I do love a cute robot story, so here is this one. A hotel in Silicon Valley (obvs) is trying out a new service. Robot bell hops. They can deliver your luggage to your room or items from room service ordered via the hotel intranet – no living person needs to be aware of your porn fetish.
Thank you, Botlr!
The robotic butler, known as Botlr due, no doubt, to some horribly contrived acronym, will not be too rude or too sycophantic, will not leer at your girlfriend, will not even think about stealing your possessions and, most importantly, will not wait around for a tip just because he had to come all they way up in the elevator to bring you a bottle of vodka. The price of hotel living just got a little bit cheaper.
I expect this will work, because the job is simple enough for robots to do. There’s no real imagination required. Once upon a time we had elevator operators and gas station attendants, but the jobs just weren’t complicated enough to require full time human employees.
What other jobs will someday be done by robots? I’ve got a suggestion. It’s a complex job, but one human beings constantly screw up. It’s one that requires objectivity, but every human who ever gets the job has an agenda. I’m talking about world leadership.
Need to redraw the voting districts so they’re not gerrymandered? There must be an algorithm for that. Need a fairer method of taxation, which brings in enough money for all necessary social services but doesn’t ding anybody too harshly? Add enough data in, the answer will pop out. It could be done on an experimental basis at first, with the Presibot just as an advisor, but once it gets to the point where it makes the right decision more often than not, flesh and blood politicians would be fools to ignore it. Unfortunately , they are.
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