Reminds me of when I attended an event in Paris, France and they had a robot bartender. I was there during the day when they were setting up and it took a team of 3 engineers ~8 hours to set up vs just paying a bartender for the 3 hours + an hour's setup time that the evening cocktail reception lasted.

I understand they organisers wanted something cool, but it was comical to observe nonetheless.

[Edit: punctuation]

There's a chain of hotels (Yotel) that is known in part for its robot that will stow luggage the hotel is holding for you. In practice, the staff mostly stows your luggage like every place else because the robot doesn't have anything like the throughput you need at busy times.

The flipside to it is, during slow hours you still have the robot at the ready to help the odd guest. The robot just sitting there generates virtually no costs (bar the minuscule amount of electricity to maintain situational awareness), while at the same time freeing humans to do more important tasks. Which may very well be family and social life.

Maybe? There are always people on duty anyway and the robot contraption probably takes up way more expensive urban space than any cost savings it brings. I'd be pretty sure the robot is far more about having a hip urban vibe than any sort of ROI.

You could also just have lockers.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a hotel with lockers. Part of it is probably not wanting to become a public luggage storage facility. The other is probably that, while lockers work well for modest-sized carryons, once you get into bigger suitcases like a lot of people travel with, you can't really lift them up to a locker that's off the ground.

Lockers (or luggage storage generally outside of hotels) are, in general, pretty scarce in the US--and at least a lot of Europe in my experience. It's one of the things that makes a regular hotel pretty handy; I can drop off my luggage the day I arrive or leave and not have to restrict my activities until it's time to checkin or depart.

They're very common in hostels, particular backpacker hostels, but that fits with having limited luggage. I've seen them once or twice in the cheapest hotels.

The main railway station in a European town sometimes has luggage storage. In Germany that's usually lockers, in countries with more history of terrorism (like the UK) it's a room with a metal detector and an attendant.

The in-vehicle monitor will likely be a standard part of autonomous and semi-autonomous trucking for the foreseeable future.

A monitor can be paid less than a driver, as they’re doing less work, and can respond to onsite issues more promptly and accurately than could a remote one.

> A monitor can be paid less than a driver, as they’re doing less work

People working full time still need to live you know, even if it's "less work". Last time I checked the "amount" of work doesn't really correlate with the pay too.

You can't tell a professional truck driver "Ok man, you'll be in the same seat, on the same road, for the same amount of time but you get $500 instead of $1500 because it's less work, oh and also if there is a crash and you weren't 100% focused you'll be liable for the damage"

What drivers are paid for a given load reflects market conditions like e.g., weather, truck availability, and load availability, more than anything else.

Automating large parts of the driving process would make the job easier and more desirable. More people would be willing to work as monitors, which would increase truck availability and lower rates.

There’s also the possibility that a monitor could do other work while the truck drove. Team drivers already do this; the passive driver occupies herself when not driving by reading or even dispatching other loads.

How can the monitor do other things if he is expected to have full situational awareness at a moment's notice in case something goes wrong, when you have no idea if or when that might happen?

All the studies say this is actually more dangerous, which is why Waymo abandoned L3 development years ago when they discovered their safety drivers were falling asleep at the wheel. And there's the infamous Uber death which is well documented and analyzed.

That's the difference. In an autonomous urban driving environment a monitor is expected to have full situational awareness at all times because driving in cities is a hugely complex process. A truck driving 1,100 miles on I-80 would not need to be monitored as closely, if at all, because that driving process is far simpler. This kind of highway driving accounts for the majority of over-the-road freight.

"Monitor" might be a misnomer, here, in that the monitor isn't expected to be actively watching what the truck is doing; rather the monitor would be expected to respond to infrequent issues and maybe handle off-highway driving to and from shipping and receiving facilities.

I understand the idea of having drivers take over in dense urban areas, and letting the truck drive itself along the highway between cities. But this assumes the truck is capable of safely navigating along the highway with zero human intervention. An inattentive driver/monitor is no better than no driver when something unexpected happens and requires a sub-second reaction. If they can do that then they're in business, but I am skeptical.

I don't think the quantity of work matters at all for salary.

A monitor probably needs more knowledge than a driver (need to know the specifics of the product, how to fix problems etc.), and has the same downsides (long hours, not especially exciting job, bad work hours, sitting all the time etc.). If anything I would think they would be paid more.

It would be wholly dependent on the load and the technical implementation.

In my view the monitor would be a driver with standard knowledge and experience who could drive if the autonomous system encountered an edge case or for last-mile, i.e., from the freeway to the shipping or receiving facility.

Under those circumstances a load traveling ten hours with six hours of loading and unloading time would require two hours of active work and fourteen hours of standby.

Any driver would accept a lower rate for this kind of arrangement.

It's not like the monitor will be sitting there playing Angry Birds all day - they will be required to be 100% focused on the road so they can intervene at a moment's notice. Personally I'd find that more stressful than just driving myself.

The arrangement I described above assumes no need for active monitoring for long-distance driving. It is the most monotonous and least technically-complex part of the process and the driver would be free to do other things during it.

It’s not the same process as the autonomous urban driving being attempted by Waymo et al. Driving from Phoenix to Dallas on the highway is far simpler than driving around Phoenix.

No one working on autonomous vehicles is trying to build something where, long term, you need a role like that. There's no benefit to that over just hiring a driver.

> ... can be paid less than a driver, as they’re doing less work ...

Major West: And the monkey flips the switch. -- Lost In Space, 1998

Instructions can be, push the big red button if anything happens.

If it were as simple as pushing a button a monkey could fit the bill. Or maybe a pigeon. [0]

The monitor would be in place to manage the last-mile driving and any other technically-challenging aberrations on the route. Human skill and judgement would still be required, just for much shorter periods.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

Salary in a free market is not determined by amount of work done, value produced, or credentials, but rather the supply of people who could fill that role.