Fresh from releasing the first robot designed to cheer you up and a robot teddy bear that looks after you when you’re sick, Japan has opened the first fully robot staffed hotel this week.

There are absolutely no humans present in the running of the hotel – although I imagine there must be a supervisor somewhere for when they inevitably break down or can’t answer a question or mess up – with the typical human jobs or porter, waiter and receptionist being taken on by robots. There’s even a dinosaur receptionist for some reason.

I’m not sure if I would want to stay here or whether it would completely creep me out, let alone if it would actually work as we all know how temperamental technology can be – it’s hard enough just to get the self checkout at Sainsburys to work most of the time. If this is successful though it could be the norm in thirty years time. Scary – both for human interaction and for employment opportunities in the future.

On the slideshow you can meet the staff and see their various roles within the hotels. Chances are they’ll either screw up way more than regular humans or way, way less. I guess we’ll have to see how this goes.

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Actroid

Actroid is a vaguely human robot that runs the front desk. She (?) will explain how you check in – which is exactly the same as any other hotel ever – and then can answer simple questions about the hotel in Japanese. Useful.