“They have a better service attitude than humans”

As I was reading through my local newspaper at home, an article about robot servers in a restaurant in China’s Shandong province (in between Beijing and Shanghai, on the Eastern coast of the country) caught my eye. Dalu Robot restaurant in Jinan is supposedly serviced by over 12 robots who, while not possessing the capacity to comment on the weather or suggest especially delicious menu items, can welcome you with a friendly greeting and stop by your table with hot food you can pick right off their handy carts. The title of my post is an actual quote from a first-time patron at Dalu Robot, who also added, “”Humans can be temperamental or impatient, but they [robots] don’t feel tired, they just keep working and moving round and round the restaurant all night.”

A robot waiter is always promptly at your service at Dalu Robot restaurant in Jinan, China.

A blog on the Zagat website entitled a post about Dalu Robot restaurant “Robot Waiters Will Kill Us All,” and the hook at the beginning of the article reads, “The day that robots will discover intelligence and kill us all just got a little closer.” Later in the post, the author makes a comparison of looks between a picture of one of the restaurant’s six robot servers and Robin Williams in the film version of “Bicentennial Man,” saying, “More robots are planned [for the restaurant] – it’s only a matter of time before they invade our [America’s] shores.” Is America is ready for a robot-run restaurant? I personally don’t think so, given our reactions to robots in film and literature thus far (and judging from the blog post, I think it’s safe to say that humans in the U. S. feel threatened by machines imitating the jobs of real people!). You can read the full post here if you’d like.

Perhaps the “robot restaurant” will become a phenomenon in China and then spread to the rest of the world…I’d like to think that most people still enjoy some sort of human interaction, even if it may not always be most pleasant. Sure, you’ll have to deal with rude waiters and slow service once in a while when you go out to eat, but I think it’s safe to say that most of us enjoy the experience of interacting with usually-pleasant servers in a restaurant.

This makes me think of self-check-out lines at large chain stores like Target, Wal-Mart, and CVS. I remember being initially appalled at their existence because, essentially, adding a self-check-out is bypassing the opportunity to grant a job to one more human. I never use the self-check-out line for this very reason. I can’t imagine a store without cashiers, much like I can’t imagine a restaurant without real waiters. Fear of machines taking over society might be a subconscious anxiety of mine, but in this age of e-mail (which apparently is going obsolete as compared to texting or instant messaging: read a NY Times article on it), iPods, and smart phones, face-to-face human interaction is being diminished at a startlingly rapid rate. I’d like to keep my old-fashioned human contact as much as possible.

Also, if you’re interested, here’s a list of the “12 Most Teched-Out Restaurants,” according to the Zagat blog. And most of them don’t have robot waiters, proving that you can still have a technologically-savvy restaurant without completely replacing humans in them.