New type of work: would you like to become a nurse for robots?

Book a night at the Residence Inn in Los Angeles, and you may be lucky to meet an employee named Wally. Its objectives are quite simple - to serve guests, to navigate among the hotel's customers in the lobby and corridors - but the life of Wally is more complicated than it might seem. For example, if you leave a tray in front of your door, it will not be able to get into your room. If the corridor is blocked by a trolley, it will not be able to move it. But, fortunately for Wally, when he finds himself in a quandary, he can call for help.

The fact is that Wally is a robot, and specifically, a Relay model robot from Savioke. If this car gets into a difficult situation, it relies on people from a call center located on the other side of the country in Pennsylvania to rescue her. When Wally sends a signal for help, a living person answers him - he takes control of the robot and takes him to a safe place.

Wally's work may seem unimportant, but she demonstrates how close we are to the robots revolution. Machines have already become complicated enough to break out of the laboratories and factories where they have existed for so long and dive into our daily lives. But with all their advantages, robots are still struggling to cope in the world of humans. They get stuck, confused, attacked. This leads to the emergence of an interesting new type of work that can only be done by a person: a robonian.

The first companies that produced robots in the area of ​​service provision, secretly opened call centers filled with people who were tracking the movement of cars and helping them get out of difficult situations. “This area is just beginning to show itself, and it's not just robots,” says David Poole, CEO and co-founder of Symphony Ventures, a company that advises other companies on automation. "I think a huge industry is born here, mostly offshore, that will track the performance of various devices - be it for health devices, worn by people, pacemakers, or whatever." This may be robomobili. Nissan, in particular, acknowledged that forcing a car to drive autonomously is extremely difficult, so it wants to introduce a person to the management process.

The picture can be quite gloomy: huge rooms of people devoting themselves to the whims of robots. But this is, in fact, an interesting look into the robotic future, and how people will interact with machines and adapt to them.

Save your (artificial) skins

Interestingly, Relay [apparently, the author had in mind Savioke / approx. transl.] transferred a call center for outsourced robots to Active Networks, a company engaged in traditional call centers. What does it mean for people working there to train in the new business of interacting with machines? People are already training from time to time, and gather to discuss the problems they have encountered. “It was not an easy task, unlike preparation for making calls,” says Markus Weaver, who manages the call center at Active Networks. "We had to change the attitude of our agents and accustom them to processing requests through the portal, instead of receiving calls on the phone."

However, such work as a nurse may soon end. A call center for robots is a temporary measure. Robots are not yet ready to become independent, but this does not mean that at some point this will not happen. “I fully imagine that we will eventually reach the point where we no longer need people,” says Tessa Lau, Savioke CTO. The idea is not to build a future in which people will take care of stupid robots - but to bring them into the real world with a little help. “We are experimenting with a new technology, the first of its kind,” says Lau. “We are still eliminating shortcomings, making Relay more reliable, more autonomous.”

Here, of course, the rates are very low - no one will die if room service is slightly delayed. But another robot, Tag, manufactured by Aethon from Pittsburgh, plays a more sensitive role as a hospital employee. He delivers medicine to doctors and nurses, and also delivers linen and food. The tag should not replace employees, but become one of them, free up the time of people so that they are engaged in human affairs - for example, talking with patients.

But Tag can still get stuck in such a chaotic environment, so the command center in this case ensures the calmness of the client. “We don’t have such a smart opportunity to wait for the culture to change and people will get used to robots,” Aethon employee Peter Safe told me when our magazine was visiting them at headquarters in November. “Therefore, we have built such a backend into the system, helping us to guarantee our customers that they are being looked after - even though they took such a decisive step by allowing autonomous devices to dodge around their organization.”

Can we not coexist peacefully?

But not everyone agrees to be watched by robots. At the end of last year, one of the Knightscope robot guards patrolled the territory of the animal protection society in San Francisco when a group of people who set up camp there allegedly attacked the robot.

“When living in the open, the lack of privacy gradually erases your human traits — when people are constantly watching you,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the San Francisco Homeless Coalition, to our magazine in December. - With the onset of night, a person is really relieved when he can be alone, without the people around him. And then suddenly this robot appears, drives around and shoots you. ”

The issue of privacy becomes even sharper when special people remotely look at the eyes of a robot. A person interacting with a robot guard may well assume that they are shooting him - but what he may not know is that Knightscope has a call center with people following the robots around the clock. And who exactly is watching? (Savioke's Relay Robot records videos in places that can be considered public — in the corridors and lobbies, but blurs the video as you approach the door of the room, so as not to detect what neither the robot nor the person should see).

If there are people behind the scenes, robots have a problem with the image. Part of the value of the robot servant stems from its impartiality. He lives to serve in a certain way - only for you, dear customer. But the presence of a call center calls it into question. What power does a robonie have? At what point does the robot begin to acquire the character traits of its nanny?

Savioke encountered this problem in its early stages. “We had problems with trying to create a certain character with Relay,” says Lau. - He is friendly, willing to help, polite. If you open access to call center employees who can arbitrarily control the behavior of Relay, for example, display any text on the screen, we will not be able to control everything that people write there. ”

Savioke eventually decided to limit the ability of the Robyanians. “They can send robots for delivery, control its movements on a limited scale, so that it will return to the desired path - but we decided not to let them control it in a free mode, since this is not a remote-controlled toy,” says Lau.

This is an interesting turn in the development of interaction between robots and humans - the topic is so complex that it has already spawned a whole scientific field. How, for example, should robots foresee our movements? How to develop robots capable of showing what they can do? And with call centers for robots, how does the dynamics change when a person is located thousands of kilometers from the robot with which he interacts and controls?

“Ideally, you should be able to interact with the robot through a high-level interface, control its actions at this level to rescue him from situations where he is stuck or in trouble,” says Anka Dragan, who studies the interaction of humans and robots at the University of California at Berkeley. "What exactly these high-level actions should be is an open question."

Another open question is the psychological effect of controlling a remote robot. Imagine operators of drones who can earn post-traumatic stress disorder , even sitting in a comfortable chair behind the monitor. Not that robonies watching Relay and other robots risk making something like that, but in their case there are interesting psychological consequences. For example, can a remote connection with a robot induce a person to unethical behavior?

We will definitely find out about it soon. Of course, the job of looking after robots can be temporary, as the machines are constantly becoming more complex. Robots, like children, grow up, after which the nanny is out of work. But for certain robots will always need people ready to come to their aid.