
Lessons from the first fully automated hotel - hos234
https://www.designbuild-network.com/features/rage-against-the-machine-lessons-from-the-worlds-first-robot-hotel/
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OnlineGladiator
Everybody thinks robots are inevitable until they meet the robots that are
supposedly inevitable. There's a fun joke template for robotics. "How many
PhD's does it take to do <generic task>?" So now instead of one untrained
person doing the dishes, you have 5 PhD students hovering around a robot as it
spends 8 hours poorly cleaning one.

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Aozi
>"How many PhD's does it take to do <generic task>?" So now instead of one
untrained person doing the dishes, you have 5 PhD students hovering around a
robot as it spends 8 hours poorly cleaning one.

Yeah, and then it spends 8 hours cleaning another, and soon it'll be spending
5 hours cleaning two, 2 hours cleaning a dozen, and it'll keep going down, and
those 5 PhD's will keep improving the robot, more and more. And it doesn't
even need to be faster than us, because that one robot can keep washing dishes
24/7, with no rest and no pay.

And eventually it'll catch up to us in speed and precision, and it'll keep
getting better and surpass us.

And then, once you have a single good robot. You can simply replicate it,
again and again, mass producing thousands of them and they will all keep
working 24/7 with no rest and no pay.

Yeah, we're not there yet for most jobs, but we're getting there. It's gonna
take a while but it will without a doubt happen

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noonespecial
It will then no longer be referred to as a "robot" or "AI", will look nothing
at all like how it started (probably just a big box), and people will call it
"the dishwasher" as they wonder why AI and Robots are always 10 years away.

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quaquaqua1
Yes, but at a certain point you will have automated away most of the labor
that needs doing.

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michaelbuckbee
A robot's utility is inversely proportional to how much it looks like a robot.

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solatic
Regarding room service, I wonder if room service wouldn't be better served by
some kind of dumbwaiter system powered by a Willy Wonka-style elevator. A
kitchen prepares food, puts it in the dumbwaiter-sized standardized container
(like a shipping container), puts the container into a delivery system (with
the destination room button-pressed in) where it is magnetically propelled
within the walls to it's destination, where it is retrieved by opening a
shutter in the wall. It doesn't have to just be room service, I could see it
as part of a modern apartment building as well for deliveries.

I imagine that the main barriers are maintenance - opening up the walls in
case of blockages etc. But maybe the correct design could account for that
somehow.

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ThinkBeat
Wel the main business of a hotel is to store as many people as possible in a
limited amount of real estate, setting aside space for such infrastructure
would cost several rooms.

It is also a feature that only some guest use at all and use is very limited.
If every guest used it several times it a day it would make sense.

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clairity
if that were the case, all hotels would have evolved to be capsule hotels.
certainly hoteliers know their business better than that, and don't simply
maximize for space. a hotel's biggest challenge (after financing) is
occupancy, which is a 4P's marketing problem[0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix)

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nmstoker
For the non-physical bots, it would've made sense to have them "shadow" a
human until they were equally or more capable and only then roll out a hotel
with them taking the helm.

Things like reception desk Q&A could easily be integrated discretely, with the
human employee getting help from the bot and overriding when it falls short.

There is already a fair amount of automation for tasks like self check in at
large economy hotel chains in the UK - and you can see how well it goes down
with customers from the queues (which tend to favour waiting for the human
assistants except at busy times)

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lnsru
So if the hotel was opened 2015, the these robots were developed 2013-2014 and
are now at least half decade old technology. GTX 780 Ti was state-of-the-art
NVIDIA’s card back then. Now we have whole Jetson palette, really powerful
raspberry pi 4 plus many not that easily accessible parts. Let’s see what
robots will be showcased 5 years from now.

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acoye
I am not convinced the limiting factor is the computing power on device or the
price of computing. I would rather bet on current "AI" not been good at
general purpose tasks.

Coherent thinking and creativity (AGI) is way above and away from the neural
nets we got now. And I'd argue that's what needed to make robots super helpful
with random human tasks.

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alexgmcm
I think full warehouse automation e.g. Amazon will be the next one to go.

As it requires a large amount of labour so there is a lot of possible savings
and consists of repetitive tasks in a controlled environment.

It would also be better PR to have robots than workers in bad conditions
(stories about workers urinating in bottles etc. have made headlines in the
UK).

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deadbunny
Not quite amazon scale but we already highly automated warehouses in the UK
with Ocado.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJqsdprXF5c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJqsdprXF5c)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKrcpa8Z_E)

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lnsru
Do robots pick goods from the crates there? Or just the boxes go delivered to
picking stations where humans work? It wasn’t clear from the video.

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deadbunny
As far as I know they grab the items and bag them, then deliver the filled
bags to the loading area. Not sure where the human interaction happens from
there.

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tabtab
Cue the tune "Hotel California". There's a great miniseries in the idea with a
taste of _West World_ to it.

