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Useless robot waiters fired for incompetence in China
If you lie awake at night worrying about the ‘threat’ of Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over the world, then take heart from a recent episode involving robot waiters in China.
Three restaurants in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou have been forced to fire all of their robot staff after their utter incompetence began costing them money.
Two of the restaurants have closed completely after discovering the clumsy waiters could not perform simple tasks like taking orders, pouring drinks and carrying soup, reports say.
The slacking robot team also kept breaking down and after a string of complaints the third restaurant mentioned above decided to sack all but one and bring back human employees, the Workers’ Daily newspaper reports.
“The mobility of the catering staff was great, we initially recruited six for service, but after a year we only retained one,” explained a supervisor at the restaurant.
Website Shanghaiist quoted one manager who said: “Their skills are somewhat limited. They couldn’t pour water for customers, nor could they take orders.”
Zhang Yun, from the Guangdong University of Technology, told the website that robots can excel when given repetitive tasks but struggle when they have to interact with humans.
Robot waiters may well eventually revolutionise the service industry but it appears that it may still be a few years away.
Microsoft recently presented another case of why you can’t always rely on AI after the company apologised for its chat bot becoming a 'Hitler-loving sex robot'.
The software giant retired the chat robot named Tay, an AI modelled to speak 'like a teen girl', after it generated racist and sexist tweets.
Meanwhile, another set of researchers believe that fairy tales could be the key in stopping killer robots from taking over the world.
While these futurists have claimed that nanobots in our brains could give us 'God-like' intelligence.