What’s the Deal with the Robot Waiters?
The advancement in technology can be seen as good news or bad, depending on your point of view.
As the use of Artificial Intelligence continues unabated and threatens to take away the jobs of the majority of people, there is certainly a fear that it isn’t all a great addition to our lives.
If you have eaten out and about at any point recently, you will almost certainly have come across the robot waiters, which have become more and more commonplace.
In some ways, they sum up the problem, in that they are obviously useful but are also taking people’s livelihoods. What are they all about?
When They Started Showing Up
In the June of 2022, news emerged of the Italian restaurant chain Bella Italia making a decision to trial robot waiters in its numerous venues around the United Kingdom. The reasoning behind it, the restaurant’s parent company Big Table Group claimed, was that they were suffering from a shortage of waiting staff after the combined blows of Brexit and the global health crisis of the time.
Nicknamed the ‘Bella Bot’, the device was able to carry four trays, weighing up to a total of 40 kilograms. They weren’t totally autonomous, however, needing a human to load and unload them.
It did make some sort of sense, considering the fact that as many as 10% of hospitality jobs remained unfulfilled at the time, which resulted in wages being inflated by as much as 13% across the industry.
In the years since, the robots have become more and more capable, being able to be set on a specific track around a venue in order to head off and deliver plates of food or drinks to locations, along with instructions for the customers to take things from a certain section of the robot’s serving area. They can even be programmed to offer greetings to the customers they’re serving.
Are They Expensive?
The obvious question that people might be quick to ask themselves when it comes to such robot waiters is how much they cost to run. After all, many of us are turning to such machines to do the basic tasks that we don’t want to do ourselves, like mowing the lawn.
Obviously, the exact price that you’re going to end up paying for one will differ depending on the model you end up buying, with each one boasting a different capability. Roughly, though, you can expect them to start at around £10,000 for the entry-level model, moving up to more than £15,000 for a ‘better’ one.
The companies that sell them are also likely to put a minimum order number in place, meaning that you will have to have at least, say, four robot waiters ordered. Then there are the numerous issues that most robots might end up encountering at your venue, such as the inability to handle ramps over five degrees or ridges more than a centimetre in height.
That might well entail a move to change your restaurant layout, which will obviously come with a further cost. The maintenance costs also have to be taken into account, although you might be able to get a cheaper company to do that.
What Does it Say About Us as Humans?
If the ‘obvious’ question that pops into your head isn’t about the cost of such robots in a literal sense, it might be more about the cost to us as people that they entail. By choosing to use a robot for menial tasks such as collecting dirty trays and delivering drinks, you might think that we are making a choice to give humans more dignity. Yet, for many, doing jobs like delivering drinks and picking up dirty trays is a job that they enjoy, offering a chance to get money in in order to pay for their rent or a present for a child that they might not otherwise be able to afford to buy themselves.
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Not only that, but by introducing the likes of robot waiters into our lives, aren’t we cutting ourselves off further from a society that already feels fractured? Nowadays, there is barely a conversation that you could have with a friend, family member or work colleague that isn’t fraught with tension, thanks to the divided nature of politics in the 21st century. By putting ourselves in a position where we barely have to interact with someone for whom waiting on tables is a necessary job to take, we run the risk of becoming more and more disillusioned with the real lives that others have to live.
Yes, the advancements in technology can be seen as an exciting step into the future, but at what cost to the importance of living and working together? Is that a price worth paying?