I’d love to get my boss’ ok for this. Live in the Bahamas and work from home. Hit the beach on my lunch hour. 
5:05pm quitting time and back to the beach for drinks. That would be the life.
I’ve read about a kid that attends school with one of these things. He’s got an impaired immune system. The robot lets him attend class and talk to friends without getting sick.
…says someone posting on the Internet.
No, really. Ten years ago we still had couriers showing up at our door to pick up documents and in-person meetings were fairly commonplace.
About five or six years ago we realized that we hadn’t actually seen a client in many months, and that our FedEx and courier bills were next to nothing.
We moved out to the sticks, less than an hour outside Manhattan but in five acres of gardens and forest. I think I Skyped with a client some time in 2012. Other than that it’s all e-mail attachments, from concept, to drafting, editing, styling, layout, then off to the printer (er, should have mentioned we write/edit/design books).
Most of our clients are institutional aid agencies, so though most of our contracts are out of NYC, we have them all over the world.
We can work from anywhere, but my favourite place is springtime in the gardens.
I know I’m not the only Doper who works from home.
Keep your jetpacks, this is the future I want.
What a hacking project! Imagine the lols.
So does the robotic avatar drive itself home at the end of the day, or does it just stay at your desk, displaying “Good night, see you tomorrow!”?
I’ve wondered how this would work in real life office situations. For example a heated discussion over the direction of a new project. Might get frustrating trying to argue and reason with a box on wheels.
I can see the real people creating their own social group separate from the avatar employees. “We drive in to work. We’re here and you aren’t. Are you wearing pants today?” LOL
I found these older articles. Robots let sick kids attend school. Article 2. I can only imagine the pranks those kids play on the robot avatars.
“What up, Shel-bot?”
Does the robot go to the john and take a nap in one of the stalls after lunch?
Can it goof off at the coffee machine?
Same thing it does every night… it plots the takeover of the world.
Some people will go to great lengths to never have to sign a birthday card again.
For many jobs, the hardest part of getting to work from home already is convincing the boss that you actually will work when he’s not looking over your shoulder. I’ve had jobs where the business-required interaction within my team was limited to “good morning”, one weekly meeting on wednesdays, and “see you tomorrow”; when customer interaction is already 100% web-based, what does the customer care whether you’re checking her tickets from a carpeted office or from your own living room?
My great-grandmother worked from home: she was a washerwoman. Others would go to their customers’ homes and wash the clothes there; she picked them up, washed them in her tenement’s collective through, ironed it and returned it. That was 100 years ago…
I work for a large digital media company, and one of the contractors who lives about 70 miles away presented a proposal to the company and received approval to build a telepresence setup. It has its own space in a big cubicle bay. I think the camera is on all the time, and we can see him working away. If you need to talk to him, you press the button on the screen and the conversation is initiated over Skype. The guy comes into the office once a week for face-to-face meetings. Seems to be working out pretty well.
(In our business, we get judged on our output. If a person is shirking his work, the results are obvious, and the penalties swift. At our company, a contractor who is not doing what he or she should be doing will be gone within a few weeks and will be replaced by someone who can do the job.)