The Henn-na hotel in Sasebo, Japan is currently staffed entirely by machines, including one that resembles a dinosaur.
Automated services are currently the future and many consumers have seen changes in hotels all around the world.
The Marriott hotel in Ghent, Belgium has had a robot named Mario on staff since June, 2015. Mario can greet guests in 19 different languages and even has the important task of guarding the buffet.
These services are also available in some hotels in the United States such as the Hilton McLean hotel in Virginia. They have a human mimicking Watson computer powered by IBM who serves as a concierge.
Royal Caribbean, a popular cruise line, also installed cocktail mixing robots in their bars on several of its cruise ships.
Robot technology is undeniably the future and is becoming more popular among business. Many other posts on this blog back up this claim regarding robotic technology and it will be interesting to see how this affects consumers.
It will also be interesting to see how these robots affect the economy as it is possible that some hotels will be fully run by robots. This shift to automated services will definitely cause job losses and I am curious to see how workers react.
It’s really amazing how far technologies like this have come. It will be interesting to see what service industries will be impacted like this next. Hopefully the labor markets will be able to adjust to technological advancements like the ones discussed in this article. One way that labor markets may be able to evolve and adjust for new technologies is by creating new job markets related to creating and maintaining similar new technologies.
ReplyDeleteGiven that hotel workers are typically employees that receive low to minimum wages, and now there will be less employees, will this increase minimum wage? Most likely. As this happens will it mean that the employees can then go find new jobs that have relatively higher wages? It could mean so or it could mean that where these jobs disappear, the job market emerges for those who will be working with the robots themselves meaning that the labor force becomes more skilled, but these unemployed workers could have a more difficult job finding their way back to employment. This experiment does seem to have some huge potential that could unfold very soon
ReplyDeleteI am amazed that this invention actually works. It will be very interesting to see what direction this goes and how it affects the economy.
ReplyDeleteAs robots become more and more common. People will need to adapt to have the education to fix these machines. I do think it would decease labor but only increase need for people to work on these.
ReplyDeleteIt always amazes me when jobs are taken by machines. I was just at a movie theater where there was no longer a ticket sales person, but rather a machine. Not only do I wonder about the labor market, I wonder if we are losing a sense of daily interaction with others that is becoming less and less necessary.
ReplyDeleteThis is just another reason a higher education is becoming more and more important in today's society. Employers are looking to cut costs in any way possible, this may be a gimmick to some degree, and it's doubtful that human interaction will be completely eliminated any time soon. But it is important to note the rate at which jobs are becoming increasingly obsolete.
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