Some highly paid people seem to not be very good at thinking straight... or at all.
We’ve all seen robot bartenders in movies: Star Wars episode one; The Fifth Element; I, Robot, etc. Ever notice that human bartenders often have a lot of screen time in movies, but robot bartenders don’t? The reason is simple: robots are boring. Which is why we won’t see many robot bartenders in real life, and this real life robot bartender is going to go over like the proverbial lead balloon.
I suspect that the engineer who designed the thing doen’t frequent bars, but likes science fiction movies, because nobody goes to a bar to drink. From my upcoming Voyage to Earth:
“Is Mars still short of robots?”
“Not since that factory opened two years ago.”
“I’m surprised you don’t have robots tending bar, then.”
“Screw that. People don’t go to bars to drink, they go to bars to socialize; bars are full of lonely people. If there’s nobody to talk to but a damned robot they’re just going to walk out. I do have a tendbot for emergencies, like if one of the human bartenders is sick and we don’t have anyone to cover. The tendbot will be working when we’re going to Earth, but I avoid using it.”
Someone who doesn’t visit bars inventing something to use in bars is about as stupid as Richardson in Mars, Ho!, who assigned a Muslim to design a robot to cook pork and an engineer who didn’t drink coffee to make a robotic coffeemaker.
Just because it works in the movies doesn’t mean it works in real life.