Companies looking to replace human staff with robots at hotels, restaurants and other service industries, should consider giving them a female face, study finds. For the study, 170 volunteers were asked by experts from Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, for their thoughts on a scenario involving a hypothetical robot working in a service job - such as as a hotel greeter. The team discovered that people are more comfortable talking to a female presenting robot, especially if it has human-like features. The researchers said that in future, as well as a female face, it could be important for robots to have some degree of personality, especially if working in service jobs. Companies looking to replace human staff with robots at hotels, restaurants and other service industries, should consider giving them a female face, study finds.

Atlas and Spot won't have blank spaces on their resumes. The Boston Dynamics robots, famous for their YouTube parkour and dancing exploits, could land a position in a heartbeat, as can many non-human job-seekers, part of the wave of robot hires amid a human worker shortage. As the Associated Press reported, the pandemic ushered in these workplace changes. Companies are starting to automate service sector jobs, thanks to higher labor costs and the aforementioned worker shortages. Machines can do many tasks such as toss pizza dough, transport hospital linens, inspect gauges and sort goods.

The biggest problem, or opportunity, for the current and many successive governments, is, and would be this - how to provide gainful employment to the millions of Indians entering the labour market every month? That one question has several corollaries to it. What role would automation play in all of this? What kind of jobs would be the first victims of automation? Is it wrong to expect manufacturing sector to provide jobs at a large scale now?

Between 1993 and 2007, as U.S. factories became highly automated, every new robot eliminated 5.6 human jobs, an economic think tank estimated in a study. Now automation is starting to eat into a new industry: food and hospitality. Workers are concerned -- according to the New York Times, the labor union that represents Marriott International hotel workers is demanding measures that will protect staff from being replaced by robots. The Times' take is that food and hospitality jobs have been spared by automation because service workers make so little. But cheap, effective artificial intelligence means those jobs are no longer secure.

Too often the answer to this question resembles the plot of a sci-fi thriller. People worry that developments in A.I. will bring about the "singularity" -- that point in history when A.I. surpasses human intelligence, leading to an unimaginable revolution in human affairs. Or they wonder whether instead of our controlling artificial intelligence, it will control us, turning us, in effect, into cyborgs. These are interesting issues to contemplate, but they are not pressing. They concern situations that may not arise for hundreds of years, if ever.

We've another of those pieces shouting that artificial intelligence is going to overturn the world and thus we need more taxes, more government and even, in this argument from Kai-Fu Lee, more colonialism. It's not going to work out like this of course, it's just not going to work out like this at all. For Lee's supposition is that AI is going to increase economic inequality. In fact, there's no way that they can work that way--it just isn't true that the owners of a new technology get all the money. Secondly, even if they did, real wages for the rest of us would be more than doubling every year. That's just not a problem, is it?

Too often the answer to this question resembles the plot of a sci-fi thriller. People worry that developments in A.I. will bring about the "singularity" -- that point in history when A.I. surpasses human intelligence, leading to an unimaginable revolution in human affairs. Or they wonder whether instead of our controlling artificial intelligence, it will control us, turning us, in effect, into cyborgs. These are interesting issues to contemplate, but they are not pressing. They concern situations that may not arise for hundreds of years, if ever.