Mike Beltzner, director of Firebox, the much-loved web browser, lives in Toronto.  His company, and team of programmers, are 2,200 miles away in Silicon Valley.  He goes to meetings and conducts his daily business by "telepresence"--a robot sporting an image of his face mounted atop a mobile aluminum machine made by a company called Willow Garage that resembles an upright vacuum cleaner. By swiveling his camera eye back and forth, he can see the entire room and chats comfortably with the assembled team.

As an article by John Markoff in yesterday's New York Times makes clear, Beltzner is hardly alone:

Mobile robots are now being used in hundreds of hospitals nationwide as the eyes, ears and voices of doctors who cannot be there in person. They are being rolled out in workplaces, allowing employees in disparate locales to communicate more easily and letting managers supervise employees from afar. And they are being tested as caregivers in assisted-living centers.

The idea of having a boss that can roam around the office keeping tabs on what everyone is doing will obviously meet some resistance. People don't like feeling they are being spied upon. And, as alluring as the idea of having a machine do the unpleasant tasks like performance reviews and firings, there can be serious negative consequences to delivering bad news that impact peoples' lives by machine rather than face-to-face. That, you may recall, was the point of the great George Clooney film Up in the Air. 

But, robots are on their way to the workplace (many are in use already) and there are clearly many routine tasks that they can do well.  I'm not convinced they are quite ready to have their "brains" stuffed with the past 10 years of the Harvard Business Review and sent in to manage people.  Don't get me wrong.  I like robots.  I just don't want to work for one.