As if today’s shopping centres aren’t already devoid of anything natural, pleasant and human. Take Melbourne’s Chadstone shopping centre as a prime example of how shit life can be (for those of you outside of Melbourne, just imagine a giant wasteland surrounded by a car park the size of a suburb—I’m sure you have your own version).
In what reads like it’s the plot of a Hollywood sci-fi, according to
TheNextWeb, some bright spark in Abu Dhabi has had the wonderful idea to replace all human customer service staff in its shopping centres and exhibition halls with humanoid robots called REEM.
I shit you not.
Not only will they remove the last front of human contact from the shopping experience, but they plan to replace it with this hideous thing:
Which isn’t too far away from this:
Which is a natural progression toward this:
And I don’t need to tell you what this means:
If T2’s great grandfather approached me in a shopping centre, I would freak!
But it gets freakier... check the youtube of this robot. People are expected to use the touch screen on its chest. On its chest while it stares at you. STARES AT YOU! Meanwhile, there’s a security guard in his smoked glass windowed room, watching you through REEM’s eyes in a Meeting John Malkovich way, fapping as you inadvertently thumb over REEM’s nipples.
Perhaps REEM’s designers need to read about the
uncanny valley hypothesis “which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers.”
Don’t think I’m not prepared for the inevitable. When SKYNET becomes self-aware, I will bow down to our new robot masters and offer my services as Human Officer to Robots (HOoR) and I will enslave the rest of you between the hours of 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday.
The Flight of the Conchords couldn't have made it clearer...