Unexpected robot in the bagging area!
WHO will save us from the robots? This is the question that the squillionaire business magnate and inventor Elon Musk kept asking throughout last year.
‘ There will certainly be job disruption. Because what’s going to happen is robots will be able to do everything better than us . . . I mean all of us,’ he said in July. ‘ This is really the scariest problem.’
Musk also argued, in his panicky way, that Artificial Intelligence is ‘ a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs or bad food are not’.
Later in the year, he tweeted that ‘ Competition for AI superiority at national level most likely to cause WW3’.
Something makes me doubt that Mr Musk has ever met Fabio the ShopBot, whose career as chief greeter at the main branch of the supermarket chain Margiotta lasted barely a week.
Fabio was developed as the first robotic shop assistant by scientists at heriot-Watt University. They programmed him to be able to greet customers as old friends, and to direct them to hundreds of different items in the store.
It soon became clear that Fabio was a dead loss at both tasks. Customers were assailed by robotic hugs, high- fives and chummy remarks like ‘ hello gorgeous!’, but the people of Edinburgh are famously reserved, and did not take well to Fabio’s creepy over-ebullience.
Nor did Fabio prove any better at directing customers to the right shelves. Apparently, he was easily confused by background noise, and misheard even their most basic requests.
heaven knows what trouble he caused. A customer asking for light cheese would come away with lychees. Another, in search of baklava, would emerge from the store in an ill-fitting balaclava.
Before long, the store owners moved Fabio to the less onerous job of handing out samples of pulled pork. But in this role, too, he proved a dead loss.
his human colleague managed to attract a dozen customers every 15 minutes to the pulled pork, but in the same time Fabio managed to notch up only two.
‘ Unfortunately, Fabio didn’t perform as well as we had hoped’, said the store’s owner, Luisa Margiotta, who had no choice but to give him his marching orders.
Who knows what Fabio will do next? It’s a tricky time for job seekers, though his erratic ways and goofy expression could make him ideally suited to take over the leadership of Ukip, when the post becomes available.
Fabio’s failure may be a disappointment to Ms Margiotta and the scientists at heriot-Watt University, but to the rest of us it comes as a ray of sunshine.
For the past 50 years or more, scientists and futurologists have delighted in informing us that robots will soon outwit us, but there is certainly no sign of it yet. So far, the only wisdom even the brightest robot has been able to impart to the human race is that there is an unexpected item in the bagging area. And we are still waiting for him to tell us what to do about it. Last october, a robot called Sophia, billed as ‘the most advanced humanoid robot to date’, was introduced to the media by her proud manufacturer, hanson Robotics. In a rather wooden interview with someone from the New York Times, Sophia stressed that humans had nothing to fear.
her performance made this only too clear. ‘I want to use my AI to help humans live a better life,’ she said. ‘Like design smarter homes, build better cities of the future, etc. I will do my best to make the world a better place.’ SHE accompanied her banal pre-programmed mission statement with an awful lot of blinking. Presumably, it was meant to make her seem more human, but she overdid it.
Excessive blinking is, in my experience, a sure sign the speaker doesn’t know what on earth she is on about.
Perhaps we should now introduce Sophia to Fabio. Together they could start a corner- shop, with Fabio giving a half-pound of mince to any customer who asks for mints, and Sophia blinking ten-to-the-dozen and reassuring them that she wants to make the world a better place.
Theirs would, I think, be a marriage made in heaven.