Future Timeline

I think y'all will like this...

Yuli Ban wrote: ↑Sun Dec 26, 2021 4:08 am

The whole vibe of "I don't know why you're pointing your finger in my face, but I find it annoying" reminds me so much of domestic dogs. Robot intelligence has a long way to go, but they're definitely catching up to us faster than we think.

Robot vacuum cleaner escapes from Cambridge Travelodge

Published
3 hours ago

A robot vacuum cleaner made a break for freedom after giving staff the slip at a Travelodge hotel.

The automated cleaner failed to stop at the front door of the hotel in Orchard Park in Cambridge on Thursday, and was still on the loose the following day.

Staff said it just kept going and "could be anywhere" while well-wishers on social media hoped the vacuum enjoyed its travels, as "it has no natural predators" in the wild.

It was found under a hedge on Friday.

Staff at the hotel posted the story of the robot vacuum's great escape on social media, asking for it to be returned, if found.

"Today we had one of our new robot vacuums run for its life," the assistant manager wrote.

"They normally sense the lip at the entrance [to the hotel] and turn around, but this one decided to make a run for it."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-c ... e-60084347

Hotels across the US are using room-service robots to act as receptionists and deliver food, amid staffing shortages



https://www.businessinsider.com/labor-s ... ots-2022-1

Hotels across the US are using room-service robots to deal with staffing issues caused by a perpetual labor shortage.

The robots, created by Savioke, carry out simple tasks such as delivering meals or other items to guest rooms, Fox Business reported.

Savioke CEO Steve Cousins told Fox Business in an interview that the robots allowed hotel staff to focus on crucial tasks, like manning the front desk, at a time when staff levels remain at record lows.
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According to a statement on Savioke's website, the company "creates and deploys beautifully simple. sophisticated, and friendly service robots." The machines work safely, securely, and reliably in human environments, the statement added.

Though it's becoming more common for businesses to use robots to tackle staffing issues, some say that there are drawbacks. These include robots running away from guests wearing lots of jewelry or chatting too much.

What I find interesting about this is that without the whole COVID induced staff shortage, this sort of trend would have been emerging in maybe 2030. The only downside to this is that by then, robots would have been more skilled at helping humans and better at communicating.

TrueAnimationFan wrote: ↑Sat Feb 05, 2022 3:20 pm What I find interesting about this is that without the whole COVID induced staff shortage, this sort of trend would have been emerging in maybe 2030. The only downside to this is that by then, robots would have been more skilled at helping humans and better at communicating.

That's something I've mulled on as well before and I came to the same conclusion: 2022 should be indistinguishable from 2019, barring a few nifty things in AI. We shouldn't be having a revolution in automation on our hands. We shouldn't have MRNA vaccines. We shouldn't have massive online infrastructure developments. But we do. And it's all because of the pandemic. It accelerated trends that weren't going to force changes until at least the latter half of this decade.
In fact, because the pandemic didn't get squashed before the end of 2020, these massive ovrewhelming changes weren't able to be reversed so that we returned to 2019++. Right now, in an "optimal" timeline where COVID was soundly defeated in 2020, all remote working progress would have been undone and the business class would have ferried its workers back into offices sometime in 2021 while robotics commercialization would revert back to its silent shadowy state of advancement that it had been in all throughout the 2010s. So.... thanks anti-vaxxers?

The only downside to having all this happen now is that it's the rawest, least capable version of all this technology that's being forced into the limelight. It's amazing to see robots arise, but it's robots from the early/mid 2010s— the exact same robots we were gawking over back in 2015-2016 as "The Future™". Of course, you have to start somewhere. You need a foundation to build a starscraper, after all, and the stronger that foundation, the higher you can build. We probably ultra-accelerated trends in the late 2020s if anything.