<a data-flickr-embed="true"  href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/lloyd-davis/214922225/" title="Kitchen"><img src="https://farm1.staticflickr.com/82/214922225_47e0cd864d.jpg" width="500" height="400" alt="Kitchen"></a>

<blockquote>robot: "a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer"</blockquote>

I ran some events about a year ago about the future of work in the context of various new technologies.  One of them was "Drones, robots and the IoT".  It was interesting to hear people's thinking about how the workplace might feel and change if your co-workers were robots (including giggles about how many people's colleagues already seemed to be robots).

So I'm thinking more about what robots we have in the home already and how home automation in the last century might inform our approach to home and workplace automation now.  To my grandparents (who were all born before 1912), my home would now seem full of robots - machines capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically.  In the kitchen alone, we have a laundry robot, a dishwashing robot and a cooking robot. A little robot takes care of the central and water heating, providing immediate access to hot water and warm radiators at the same time *and* before I've even woken up in the morning.  My TV and its peripherals can automatically find, display and record media for me.  And I have my laptop and phone computers that do all sorts of things without any manual intervention, some of which I didn't even ask them to in the first place.  

It's not hard to see how any of these could become more complex, but do I see my house as being full of robots?  No, I just have some useful and some not so useful machines.  And I think it's going to continue to the be same with work.  We  didn't call the photocopier a robot, and when machines and software are automatically doing more than 50% of our work, we won't either, we'll just be wondering what it is that we could be doing instead of sitting around watching them.