SUNNYVALE. Those confined to home to comply with Covid rules may find, when they return to work, that they have been replaced by a robot. Hotels and restaurants were struggling to find staff even before the pandemic and the Radisson Hotel in Sunnyvale, Silicon Valley, whose staff was blocked by Omicron, decided to run for cover: the drinks in the room are now served by robots.
It is an example that may soon be followed by other hotels and restaurants. Robots are now reliable, the humanoid presented a few months ago by Tesla is impressive, and in many service activities, machines are replacing men. Instead of being worried about what’s going on, customers are happy and amused by being served by a robot, who should not be tipped.
Those at Sunnyvale’s Radisonn are designed by Savioke, a Campbell, California-based company that supplies hospitals, retirement homes, restaurants and hotels with intelligent and helpful machines. “There is no point in paying high salaries to staff when a robot can do the same thing,” said Savioke CEO Steve Cousins, and anyone running a business can only agree.
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At the Radisson, when you want to have a drink, it’s called a robot. The machine only needs a short training to learn how to move around the lobby and corridors. He soon learns to take the elevator and to press the key of the floor he wants to go to. In the corridors he knows exactly how to avoid food carts left in front of doors or other guests he meets. If someone is unsure of which side to pass and zigzags, the robot does too, looking for an understanding. He is trained to avoid contact and can move even in a crowd without colliding with anyone.
Arriving at the door of the guest who called him, the robot says, “Our robot is waiting at the door of your room for the delivery.” The recorded voice is accompanied by some technological noises, like those of C1-P8 in “Star Wars”. When the customer appears, the robot opens its compartment, inside which there is the requested drink. You don’t have to tip him, you don’t even need to put on a bathrobe to open him, even if he is certainly equipped with a camera that records everything. You don’t need to wear masks, Covid anxiety is eliminated. The service is faster: the average wait has gone from 30 minutes to less than five. These days, but perhaps even in the future, people are happy not to have human contact when they want something. And companies take advantage of it: many things that post office or bank employees did before, today we do from home to the computer.
Robots don’t get sick, they don’t ask for holidays, they don’t go on strike, they don’t want salary increases or pension provisions. They work 24 hours a day for seven days, they never complain. The American police are using robot-dogs, robocops are already on the streets in Singapore, and in Estonia they are experimenting with robot-judges who should be more competent and impartial than humans. People who used to work in the future will stay at home getting bored, and making a living on no one knows what, since even robots will be built by other robots. Even Nostradamus, in its centuries, has predicted that 2022 will be the year of robots. But the French seer did not see anything good: in fact today we are amused, but soon we will fight, and it is not certain that we will win.