The same is true for many, many services that used to be handled by clerks: I'll rather do my check-in at the airport or the harbor via a machine because it's easier and quicker, no need to go stand in line to buy concert tickets as I can buy them online and print them out or just have 'em read the QR-code from the phone screen, etc...

So unfortunately no, I cannot agree with this" you don't have to thank the machine" -BS. The machine gives me the exact same end result as I'd get from a person, except it usually does it faster. Unless the product/service I'm buying is so complicated that I need a guy there to help me figure out what I need to get, having a person there brings no additional benefit for me as a customer.