My Life as a Robot | Hacker News Reader

My Life as a Robot

wired.com

95 pointsohjeez34 comments

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?

What if you rent a room with a whiteboard somewhere and put in telepresence robots for everyone? You'll save on food and...

Actually, a virtual reality persistent world would be more economical. Just buy Second Life licenses.

https://convrge.co is building a persistent VR world. (Supposedly alpha is working though I haven't tried)

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...

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/

I feel like the military potential has already been realized in the form of armed drones.

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.

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.

Don't anthropomorphize inanimate objects - they hate that.

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

That's ... sort of the point of the article. The attachment the woman finds herself feeling to it and her identification with it. The last line of the article pretty much hits that home.

Next up: "What's up with Blade Runner? Half the film is about androids?!"

Half of this article is this woman seriously personifying her "robot"

Correct, because it is her eyes and ears in her workplace, and she sees and talks through it every weekday. I find an exploration of what that means to a person to be absolutely fascinating, I'm really not sure what's creepy about it.

Personifying inanimate objects is usually either a metaphor or signifies something unsettling. This article borders on the latter of those two.

Sorry, that was just the way I took it.

Between the passive aggressiveness

>Sam cuts me off. “Em,” she says, “can you control the volume? You’re very loud.”

>“I am?” I ask.

>“YES,” the entire bullpen yells.

And then the obsessive literalness of the personification of the ipad this was a weird read for me.

Why is that passive aggressive? Because she asks "I am?" instead of just adjusting the volume?

The entire bullpen yelling YES as if an loud ipad is disturbing their sanity.

You know what though? I'm just expressing how the article made me feel. As a reader that's my right. You obviously don't agree with me so let's leave it at that.

Shit man, I just genuinely didn't understand. I haven't even read the article. I would probably call the yelling straightforward aggressiveness, but I'll agree that it's childish, overblown, and reactionary.

It's an advert. I wouldn't look too deep into it.

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.

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

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.

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

aka telepresence, like http://www.doublerobotics.com. There was a robot-as-a-service telepresence startup as well I stumbled upon, which I don't recall the name right now.

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.

I assume this is why Facebook decided to buy Oculus.

likewise

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

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.

Note that in the future VR googles will have eye tracking to improve the efficiency of the rendering, so you could also use this data to render correctly the face.

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

http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/serge-housebo...

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.

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?

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.

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

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.)

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

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