Welcome to a world of man and machine

Bored with the programmer who sits next to you? Fed up with the same old jokes, and the same old stories about their family and friends?

Well, an end to your tedium could be in sight. Put down the shotgun and move away from the rat poison, for your technology colleagues could soon be replaced by robots.

Analyst Gartner says progress is being made towards the commercialisation of autonomous machines.

It says the world will not be overrun for a long while yet, and that we are unlikely to see useful enterprise applications during the next three years.

But by 2015, says Gartner, more than one million mobile robots will be attached to business networks.

Movement towards this end is already under way. Of particular significance are Japanese robots aimed at performing service tasks normally carried out by an individual.

Since the mid-1990s, electronic security firm Alsok has been developing patrol robots used to protect larger buildings. And Honda’s Asimo research robot can run and slalom as it does business tasks, such as pushing a trolley and serving coffee at a meeting.

Further progress was revealed this week: a wine-tasting robot has been developed by researchers at NEC System Technologies and Mie University.

NEC first announced that it had succeeded in developing a robot with a sense of taste in June 2005, with the excitingly named Health and Food Advice Robot, which used its sensor to examine the taste of food and ingredients.

While no one expects the two-foot-tall sommelier replacement to take the place of a chief information officer, robotics could help to provide one solution to the continuing and growing IT skills gap.

Forrester Research reports that technology will have to be substituted for retiring and lost workers, so that each remaining worker can produce more output.

At the moment, robots are fulfilling simple service errands and media-seducing tasks, such as wine tasting.

Forrester suggests that most industrial countries will probably not follow the route of Japan, where robots are considered to be a realistic and acceptable substitute for human workers.

But at the same time, Gartner says Moore’s law, battery improvements and sensor advances are providing the power and navigation capabilities required for viable designs.

And if the NEC sommelier is a taste of the progress that is likely to be made, expect to see a robot sitting next to you and completing IT tasks within the next decade.