Technology advances become more
and more sophisticated every day, and based on these advances, the Japanese
theme park Huis Ten Bosch plans to launch an all-robot staff hotel in
July 2017. Henn-na Hotel’s robots endowed with human likeness will be
able to act as receptionists, porters, cleaners etc. Others technology
innovations will be settled such as facial recognition for room door opening,
air conditioning adjusting to guest’s body temperature, solar panel energy, and
other eco-aware innovations.
According to Huis Ten Bosch President Hideo Sawada, the company plans “to
have more than 90 percent of hotel services operated by robots” but also to
build 1,000 similar robot-guided hotels worldwide. Robot revolution is underway
and with the rapidity at which technology is developing human-like actroids
will soon give way to humanoids. We know that in the near or distant future,
robots will be more and more present in our society, and we can wonder to what
extent can robots replace human beings?
In
Singapore, Timbre Group restaurants will equip itself during this year with
Infinium Robotics drone technology. These waiters’ drones floating in the
restaurant will allow the Managing Director, Edward Chia, to reduce the number
of employees in each restaurant in order to redirect them to higher skilled
jobs and open more outlets. With this new organization, the “human touch” is
still present in the restaurants and the drones constitute a help in the staff’s
more basic tasks.
Source: WorldNews
These
new practices in term of staff replacement or complement are a way for
companies to make them known, to attract new customers but how will they face
possible technological problems? Drones and robots being a new technology, we
can wonder if the maintenance costs won’t be more expensive in the long term
than paying human staff wages.
Another
point that call us to mind, is the use of robots and drones to replace humans
when the unemployment rate is still very high. In fact, it is a recurrent
problem that each country has to face, and that the global economy is suffering
from. Hence to use these new smart technologies instead of the potential work
force available raise an ethical issue.
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