UK employer fires robot after a week
THERE’S a lot of talk about how robots will be replacing people and eliminating jobs. Maybe that will happen someday in the future. But, based on what just happened at one retail store, that future is still a ways off.
Margiotta, a family-owned, upscale food-and-wine chain based in the UK, thought it would be fun to test out a robot assistant in one of their locations. Unfortunately, the experiment didn’t go very well.
Fabio – no, not the silky-haired model – is a robot with software developed by scientists at HeriotWatt University. The idea was to station Fabio at the door of the Edinburgh Margiotta so that he could greet shoppers with high fives, food samples and helpful directions to products.
Poor Fabio. He got fired after only a week. Why? Mashable reports that the robot couldn’t move well enough to direct customers to products and would sometimes give customers incorrect or inadequate information (thanks, internet!). More disturbingly, Fabio would unexpectedly yell out “hello, gorgeous” or offer up unwanted high fives and even hugs to startled shoppers. The result? A bunch of creeped-out customers.
Don’t worry, Fabio fans. The robot is still in its early days and its manufacturer – SoftBank, a Japanese company – says it already has over 10,000 similar robots in operation at retail stores, cruise ships and even homes around the world, with plans to ship thousands more in the years to come.