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Mashable reports there’s been more progress in the robotic takeover. Drones that deliver food and brain chips that turn us into computers have a new ally in the battle to overthrow humanity: Marty The Grocery Store Robot. Luckily for us though, Marty is pretty goddamn useless–the robot’s function is basically to stand by a spill and call a person over. Oh good, more things to tell retail workers how to do their jobs.
Stop & Shop stores have come up with a new layer to add to the every day shopping experience. That layer is a huge, expensive robot which helps identify spills and other hazards. These robots have been implemented at 200 stores across Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey.
If you’re a shopper and get confused as to why this, 5-foot-3, 140-pound, $35,000 googly-eyed monstrosity is rolling around your local Stop & Shop, don’t worry–they all have this note on their body for you to read and understand:
“This store is monitored by Marty for your safety. Marty is an autonomous robot that uses image capturing technology to report spills, debris, and other potential hazards to store employees to improve your shopping experience.”
But Marty’s actually completely useless. So the key word in this robot’s description is “report” because that’s all it does. This shit just alerts humans to a mess or hazard so that they can clean it up. The little shit doesn’t even do it itself. And to make matters more hilarious, it’s bad at doing that! A piece of cilantro on the ground is alerted as a hazard equal to broken glass or a spill. Once it finds some such disaster, Marty’s operating lights change from blue to yellow and it repeatedly announces:
“Caution, hazard detected.”
Marty is super cultured and speaks both English and Spanish. An employee at a Stop & Shop said of the robot:
“It’s really not doing much of anything besides getting in the way.”
Which I’m sure will make the Stop & Shop executives who thought it was a good idea to buy 200 robots for $35,000 each which don’t clean anything, feel amazing about their choices. Here’s Marty “at work“:
Apparently my supermarket has just gotten a robot. Its name is Marty. It detects spills. Doesn’t clean them, just starts shouting if it sees one. pic.twitter.com/xnRuV8LBCU
— Jennifer Jordan (@jennlynnjordan) July 23, 2019
The other day, we heard the googly eyed and friendly stop& shop robot alerting (in two different languages) of a found hazard! We braved it out to find out what this hazard was: a bottle cap! #robotLifeProblems pic.twitter.com/h965nscTy7
— farnazIr (@farnazIr) July 18, 2019
I think we need to stop making it easier for the robots to take over. Like how many soldiers of war can we build for them? Sure Marty is going to be low on the totem poll, but listen, Marty will still come in handy for the robots during the AI Apocalypse. When Marty is chasing you down a desolate grocery store after finding you looking for scraps, beeping his alarm and shouting: “Human detected! Human detected! Humano detectado!” you won’t think it’s so useless.
Pic: Twitter