How Good Are Robots at Customer Service Jobs?

Since 2006, robots have become commonplace in some restaurants in China. They greet customers, take orders, prepare food, and deliver finished dishes from the kitchen to hungry diners. Though mostly a novelty and sometimes unreliable, business owners in China say that robots are still cheaper than hiring humans as wait staff. The robotic waiters are about 5 feet (1.5 m) tall and can display more than 10 facial expressions. In the kitchen, a burger-making robot can make 250 hamburgers every hour.

Invasion of the culinary robots:

• In many fields, robots have already replaced humans, especially for completing repetitive or dangerous tasks. In manufacturing, robots operate efficiently and economically to assemble a wide range of products.
• There are concerns about the increasing use of robots and their role in society. In some sectors, robots have been blamed for rising unemployment.
• The use of robots in military combat has raised ethical concerns, and the possibility of robot autonomy -- the focus of many works of science fiction -- raises troubling, hypothetical questions.