Technology

A machine preparing drinks is not 'AI'.

If this is AI, then McDonald's has been using AI for a long time. Also, my Keurig is AI powered too.

And you’ll still be expected to tip

The robot drinks in Vegas are novelty. As overpriced as casino drinks generally are, the ones at robot stations are even more expensive.

I got a disgustingly over-boozed long island iced tea from one such place. I assume they add more liquor to make it feel worth the extra price. It's not.

Robots pouring drinks has been a thing on cruise ships for years. The big money is using AI to keep people gambling.

I'd rather buy a cocktail from a vending machine than a person tbh. If well programmed it should be able to get proportions perfect, there's a fighting chance it might know what a right hand cocktail is, and if not it should have an option to let me select components. I don't need to be an ass about being particular with what brand rums and vermouth I want, I can clearly see what's available from the selection. It could also let me pick the most popular drink of the night or very quickly give me a mini sampler of a drink if I was feeling curious.

If there’s a hole…

I can see this sort of thing being interesting - but the article says they still need an employee to pick up drink glasses it knocks over, and top up drinks it doesn't properly fill. For now, it's more a novelty, and one that I'd guess might wear off sort of fast.

This doesn't seem like new automation - we have had all sorts of drink vending machines for decades, and I believe we've had cocktail ones for at least a few years. And if it sold, people would have already been using it. This seems more like the automatic fountains and such that's as much the "show" as the practical effect.

The other issue IMO has always been age checking - so there's probably a legal challenge to just replacing all bartenders with one of these. What it might eventually do is replace bartending as a skill in so much as making the drinks, but it'll need integrated facial recognition and ID parsing, as well as a lot of speech to text and back via a likely better / tuned ChatGPT to really take over. Though anyone who's going to a bar to interact with the bartender probably won't for these.

Went to VMware explore and there was one of those robots... saw people using it one time in the entire week I was there.

Every bar was packed to the brim with attendees.

I once saw a drinks bot at a festival.. Just a conveyor belt that moved the glass past various incredients and dispensed them at the right time. It was quite cool. Also the drinks were free, which made it cooler.

Something like that could be made commercially, if there was demand.. trying to make something using AI and robot arms just looks like overengineering for the sake of it.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

With the use of artificial intelligence on the rise, the economy of this city --which relies on tourism and hospitality — is at an inflection point, as companies look to technology to reduce labor costs.

"Wherever the resort industry can replace their workers and not affect productivity, profits or the customer experience — wherever they can do that with artificial intelligence... they will," said John Restrepo, principal at RCG Economics in Las Vegas.

"We need to move ... to those occupations that are more highly skilled, that are not easily replaced by AI and that provide a greater level of balance and resilience so we're not so hard-hit," Restrepo said.

Sabrina Bergman works at the Tipsy Robot, a bar inside Planet Hollywood on the Las Vegas strip.

Bergman and other service workers told NPR there are some human jobs that technology can't eliminate.

Technology like ChatGPT, which is a form of generative AI, will impact white collar jobs, too, in fields like accounting and data entry.

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