No artificial intelligence: Chinese restaurants’ robots prove very dumb waiters

Employing artificial intelligent robots in Chinese restaurants – an idea that attracted national headlines – has not proved such a smart idea after all, mainland media reports.

A number of restaurant owners have chosen to fire about 10 robots because they were just not clever or sophisticated enough to do their jobs properly, the Xiamen Daily reported.

The plug has been pulled on a number of the robots – employed as chefs and waiters – only a few years after a catering business in the seaport city of Xiamen, in southern Fujian province, scrambled to employ them instead of people, the newspaper said on Tuesday.

Another restaurant, which opened last October, made local headlines for using four automated waiters that were able to take orders and deliver food to customers’ tables.

Now only two of them remain, to greet customers as they arrive, with the other two apparently canned.

“The robots were virtually not intelligent at all,” an employee at the restaurant called Chopsticks Passion told the newspaper. “They were merely standing there to look fancy.”

Another robot-themed restaurant closed down less than six months after its opening.