LG has announced three new service bots according to this piece in The Verve, for operating within locations like hotels and airports. They are concepts at the moment. Next week’s CES in Vegas will, no doubt, have more to say on this.
The MIT Tech Review newsletter that alerted me to the original article provided an opinion that these would probably not be replacing humans anytime soon. Their rationale was that recipients of service industry (ie you and me) would not want this any time soon.
I am afraid I disagree with argument on this one.
I travel a lot. In the past 6 months, I have probably been in an airport at least once a week and a hotel a few more times than that. Although I would always prefer a human in these environments, no one has ever asked my opinion. Not once. Not one little word about how I felt regarding the replacement of real live humans with an automated alternative in all the time I have travelled. In the recent months, I have always boarded through automatic gates, using the boarding pass downloaded onto my phone; I have used auto-registration at the front door of hotels when I have arrived too late; and I have used auto check-in counters in terminals to change my seat allocations. At each event, although it would have been nice to have a person dealing with my situation, I was not offered the option. And I could get what I needed done this way, so who I am to raise a stink about something that is actually working quite well? I suspect I am quite typical of most. The new ways we are being served are just part of the evolution of inventiveness and, as long as it doesn’t get in our way, we don’t complain.
The service industry’s under immense cost pressure from disruptions like AirBnB and low cost carriers. I very much doubt the argument that people prefer humans is going to have a great impact upon the trade offs their leaders are prepared to make. I expect to see these little droids on my travels very soon!