Your new office mate will bring you coffee, mail and packages, and will never bring a smelly tuna fish sandwich into the cubicle near yours. (photo credit: New York Times)
Because it’s a robot. At least that’s the hope of South Korean firm Naver, as it experiments with robots in the office, as reported in the New York Times. There are a host of issues, as you might imagine, privacy not the least of them.
But still it’s fun to imagine a world in which robots are an integrated part of the office.
“Naver designed the office from the ground up with the robots in mind, starting construction in 2016. Every door is programmed to open when a robot approaches. There are no tight hallways or obstructions on the floor. The ceilings are marked with numbers and QR codes to help the robots orient themselves. The cafeteria has lanes dedicated for robots to deliver meals,” according to the article.
“Naver said one distinctive feature of its robots was that they are intentionally “brainless,” meaning they are not rolling computers that process information inside the machine. Instead, the robots communicate in real time over a high-speed, private 5G network with a centralized “cloud” computing system.”