Workplaces for human-machine "centaurs"

Roboticists are becoming workplace designers, as the challenges of creating machines that can work efficiently and safely alongside humans—"centaurs", in industry speak—grows. Their main approach: simplify human environments. As one designer at Boston Dynamics puts it “There’s a lot of mobility, dexterity, real-time perception of the world around us. [The robots] are good. They're getting better all the time. But there's a lot more we need to do,” But warehouses, and one day offices need to be redesigned as well to create adjacent spaces where humans and robots can work alongside each other. The challenge, as the roboticist puts it is “to make the robot do all the things that are in a problem, but also adjust the problem to make it more doable.”

Similar developments in simplifying driving environments to accelerate development and improve performance of self-driving vehicles suggest this is a widespread trend. This points towards restructuring messy human environments, both indoors and outdoors, as structured, machine-readable ones.