Fabio, The Pepper Robot, Fired For 'Incompetence' At Edinburgh Store

The advancement in technology heralds a future world dominated by artificial intelligence with robots taking over many of the jobs currently being done by humans. However, with the firing of Britain's first cyborg shop assistant for "incompetence," it seems unlikely that the day is anywhere in the near future. Fabio, the Pepper robot, who was deployed as a retail assistant at the upmarket store Margiotta in Edinburgh, Scotland, was let go after only a week at the job after it was found that the robot was confusing the patrons, who preferred assistance from its human colleagues. The robot was an experiment run by Heriot-Watt University for the BBC's Six Robots & US. It was programmed with directions to hundreds of items in the company's flagship Edinburgh store.