
My Life as a Robot - ohjeez
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/my-life-as-a-robot-double-robotics-telecommuting-longread/
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blisterpeanuts
What a charming article. It brought a smile to my face at the end of a long
day.

My team is too decentralized, spread all over the world, for a robot to make
sense, but I almost wish this weren't the case because it would be so fun. So
many opportunities for jokes, pranks, and as Emily put it, joy.

Eventually these devices will need to have mifi or 4G, to get around the wifi
dead zone issue though if there's no 4G either, you're in trouble. I suppose
the robot could be instructed to automatically turn around and retrace its
steps until it has signal again.

Also, of course, they'll need arms. It would be so useful to point at things
on the white board, tap an elevator button, knock on a door, etc. Operating a
heavy door might be a bridge too far, for now.

But eventually, we may have a "Surrogate (The Movie)" situation where human
lookalikes are wandering around everywhere, and we'll be jacked in with 3-D
goggles, noise canceling headphones, and smart gloves that provide resistance.

This may actually be the Next Big Thing. Where can we invest?

~~~
CM30
So in other words, like that Avatar movie James Cameron directed, except with
robots replacing the Na'vi. Or if you're a Doctor Who fan, like the episodes
with the Gangers.

Either way, it'd definitely make remote working a lot more interesting. And a
lot of other things too, with the military potential being near endless...

~~~
blisterpeanuts
Yes but the Avatars cost like $1B each and were neurally customized to exactly
one person. I was thinking more of Surrogates[1] where you could remote into a
robot pretty easily.

1\.
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/)

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jklinger410
There's so much passive-aggressive quipping in this article it makes me feel
like it must be terrible to work for WIRED. I mean, the last office I worked
in was kind of the same way...

Is every office like that?

//edit

Okay, now I'm just creeped out?

>A coworker in San Francisco is logging into her, ___which normally would
upset me_ __, but I’m so nervous I don’t care __ _that another being enters
her._ __

Half of this article is this woman seriously personifying her "robot" (robot
or ipad on wheels?). Creepy.

~~~
Pfhreak
Anthropomorphizing inanimate things is a very human thing to do -- I can
imagine that goes double when the thing is tied to your presence in a space --
like someone rearranging the paintings in your house.

I don't see either the author or the coworkers in this story as passive-
aggressive, but rather familial -- people who were comfortable with a level of
joking and camaraderie that allowed this sorts of comments to be understood as
non-serious.

~~~
knodi123
Don't anthropomorphize inanimate objects - they hate that.

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fenomas
For anyone wanting to see this explored further, William Gibson's latest _The
Peripheral_ deals heavily with the idea of people going places via
telepresence.

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facepalm
I sometimes ponder a bot-rental startup. Like if you want to attend a
conference somewhere, you could rent a robot for the occasion.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
Great idea. Definitely the bot should have a business card scanner slot (and
maybe a way to prevent every Tom, Dick, and Harry from inserting his business
card).

I recall an amusing discussion about this on Slashdot a few years back. It
would be _great_ to have one of these at a conference, but someone pointed
out, you'd need a way to distinguish people-bots from actual robots, e.g.
Roomba.

~~~
corobo
Use a red circular light if the robot is being controlled by AI of course

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moron4hire
I think this is where VR will eventually settle in for the majority of people.
In a way, smartphones gave us the ability to communicate with anyone in the
world, for practically free, from anywhere in the world. With no barrier, we
just started doing it. VR is going to do the same thing for face-to-face
communication.

Sure, there is Skype and Face Time and whatnot, but they aren't the same. You
get stuck looking back and forth between the camera and the screen. The camera
angles are weird and the receiving user is at the mercy of the person they're
talking to as to what they're going to look at. Ironically, I've felt more
personally engaged, more like I'm talking to a real person, having
conversations in VR with robot-shaped avatars than I've ever had with human
faces in Skype.

~~~
dclowd9901
How does the other party see your face if you're wearing VR goggles?

~~~
moron4hire
You don't run video over the VR session, it's all a 3D rendering. You have an
avatar, and you correlate the HMD head movements to the avatar's 3D model.
Combined with simple hand tracking like Leap Motion, you get very natural body
language of of it. Check out AltspaceVR for an example.

There are also some fairly recent advances in photogammetry that I think we
will soon all have 1-to-1 avatars with our own faces.

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tux
Haha very cool! Reminds me of "Serge HouseBot" from Caprica.

[http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/serge-
housebo...](http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/serge-housebot.jpg)

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NumberCruncher
It remembers me of the HumancentiPad. Pick something what should not exist by
nature (a robot for remote workers) and put an iPad on the top of it. I mean
if I want to see a movie but I want to stay at home I don´t send a robot with
an iPad on the top of it to the cinema but I connect my laptop to my TV and
streem something.

[edit] Maybe I should send a robot to the cinema and write an article about
it. And start a protest movement because my robot can´t access the cinema and
that´s why I am discriminated. And write an article about it.

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thescriptkiddie
I don't understand these things at all. They're a hilarious toy, but they seem
like a complete waste of time regarding their intended purpose. For example,
when she says not to sneak up behind someone you're trying to talk to - why
not just send them a message? Or the robot in the conference room - have they
not heard of speakerphones?

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johansch
Have you ever been the one person to dial into a physical meeting with > 4-5
people in one room with a speaker phone? It doesn't work.

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thescriptkiddie
I have. People tend to forget about you unless you keep talking, but that's
easily solved with video conferencing.

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stcredzero
A friend and I were contemplating a robot tele-operation business. It wouldn't
be right to call it a startup. It would me more like a cross between a
catering/entertainment service and performance art.

The idea is this: get together some good tele-operators, some good haptic
tele-operation hardware, and hire out the group as "Robot Caterers" or as
"Robot Entertainers." I could picture some Hollywood tycoon hiring the group,
just so he can appear to be _so rich, he can hire robots from the future._
(He'd have to have some dim friends for this to work.)

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kevin_thibedeau
Seems like it needs more ground clearance. Surely someone at Wired can hack on
some thicker tires.

