A lot
of the use of robots in our modern labor market has centered up until now on
performing work related to products: manufacturing and warehousing. But it was inevitable that robots were going
to creep more and more into the service industries. A new hotel in Nagasaki, Japan intends to
make androids a significant part of the staff.
Adrian Bridge in his article for The Telegraph, “Robots to serve
guests in Japanese hotel” (Feb. 3, 2015) discusses the Henn-na Hotel (which
appropriately means “strange hotel” in Japanese). Among the categories of workers that will be
robots are reception desk workers, porters, housekeeping staff and a cloakroom
attendant. The article says that many of
the robots resemble a young Japanese woman.
If this means that it will be the same Japanese woman robot over and
over again, that would be pretty spooky.
These Japanese woman robots will be able to speak Japanese, Chinese,
Korean, and English. They will also be
able to gesture with their hands, move their eyes in a human way and smile. They belong to a group of highly developed
androids called “actroid” androids.
The
hotel where these androids will work is situated in the middle of a theme park
that looks like a Dutch town. In
addition, the hotel is surrounded by nature.
There will be along with the androids, 10 human staff members. The theme park is hopeful that if the hotel
is successful, another hotel will open in 2016, and after that, others could be
opened in Japan and around the world.
A
hotel is required to deal with small intimate details in order to satisfy a
customer. The commercial entities that
it sells are not discrete pre-made product categories that can easily be
reduced to a series of pre-programmed potential interactions for the
androids. The commercial entities that
it sells are spontaneous interactions.
The commercial entities that it sells are nuanced flowing blendable
continual interactions with customers, who often have special needs based on
anxieties about travel, desires to maintain unique lifestyle routines even away
from home, and a need to use service staff as surrogate family, friends and
even therapists. Sometimes a member of a
hotel staff has to deal with an unusual crisis. What if a guest suddenly
becomes sick and requires first aid and/or a doctor or even an ambulance. Well, we might say, this is where the human
staff members come in. But with only 10
human staff, what if they are involved in other important tasks? What if they are in meetings? What if by the time they would get to the
guest, the guest had already become very sick as with a stroke or a heart
attack? And what if a guest needs CPR or
the Heimlich manoeuver?
There
are so many different unique flowing blendable continual situations which
require nuanced decision making. These
unique situations can’t possibly be effectively programmed as formal categories
of life situations that would require certain discrete formulaic operational
responses. All a robot can do is to try
and take whatever problem situation with which a human may present him and fit
that situation into one of the discrete problem situation categories with which
it has been programmed for an operational response. It would appear to me that what could arise
would be similar to having a computer translate a text into another
language. The computer has been
programmed to translate the formal denotation of a word, but is going to have
trouble picking up when certain connotations come into play. The result is translations that can be
bewildering or even ludicrous.
There
is an additional major problem involved in using android service
employees. Because of all the nuances
involved in the services that can be requested by a hotel guest, there is something
much more intimate involved here than using robots for blue collar work. It may be a shallow bond, but a kind of
bonding does take place in the interaction between a guest and a hotel
employee. The hotel employee is there to
take care of you, to take care of your wants and needs. The employees at the front desk try to match
your special requests for an ideal preferred room with the rooms that are
available. The employees in room service
have to deal with requests for meals that aren’t on the menu and that can
involve very special details. Handling
properly these special requests from guests is not a programmable science. Rather, it is an art. So what does it mean to interface with
complex behavioral entities (namely, androids) who are there to respond to your
human wants and needs, but who can do so only in a very imperfect way?
There
are similarities between this kind of interfacing and some of the interfacing
that has been discussed in previous articles with other kinds of robots. I am talking here about how robots are being
developed as companions for humans – in particular, the very young and the very
old. With children, robots are being
programmed to be educators and caretakers.
With the elderly, robots are being programmed to do housekeeping tasks
and to help take care of health tasks like distributing medicine at the
appropriate times. I have discussed how
this kind of interfacing with respect to more intimate human tasks sets up
subtle relationships where the robot mirrors back to the human the human’s
defects in imitating the smooth crisp discrete defined angular efficient
actions of the robot. At the same time,
the robot acts as a model for how the human should behave in the future.
Now
obviously the intensity of the bonding and therefore the degree of individual
influence is not going to be great between a human hotel guest and an android
hotel service provider. But what is
diminished in terms of intensity is more than made up for by the pervasiveness
of the robots in different sections and activities of the hotel. The modalities of robot activity are spread
out through a relatively large swath of the human hotel guest’s field of
experience. With robot companions, there
is frontal mirroring and modeling – the human is influenced as a result of his
direct face-to-face interaction with the robots. But in a situation like the Henn-na Hotel,
the robot activity can literally surround the hotel guest and influence him
more easily preconsciously on the periphery of his field of experience. The mirroring and modeling influences can
enter a hotel guest’s mind when he is not directly paying attention.
And
this kind of enveloping experiential influence by android service providers may
not be limited to hotels in the not-so-distant future. Robot staffing in shops, department stores,
restaurants, amusement parks, zoos and nightclubs. Why not?
It would certainly be more economical for the owners and
management. No need for salaries, wages,
health benefits, pension plans. But
apart from the fact that an awful lot of people would be put out of work, the
effect of having a pervasive presence of robot service providers would be
enormous.
There
would be an enormous growth not only in frontal encounters with androids but
also in peripheral awareness of them and their behavior and their
activities. With the peripheral
experiences of androids, there would be ongoing mirroring and modeling from
them, even for those humans whose direct frontal encounters with them would
only occupy a small portion of their day.
In other words, the boundaries between what constitutes a human and what
constitutes an android would become more and more blurred. People would become influenced by the
presence of so many androids in their fields of experience, much the way that
non-smokers can experience health problems from secondary smoke.
This
is why I view the opening of the Henn-na Hotel with such concern. If it is the harbinger of a lot of things to
come, the way its developers want it to be, it could have an enormous influence
on the evolution of the human sense of self.
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