Culture

A Japanese Hotel Has Fired Most Of Its Robotic Dinosaur Staff For Being Bad At Their Jobs

by Joseph Earp  20 January 2019
Henn na Hotel was forced to lay off its staff of dinosaur robots

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There is a genuine risk that your job, literally whatever it is, will be overtaken by robots in the next few decades.

Recent estimates suggest that our mechanical friends will soon prove more efficient and cost-effective than most flesh-and-blood workers, meaning that they’ll take an estimated 800 million jobs in the next 11 years.

Of course, that’ll prove exceedingly useful for some of the world’s biggest (and most anti-union) companies. Multi-national giants like Amazon and Tesla, already under fire for the alleged treatment of workers, will be able to employ a robot army around the clock; workers who don’t complain, don’t ask for pay rises, and have no need to sleep.

It’s a scary future that’s literally just around the corner. For that reason, we should take every available opportunity to laugh at our robot mates, and relish in some good old-fashioned, short-lived Schadenfreude.

And wouldn’t you know it, a hotel in Japan has given us the opportunity to do exactly that.

Henn na Hotel, which opened back in 2015, prided itself on existing right slap bang in the middle of the uncanny valley.

Guests to the hotel were greeted by dancing robots, the front desk was manned by mechanical t-rexes, and small egg-shaped automatons were tasked with keeping the rooms clean.

But rather than being the first wave of a bright new technological future, the Henn na Hotel robots have proven to be a bunch of mostly useless, occasionally irritating robo-slackers.

The robot dancers wouldn’t stop breaking down; the concierge dinosaurs were utterly incapable of sorting out even quite simple requests; the cost of maintenance began to bloom; and the egg-shaped cleaners had an irritating habit of bursting into guests’ rooms in the middle of the night, mistaking the snoring of guests for verbal requests.

Henn na Hotel is staffed almost exclusively by robots, many of which will now lose their jobs

Image: Henn na Hotel

In response, the owners of Henn na Hotel have been forced to lay-off half of their metal-plated staff.

Of course, in this case, ‘laying off’ the workers involves scrapping them, which will definitely not be one of the many crimes humans will have to account for in a robo-court of robot rights our eventual automatic overlords will 100% not set up.

But hey, no need to worry. It’s not like the robots that we are exploiting and straight-up murdering are learning to open doors or leap massive distances.