Japanese Robot Hotel Fires Its Robot Staff For Being Incompetence

Well, it seems like not just human but even robots are going through a hard time keeping their jobs.  The Wall Street Journal reported that because of their incompetence to complete their duties, half of 243 robot staff at Henn-na “Strange” Hotel in Japan were fired.

The dismissal included an assistant with doll-like appearance called Churi. Churi is put inside each hotel room to provide assistance. While Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant can answer inquiries about the opening and closing hours of local businesses, Churi couldn’t.

For example, when being asked “What is the opening time of the theme park?” by the hotel guests, it could give a good response. This posed as a significant issue as Churi was expected to help with the staff shortage of Strange Hotel by filling in human workers’ positions.

Other robots on the layoff list:

• Two velociraptor robots at the check-in area were also fired since human staff had to do all their jobs and manually photocopy passports of guests.
• Two robot luggage carriers could only get as far as 24 rooms in the total of 100 rooms in the hotel. They also failed to operate in the rain or snow. Moreover, when trying to go past each other, they often got stuck.
• The chief concierge robot of the hotel also did not know how to handle questions about close by tourist attractions or and flight schedules. A human then replaced its position.

Most of the robots in the layoffs were in operation for many years leading to them being outdated. Because of high costs, the hotel came to the decision to fire them instead of replacing them with new robots.

Ultimately, a great deal of tasks is still left for human staff, especially more complicated questions. It seems like we still have a long road ahead from building an entirely automated hotel.