japanese hotel to be robot-staffed

[AccuTron]

Here's another item for the trend to replace workers with robots.  

 

Robot hotel to open in Japan | Al Jazeera America

 

 

As a minor humorous point to it all, I noticed the phrase "old-fashioned keys" may be used if a guest is not comfy with facial recognition.  Are these brass keys with notches?  I think just magnetic cards.  Funny how the phrase is reassigned to a newer old-fashion.

[NotDarkYet]

The lefties chickens are coming home to roost.

[AccuTron]

Does anyone know the stats on the dollar-only cost of a human employee at a fast food store, versus the installed and maintained cost of equivalent machines?  

 

A sales kiosk is probably now a catalog item from restaurant equipment suppliers.  I believe all food prep phases have already been automated.  I'm guessing an installed cost of sales and/or prep machines for a single small store may be low to high tens of thousand dollars, which would be just one or a few years worth of human wages.  (And of course there's the lack of income tax, etc.)

[J-William]

Does anyone know the stats on the dollar-only cost of a human employee at a fast food store, versus the installed and maintained cost of equivalent machines?

 

A sales kiosk is probably now a catalog item from restaurant equipment suppliers. I believe all food prep phases have already been automated. I'm guessing an installed cost of sales and/or prep machines for a single small store may be low to high tens of thousand dollars, which would be just one or a few years worth of human wages. (And of course there's the lack of income tax, etc.)

I think a fully automated restaraunt in the fashion that it could replace a human staffed one is probably still in the multimillion dollar range.

I don't know anything specific about that business, but if it were in the tens of thousands then places with very high labor costs would have already converted.

 

I mean, a fast food restaurant somewhere with $15 an hour labor costs is going to cost at least half a million every year in labor, so you could amortize costs very quickly.

We will see this happen as costs come down and labor regulations don't keep up.

[AccuTron]

Good points.  I was thinking the smaller menu (simpler steps) of a single fast food outlet.  I'll go online and see what I find.  (Modern citizen's note to self: research cost of replacing self with machine.  See today's Dilbert comic attached below.)  

 

Whatever it is now, the technology is clearly going to be a major player in a few years (3-5?), to the point that the cost is really the total vendor contract, as the actual machines are fairly simple (and clever) blends of well established electromechanical technique and require virtually nil special materials.  Referencing another technology, at what point are the contract computer installs, with well-dressed IBM associates, replaced by online ordering a Dell from a big box store?

 

 

 

From another angle:  Sci-fi is fascinating, what are the possibilities of the more distant future?  I don't know how sci-fi writers will come up with new stuff to put into the fiction race, since reality is catching up fast, and has already blown by much of the field.  (Yes, I have an affection for metaphor.)

 

I am intrigued by the thought of robot-hood and person-hood blurring the lines, like corporations are now in some ways considered "persons."  If robots are just capital equipment, it's used until it's junked, and there are tax write offs.  

 

But if robots of decades hence become some sort of HAL9000, and can't be turned off because humans don't completely understand how they work, they just do (which I think is how A.C.Clarke told it in 2001: A SpaceOdyssey), then there is the doubt of whether it's a life form, similar to the question of when life in the womb begins.  

 

Whatever any person here and now might feel, a social movement of the future could easily wield enough political power to get legal action towards that end.  Does the capital write-down evolve into a form of unemployment insurance for under-utilized robots?  

 

Any sci-fi minds out there want to run with that?