On Vacation and Can’t Attend an Important Meeting? Use a Robot Stand-in!

Can’t be in two places at once? I have this problem all the time. You want to attend that important meeting in person, but you have got to be somewhere else, like maybe a family vacation. Now there is an answer beyond the common joke of cloning. Send your robot, your telepresence robot. Be there and here at the same time.

John Paul Titlow has written an interesting article on the subject for ReadWriteWeb called Are Telepresence Robots the Future of Going to the Office? Could this be the future of commuting in an energy starved green conscious corporate world of tomorrow?

Telebotting at this early stage of the game is like a super video conference where you have a 3D presence and can move around and point lasers and such. You control yourself. Perhaps you want to get in the face of that loud mouth in the room who won’t stop talking. I can imagine you would get a lot of attention with one of these.

What else could you do with a telebot? Supervise a room full of document reviewers in India perhaps? Maybe the reviewers are just across town, but you don’t have time to drive? Maybe you could use one to meet with a client or other attorneys? Or make a speech? Or teach? How about an appearance in the courtroom of tomorrow? Medical applications are already being explored, so too are teaching apps, such as allowing sick teens to attend school and interact with friends. Can you see a meeting with all bots? Could get interesting.

One of the bots already on the market is a Segway-like robot by Anybots. Here is one of their demo videos so you can see for yourself what it is like. To me it looks more like a lamp on wheels than a robot, but remember, it’s just first generation.

There will be legal issues with telepresence bots of course, there always are. For instance, you could be at two places at the same time. You could be at work and at the same time you could be at home searching the web for, say, articles on how to use chloroform. Perhaps Cindy Anthony had one of these bots and is not lying to keep her daughter off of death row? What happens when the bot you’re operating malfunctions and crashes into a carbon based life form (a human) and injures them. Who is liable? You or the owner of the bot? What if one bot strikes another? Does a bot you’re inhabiting have legal rights? Put another way, do you have less rights when in a bot?

There are several telepresence robots already on the market at about $15,000 each. Three are manufactured by competing Silicon Valley start-up companies Anybots, VGo, and Willow Garage‘s new company Suitable Technologies, Inc.  Google co-founder Sergey Brin likes to use the Willow Garage’s robot. He is shown below using an early model to appear at a charity gig.

More telebots are expected soon that will have an even more realistic appearance. You know the prices will also come down as the quantities increase. This could be in your future even if you don’t work for Google. Someday every law firm may have one. How will that change work? Will people look down on you if your robot is short? Will Donald Trump insist on appearing in a gold-plated bot?  How will appearing in a bot affect your personality, your behavior? Will some people be even more effective appearing by bot than in person? Check out this next generation model shown on the right by Anybots. Just how anatomically correct will they get? What if the only model available for a meeting is the wrong sex?

They have already gone very far with this in Japan. They have an experimental model that is more like an android than a walking television. It, or shall I say she, looks amazingly real. Getting the future shock feeling yet?

But back to the present, here is a short, recent video on Gostai, yet another telebot manufacturer and their bot called Jazz.

Several other models are coming onto the market, including one by iRobot, the makers of the popular Roomba. They now have a telebot called AVA, shown right. This may well catch on, especially as the price of fuel keeps going up. I can see it now; I’ll appear at your event, but you have to provide a third generation or later AVA. Hey, I might even be able to keep up with Jason Baron’s speaking schedule that way.

Back to Anybots, who call their bot a QB, and sell it as a  personal avatar that allows you to, in their words:

Be part of the action at work from home or anywhere. All you need is a web browser to interact with the whole office, lab, factory, or warehouse. QB glides around smoothly and quietly, giving you total access and presence.

If you are really curious, the Anybots web even allows you to test-drive a bot for yourself.

Ariel Schwartz wrote an article on what it is like to spend a whole week using the Anybots robot, entitled Robots Are Changing the Future of Telecommuting. Here is how she described her experience:

The QB, a hybrid of WALL-E and a Segway, can sit, stand, roll around on its wheels, speak, display video on its forehead, and point a laser out of one of its “eyes.” Long tapped for factory work and perilous situations, robots now want into our offices. … Proponents argue that such robots are the natural outgrowth of pervasive connectivity, inexpensive broadband, and the realization that constant business travel is taxing on both people and the planet. Dozens of remote employees could time-share one robot to slash travel and boost productivity. …

For most travel-weary workers, the biggest trick may be one the QB already handles quite nicely: letting us stay where we are while also being where the action is, minus the carbon emissions spent and travel time lost. …

For most offices, that means videoconferencing will still trump QB in practicality. But the freedom of movement that a robot offers should not be wholly discounted. I have been to the Fast Company offices only twice over the span of 18 months. But following my week with the QB, I recently had an in-the-flesh visit and found that I not only knew my way around but also remembered where individuals sat. I felt, in other words, as if I had just been there.

Conclusion

John Titlow ends his article with an interesting question. I’d like to hear your answers.

By most accounts, these robotic representations of remote workers are pretty neat, but still a bit clumsy and not yet close to accurately mimicking the presence of a real person. As the technology and related interfaces improve, we could envision an office setting in which humans and human-controlled robots coexist and collaborate effectively. What do you think? Could you work with a robot? Too distracting or totally awesome?

I certainly could. In fact, for some people it might be easier to work with them that way (think of all the opposing counsel you know with personality disorders).

As I speculated at the end of Did You Know, the day may even come when all fact investigatory work in litigation is performed by artificial intelligence robots. Only the decisions and legal argument will be reserved for human lawyers. Watson can already easily beat us at Jeopardy, and automated review is already at least as good at document review. The day may come in this Century when all written evidence is handled by Artificial Intelligence robots. If a lie detector is ever perfected, and I expect it will be as brain imaging progresses, then AI bots may also take over deposition discovery.

Then lawyers will be free of investigatory drudgery. They will not personally do discovery. They will just supervise their team of super-smart-bots, like they now supervise their associates and paralegals. Lawyers will be free to do what they do best, the law. Maybe then trial lawyers will actually try cases again.