This short video explores the country of Japan who is known for embracing technological innovation. In the video they visit Henn na Hotel which is the world’s first entirely robot staffed hotel. The owner he says is very interested in the interactions he sees in his hotels and is in essentially conducting a social experiment and using real life research to see how hotel guests interact with the robot staff.
He agrees that even though there is a move to explore replacing almost everything with robots, there are many things a robot simply cannot do. He doesn’t say anything more than this but I wonder what he means? Does hotel staff and guest satisfaction for example need a certain element of personal hospitality that the robot lack? Or are people nowadays more comfortable not interacting with humans at all? He later mentions how many times a parents or someone of an older generation cannot communicate with a robot, but then a kid can. This is a very interesting point, that implies that children are growing up in a vastly different and changing technological world than their parents and are being raised with an innate understanding of how more advanced technology works. He says here that this provides a glimpse into how effortless the future of human-robot interaction might be in the future.