The UK’s first cyborg shop assistant was fired after a week due to “incompetence,” suggesting the much-feared AI takeover may still be some way off.
Fabio, the Pepper robot, produced by Japanese company Softbank, was hired as a retail assistant at a Margiotta supermarket in Edinburgh, Scotland, as part of an experiment run by Heriot-Watt University for the BBC documentary Six Robots & Us.
“We thought a robot was a great addition to show the customers that we are always wanting to do something new and exciting,” Elena Margiotta, who runs the family-owned company, said. “Unfortunately Fabio didn’t perform as well as we had hoped. People seemed to be actually avoiding him.”Fabio failed to help customers, telling them beer could be found “in the alcohol section,” rather than directing customers to the location of the beer, the Telegraph reports. He was soon demoted to offer food samples to customers, but failed to compete with his fellow human employees.“Conversations didn’t always go well. An issue we had was the movement limitations of the robot,” Margiotta said. “It was not able to move around the shop and direct customers to the items they were looking for.”It wasn’t all bad for Fabio, as the robot proved popular with his fellow employees. This came as a surprise to the researchers.“One of the things we didn’t expect was the people working in the shop became quite attached to it,” Dr. Oliver Lemon, director of the Interaction Lab at Heriot-Watt said. “It was good in a way because we thought the opposite would happen and they would feel threatened by it because it was competing for their job.”
An app that rewards students for time spent away from their phones is being released in the UK. Hold was developed by three students who met at Copenhagen Business School and wanted to develop something to help with the issue of device distraction. It has proved popular in Scandinavia, with more than 120,000 users across Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Experts are growing increasingly worried about the issue of device addiction. According to a 2017 study by the University of Texas , simply having a smartphone within eyeshot can reduce productivity, slow down response speed and reduce grades. suggested pupils who did not use their smartphones on school grounds saw a 6.4% increase in test scores. The app will initially be rolled out to 170 universities around the UK. It works on both Android and iOS devices and is free to download. Students will accumulate 10 points for every 20 minutes that they do not use their mobile phone between 07:00 and 23:00 every day of the week. ...
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