It happens almost every weekend: Okuri (送り) arrives at the table and delivers our lunch.
Okuri is a robot working in a shopping centre restaurant. Or, more precisely, a stack of food trays and a tiny screen on top of a Roomba-like platform. We order the food through an app, and Okuri brings it to us. The kids love the experience. But to me, it feels sterile.
Okuri is just like our vacuum cleaner. It can easily get stuck, and (cue David Attenborough’s voice) fall prey to robots’ most lethal predators: children (kids can be horrible toward robots). Young humans know Okuri is just a bunch of wires, motors, a few sensors and chips.
The sushi tastes good. But the robo-novelty wears off quickly. And we’re glad to be able to shout “thanks!” to a human chef when we leave the restaurant.
Bring in robots to bring out the best in humans
On the 26th of November 2018, an experimental pop-up cafe opened for two weeks in Tokyo. It was staffed by robots. A bit like my weekend lunch place. But with a twist.
The creators of the pop-up café did not just automate the food delivery process. They recognised the importance of having staff. Staff that chat with customers, remember their names, and, ultimately, get patrons to come back next time.
A paradox! Can you hire robots and make the café feel more human at the same time? The café founders decided to take this paradox head-on.
They ended up hiring humans.
And robots.
The café deployed three OriHime-D robots. OriHime-Ds are controlled by human “pilots”. The café hired ten pilots. Five women and five men, disabled, bed-bound, and not otherwise able to work or interact with the outside world, certainly not as staff in a café. Thanks to the robotic avatars, the human pilots could see and hear the customers, and interact with them. A wonderful experience for pilots, and a wonderful experience for customers.
Details of the experiment, including analysis of the impact of such type of work on OriHime-D pilots, are in a research paper published by the café founders. Spoiler alert: pilots found the work fulfilling and appropriate for their level of disability. My favourite quote from the paper:
“With the spread of avatar robots and avatar work, it is possible to realize a society where we can do anything if we have free mind, even though we are bedridden.“
Success
The DAWN Avatar Robot Cafe ver.β is now out of the hypothesis phase. A permanent laboratory café opened in June 2021 in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. As of now, it has 73 OriHime-D pilots among its staff.
There’s another, smaller, robot in the photo above. That’s OriHime. OriHime is a telepresence robot that can be used by guests who cannot be physically present at the café if they want to join those who are there. The restaurant even lets customers hire OriHimes and take them for a walk—with the remote guest gazing, hearing, and speaking through it. Yet another experiment in using robots to bring us closer together.
Demirobots
OriHime-D’s creators call their machines demirobots1. It’s an intriguing idea to bring humans and robots together, to perform tasks where either is not enough. And it is becoming more and more common.
The Tokyo experiment shows that there is no need for a tradeoff between a human and a machine. It might be possible to bring the two together and bring out the best in each. If your customers expect a “human touch”, but you want to automate, demirobots might be the way to go.
Or when technology is simply not ready yet (did someone say self-driving cars?), you can let humans step in and take over from the robot for a while.
It is a simple question to ask when you decide to automate processes or services in your organisation: “Can I bring in robots to bring out the best in humans?”
One more thing
You can now read Digital Economy in the new Substack app for iPhone.
With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my Substack and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters, or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never be cut-off by your email app. Comments and rich media will all work seamlessly. Overall, it’s a big upgrade to the reading experience.
The Substack app is currently available for iOS. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.
Demirobot: a semi-automated avatar robot that extends human abilities with technology. Source: Takeuchi, K., Yamazaki, Y., & Yoshifuji, K. (2020, March). Avatar work: Telework for disabled people unable to go outside by using avatar robots. In Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 53-60).