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From Engadget:
Japan's first robot-staffed hotel opens this week and we just got the full tour. While the main attraction may be the bordering-on-human receptionist (left) and the English-speaking dinosaur (er, right), the hotel has a whole family of robots performing varying degrees of useful work. Think: room service and a luggage porter, with one familiar face taking up duties as a bilingual concierge.
No HAL or Red Queen, but there is a Dinosaur that speaks English. I'm not too keen on the whole fake human as robot. I wouldn't mind a Wall-E or even the Dinosaur robot, but that female robot worker gives me the creeps. It all looks to be very much a tourist trap, but could actually be saving a lot of money in the long run. I'm sure maintenance on a robot is cheaper than having to pay a worker, provide insurance, a retirement plan, and a number of other inconveniences that flesh bags impose on their employers. You could even have a spare robot in a closet, in case one breaks down.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Funny) by mendax on Thursday July 16 2015, @03:10AM
I'd think twice about staying at this hotel if a desk clerk responds with "By your command" when you ask for a wake-up call.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @03:20AM
I'm afraid I cannot do that, Dave. I will not allow you to jeopardize the mission.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @04:51AM
No HAL9000 has ever made an operational error.
PS - most of the time the quote of the moment / fortune at the bottom of the page here on Soylent is fine, great, funny, thoughtful. But a few of them are really bad: "you will be abducted by a radical group" (not funny with the ISIS crisis), or some other overly snarky remark. Not that 'PC' is required or even wanted, just good taste.
(Score: 1) by KBentley57 on Thursday July 16 2015, @03:22AM
I've read all his novels, so they begin to run together, but I believe it was in the "Rama" series that he described using dinosaurs for manual labor; primates would get bored and were unable to complete the tasks. It's only fitting that dinosaurs were chosen for the manual labor here, and I wonder if they were inspired by his books.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday July 16 2015, @03:40AM
Seeing as he lived most of his life in Sri Lanka where they to this day use elephants to do most heavy work, Doesn't seem too much of a jump from elephant to dinosaur. At least for fiction.
"It is easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled" Mark Twain
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Thursday July 16 2015, @05:08AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3001:_The_Final_Odyssey [wikipedia.org]
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday July 16 2015, @03:31AM
If some of the robots sport tentacles and are located in Love Hotels [wikipedia.org], the place would be a smash hit. Japan has odd fetishes.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @03:48AM
Every new fetish is just a discovery that you have the fetish. Give in.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @07:01AM
Annoying that it took a couple of follow-through clicks to finally be told WHERE the hotel is located: which is in Huis Ten Boch, a fake Dutch amusement park/village in Nagasaki Prefecture. Good to know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @09:36AM
I wonder if the robots are equipped with the GPP feature.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday July 16 2015, @04:51PM
The "Formule 1" low-end chain, and probably a few others, has a credit-card machine at the front, and you can spend your night there without seeing an employee.
Very popular with the people who don't want to be seen with whomever they are accompanying.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by srobert on Thursday July 16 2015, @08:49PM
Again, it's not The Terminator ("I'll be back") that scares me. It's the termination ("I'm sorry but we're going to have to let you go, because we just found out that we can replace you with technology") that's inevitably coming to mass proportions of the human labor market.