It's a Brave New World - Robots Take Over!
We don't quite know, yet, how this may affect the hotel industry and employment chances in the tourism and event industry but Nagasaki, Japan, proudly presents the first hotel completely run by robots: Henn-Na Hotel at Huis Ten Bosch Amusement Park.
From check-in to porter services, it's all automatic and automated and multi-lingual at the push of a touch screen.
We just have one question: how do you tip a robot?
It seems that robots are everywhere these days!
Closer to home, The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University is developing "co-robots" who can work with humans. Robot assistants for the blind and caregiver robots for the elderly will be just as common as Google's autonomous driving car soon.
Furthermore, robotic medical devices are nearly ready for implanting into human bodies to monitor health and trigger alerts for timely intervention and blood plasma based bioplastics that will revolutionize the natural healing process are already in the human clinical trial phase.
Television already shows us what the near future may hold. Halle Berry plays mom to a "humanic" boy and an alien hybrid in "Extant", cars are self-driving and daily chores at work and at home are performed by invisible high tech assistants that respond to voice command. Siri on steroids!
Actually, social, emotionally responsive robots already exist!
Jibo is the first family robot, a hands free helper who listens and talks to you! Yes, he welcomes you home and orders take-out dinner, reads you your messages and much much more.
Pepper is your guy if you need an emotionally responsive greeter with endless charm, stamina and a little more height. He stands 1m27 (50 inches) tall and became commercially available on June 20th! Yes, he can open your next annual meeting!
It seems that robots. androids, cyborgs, humanoids and humanics will be part of our lives.
But how do we feel about our new mechanical friends and helpers?
According to a two-phase study by a team of German researchers who presented test groups with videos of human - human and human - robot interaction, tender as well as violent, we feel empathy towards the machines.
“We did not find large differences in brain activation when comparing the human and robot stimuli. Even though we assumed that the robot stimuli would trigger emotional processing, we expected these processes to be considerably weaker than for human stimuli. It seems that both stimuli undergo the same emotional processing,” writes Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten from the University Duisburg-Essen.
This explains our sadness over the demise of HitchBOT, an adorable little hitchhiker robot, who was "killed" by vandals in Philadelphia on August 1st.
HitchBot, a simple, child-sized little fellow was developed in Port Credit, Ontario, Canada, to study the other side of the coin.
Professional Communication professor Dr. Frauke Zeller:
“Usually, we are concerned with whether we can trust robots. This project asks: can robots trust human beings?”
HitchBOT was deliberately cute and simple. Equipped with Wellington boots and rubber gloves, its technological heart was really quaint. It needed the help of kind strangers to hitch rides on its global journey.
HitchBOT traveled across all of Canada in 2014 and safely visited Germany and the Netherlands earlier this year.
He started his American adventure on July 17 in Massachusetts, thumb up to hitch across the USA, hoping to reach San Francisco.
His journey ended just 2 weeks later in Philadelphia where vandals ripped his head and arms off and damaged the helpless bot so badly that the team had to end the social experiment.
The good news: kind strangers did find the parts and are sending the package home to Canada - after all, bots don't die. They get reassembled!
We can think of a myriad fun ways to use bots in events.
Looking forward to having those little helpers on site!
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