Robots have been developed over the years to take over various jobs in different industries. With the fast growth and development of AI, people are starting to worry that their jobs too will soon be replaced. It seems that fears in the service industry are just that as robot servers fail to fulfill their tasks efficiently.
Robot Servers Won't Replace Humans Just Yet
Robotic servers are already being used in certain places, especially in Japan. Customers are often impressed by them, but workers in the service industry are more afraid than amazed since these machines will take over their jobs one day.
Luckily, that day is still far from now. Restaurants claim that human servers are still more efficient than robot servers, especially in a restaurant that has a lot of customers that are being served. Two restaurants said that they have already fired their robot workers.
The machines were not all bad. The restaurants even said that they were useful in some cases, but the problems outweigh their capabilities, as reported by Interesting Engineering. Humans can still do everything that robots can, but robots cannot do everything a human can.
Alan Song from Foodie Kitchen said they tried it out because they were a new thing. Mostly, they were "great for carrying hot dishes and bringing used dishes and bowls back to the kitchen, to help save human labor."
Still, the robots were monitored and followed by staff to make sure that it performs smoothly, which means that the work was just doubled. If anything, the robots were just for show to encourage customers to dine in the restaurant.
They couldn't use it to deliver soup since the abrupt stops of the robot may cause it to spill. It also gets confused with table arrangements in the event that customers put them together to create a bigger table. There's even one instance where the robot dropped the food to move faster.
Restaurant owner Zhengwen Hao said that the robots were useful during the pandemic when there were fewer customers to tend to. As the crowd grew, so did the number of tables, which resulted in less space where the robot could move through.
Other Jobs Are Already in Trouble
Just because the food service industry is safe from technology over for now, other jobs are not so lucky. Even years before, a lot of labor workers have already been replaced by machinery since it's a cheaper and faster way to produce.
Since AI is becoming advanced enough to process more complex data, a lot of data-related jobs are already in danger. Soon enough, clerical work could be handled by AI. Since they're more or less sets of numbers and letters, machines could be better to avoid human error.
There are already reports of companies firing employees and replacing them with AI chatbots like ChatGPT. It is, after all, capable of many things. Unfortunately, it's a matter of "when" and not "if" when it comes to robots and AI replacing humans in some jobs.
