Message from the Chairman
by Steven Ferry
Just three mentions of butlers in the media this month.
- The investigative South African TV program Carte Blanche aired an responses to the video as well as the number of people writing to the editor, expressing relief that action was finally being taken to rein in the excesses of this organization that they had witnessed themselves;
- Bloomberg has an interesting article on the rise of robots in response to the fear generated concerning social distancing to avoid the spread of the rather unremarkable threat posed by Covid-19. The basic message: More robots will be employed and less people. Even though robot butlers are listed, the truth is that no robot, R2D2 notwithstanding, can ever take over from a multi-dimensional human in the service of another multi-dimensional human. The current and future levels of Artificial General Intelligence being generated by today’s software companies have as much possibility of achieving the complexity of human thought and action as the flint stones of the caveman had for achieving inter-stellar flight.
- On a more mundane note, a mildly useful product to salvage soap fragments and reshape them into personalized bars just had to be called a Soap Butler.
The Institute is dedicated to raising service standards by broadly disseminating the mindset and superior service expertise of that time-honored, quintessential service provider, the British Butler, updated with modern people skills, and adapted to the needs of modern employers and guests in staffed homes, luxury hotels, resorts, spas, retirement communities, jets, yachts & cruise ships around the world.