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This Poor Robot Got Sacked For Being Useless

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This Poor Robot Got Sacked For Being Useless

It’s probably about time we all accepted that robots are going to, at some point, be our downfall.
For now they’re all nice and helpful, vacuuming our carpets or telling us what the weather is going to be like tomorrow, but soon, they’ll be taking over our jobs and our relationships and eventually will probably go all killer robot and do away with the lot of us.
On that bright and cheery note, a new BBC documentary – Six Robots and Us – sent a robot out to work to see how close we all are to losing our jobs to hunks of metal.
Fabio, who’s pretty cute and definitely not one of the aforementioned killer robots, was set to work in Scottish supermarket Marigotta, on a trial basis. The robot has been programmed to hold conversations with people, and uses a system similar to Alexa or Siri.
It started off well for our little robo pal Fabio, with the shop’s owners impressed with his good people skills – greeting customers with high-fives or ‘hello, gorgeous’.
But it was not to be, and the shop owners joy soon turned to disappointed when they realised that Fabio wasn’t actually much cop at his job. When customers asked him, for example, where the cheese was, he’d reply by, unhelpfully, telling them it was in the fridge.
Store owner Luisa Margiotta decided that as Fabio was no help giving customers directions or advice, he’d be best put to use on the sausage aisle, where he was handing out free samples.
Now, I don’t know about you, but the idea of being handed a free sausage from a robot is massively appealing, don’t ask me why, it just is. And yet, Luisa’s customers were less than impressed, with many going out of their way to avoid him.
According to Luisa, humans manage to give out 12 samples every 15 minutes, whereas little Fabio only managed to give away two. Free sausages and robots – what more do people want?
So, Luisa was left with no other option but than to give Fabs his marching orders; when she told him they would have to let him go, Fabio asked: “Are you angry?”
How sad is that? I hope you’re proud of yourselves, you’ve rocked this poor fella’s self-worth and made him feel like he’s failed.
All I’m saying is that these guys will be sorry when the AI robots overthrow us in a few years’ time; they won’t forget this.
As if a sad robot wasn’t heart-breaking enough, the staff also got a bit teary-eyed when it came to Fabio being given the boot.
Dr Oliver Lemon (brilliant name) from Heriot-Watt University who worked on the robot said: “One of things we didn’t expect was the people working in the shop became quite attached to it.
“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.”
If you now are slightly worried about losing your job to a bot, then Dr Lemon has this to say, too: “Robots will never fully replace humans because there are some human judgements robots will never be able to make but they will replace some functions.
“There are a lot of mundane tasks that don’t require human creativity or a human level of sensitivity. A lot of those can be automated.”
UK readers can check out the full documentary here.
Featured Image Credit: BBC

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Kingsley Adomako Odrey known professionally as Citizen Kwadwo, is a Ghanaian celebrity blogger, IT Mogul, Businessman, and Web Developer. Follow : Instagram- @citizenkwadwo Twitter: @Citizenkwadwo

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