In Japan, the human workforce has been shrinking and the solution that many businesses are already testing is robots. Robots have been used in stores, banks and soon to be hotels. One robot, Aiko Chihira, appears as a 32 year old female greeter that can move, speak, use sign language, and even sing. It can not have conversations yet but technology is fast improving. Another robot, Nao, who works customer service at a bank in Tokyo. It can answer basic questions and is designed to speak 19 languages. This type of technology would be very useful for when the 2020 Olympics come to Tokyo. There is even a robot designed just to chat with people in a store. Pepper is the name of it, and it is designed so that it looks like a robot, but has humanlike qualities. A hotel in Nagasaki plans to open this summer and staff 10 robots right off the bat. The role robots play in Japan is only small for now, but is quickly growing.
It is scary to think of having robots in the workforce. Soon enough this technology will reach the states and we will be seeing them in our stores. I don't like this at all. I don't think that our technology is advanced enough yet to have robots working instead of humans. They need to be able to actually communicate with customers on a conversational level. I would feel more comfortable talking to a person than to a robot who has limited talking ability. I would be fine with having robots in the workforce if they could function nearly like a human, but until then I would rather see humans behind the counters.
Story: http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/24/asia/japan-robots-work/index.html
I see some of the positives to robots also and I wrote a similar blog post to this last week. I think that the other downside to having robots is that they take up jobs of people who could really use them.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. Seeing robots work our stores would be freaky and I want no part of that.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I would rather have a human behind the counters and not a lifeless robot.
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