I’ve been reading a fascinating book entitled “The Rise of the Robots.” It is, as you might suspect, all about celery gardening.

I jest, of course. It is about robots and how the automation of physical and mental work threatens our economy.

There’s a interesting little premise that barely gets a mention in the book (so far) but seems worth describing here. We all understand that a lot of physical labor in product manufacturing has been replaced by robots. This has been easy because manufacturing involves a lot of repetitive tasks which robots excel at. What is harder for robots to do is diverse physical labor like what a janitor does. A janitor doesn’t repeat the same exact task over and over again. He might clean one bathroom, then mop a floor, then clean some windows, then throw out some boxes etc. And he might does this in a variety of buildings with different floor plans etc. Getting a robot to navigate all these tasks is still difficult. For one thing, while technology for robots to “see” is improving, it’s still not perfect.

But imagine this. You make an ambulatory robot with cameras attached and “grabbing” mechanisms as hands. You give control of this robot, via the internet, to some guy in an Indian call center. The Indian guy, payed a pittance, provides the seeing and motion control for this robot. By running the robot, probably via something like a video game interface, the Indian does the work.

Could it be that this process of human/robot collaboration could put real, first world janitors out of work (especially with the push to raise the minimum wage)?

But wait. As they say, it gets worse. As this robot is being guided through the janitorial tasks isn’t it being trained to do these jobs all by itself? For example, let’s say the Indian guy guides the robot to wash the windows in a particular building once a week. As he guides the mechanical appendages through the process of window washing, the robots records them. Next week it can do this job all by itself. Really, the human is only needed to train the robot a few times, then the robot takes over. (This is sort of how the robot Baxter, working in factories as we speak, operates.)

And don’t get me started on remote controlled robot prostitutes!