Upper Hand

4Don't Let the Robots Scare You

The robots are already here. And they've been with us for a while now.

They're the new checkout stand. The bank teller. The vacuum cleaner in our homes. The devices that turn the water off and on in public restrooms. They power our cars and even manage our money. They've lived among us for quite some time as complementary efficiencies to our lives, and we expect them to do some of the mindless chores we are no longer interested in doing ourselves. They don't have faces or names or families, but they are integrated into the most intimate parts of our lives.

The myth about the world ending and robots taking over is very much something you might find in a Hollywood storyline on a forgotten‐about Netflix watch list. Instead, interdependency, where humans and machines work to execute tasks together, is what will allow us to focus on bigger tasks while letting automation do the repetitive work we would rather not do ourselves.

So what does this mean for us in terms of how we navigate a robot present and future? Learning how to fix, train, or work with these robots is where we would do well to focus our efforts and our time.

Technology has fundamentally changed the way in which we live and work, there is no doubt about it. And with its presence comes great opportunity and the responsibility to learn from our existing spaces to determine how we can leverage these technologies to create greater efficiencies within our lives and also adopt their usage ...