Alibaba’s FlyZoo Hotel — The Future Of Hospitality Or Just An Absolute Nightmare for Humanity?
Robot bartenders, facial recognition, AI-based assistants:
Alibaba’s fully automated high-tech FlyZoo hotel in Hangzhou, China, gives a technical glimpse far into the future.
A future with greatly reduced human interaction.
But is that really what we want?
Imagine you’re tired, exhausted, in a foreign city, and all you really need is someone to give you a friendly welcome.
Instead, you end up in a fully automated hotel without a human receptionist or concierge. Machines take over where there should be human contact. You scan your passport and then roll into your assigned room. The room service is a robot. The key: facial recognition. The interlocutor: Tmall Genie, a personal assistant like Alexa, who apparently fulfills all your wishes, as long as she understands you, because at the moment she is only programmed in Chinese.
Sounds like science fiction? It isn’t anymore.
Alibaba is making it possible in its FlyZoo Future Hotel in Hangzhou, China.
But is this what the hotel of the future should look like?
Wherever empathy and creativity are required, humans cannot and should not be replaced by machines, also not by artificial intelligence.
That’s why I have a hard time with this in the hospitality sector. Because it really doesn’t have much to do with “hospitality” anymore. Escape to the bar to find a soul comforter in the bartender? That’s also not the case. Instead, a cool robot hand mixes the drinks in the hotel of the future.
What about atmosphere?
I don’t particularly like hotels in general because I find them too impersonal.
But it’s usually people, not machines, that create the atmosphere. In small boutique hotels, where owners and staff bring everything to life down to the last detail, the personal touch, warmth and cordiality make the stay a pleasant experience. It doesn’t take much. A quick smile, a warm handshake, a warm welcome, and the guest feels at home.
I have never wished that a hotel should be more impersonal and with less human contact from staff.
And there is also always the possibility that the human-replacing technology will suddenly fail. What happens then? Do you sleep in the hallway when the facial recognition doesn’t recognize you and denies you access to your own room?
Expensive pleasure
The science fiction hotel is not cheap either.
At $200 a night, it’s very expensive for the region. And when r2d2 brings you a salad, you pay three times as much for it as if you were to try authentic Chinese cuisine in one of the surrounding restaurants and make contact with locals.
This is especially unfortunate because in China the food in small cookshops is really great and worth the experience.
We need human contact
Whether we like it or not, we humans are herd animals and, as such, need contact with other members of our species. This is not just a “nice to have” for us, it is essential for our survival.
A horrifying illustration:
When the science-loving Emperor Frederick II had newborn babies isolated for the purpose of determining the primordial language, the infants were fed, but received neither attention nor encouragement from their nurturers so as not to influence the “primordial language” supposedly dormant in them.
These children did not speak Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, or any other language.
They died.
That’s terrible. Furthermore, it demonstrates that humans cannot survive without contact and connection with other humans.
Autonomy and independence are good and important developmental steps, but we should not take them to nonsensical extremes by living high-tech fantasies.
Reduced human interaction and a lack of connection to our fellow human beings and our environment are perhaps among the biggest problems we currently face.
They should not be on an advertisement flyer for the hotel of the future.
After all, if we took our neighbors as part of us, we wouldn’t be able to harm them. The same applies to the environment. Only when we have completely disconnected and distanced ourselves in a machine-like way can we recklessly treat our surroundings.
For a while, until it falls violently on our own heads. The law of cause and effect is a bitch.
I don’t need a hotel without humanity
It reminds me of the nightmarish hotel California the Eagles sing about:
“Last thing I remember, I was
running for the door
I had to find the passage back
to the place I was before
‘Relax,‘ said the night man,
‘We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
but you can never leave!’” (Eagles — Hotel California)
And for all our enthusiasm for technology, we should also seriously ask ourselves: is a fully automated hotel with greatly reduced human interaction really what we wish for?
Is this a world we want to live in?
