Robotic Human Vs Humanoid Robots

By Chandan Agarwala

The term "Robotic Human" is used to signify the impact of mobile devices and wearable computing on users. These devices help to improve personal productivity, to the extent that users start to behave like machines.


The term “Humanoid Robot” is used to signify the intelligent machines, who can imitate the behaviour of living beings.

In the current era of evolution, the Robotic Human has taken a lead over the Humanoid Robot. This is enabled by the success of emerging technologies in a consumer domain over the enterprise world.
It can be attributed to the different mind sets of productivity improvement and cost reduction. While the consumer applications were looking for improving personal productivity, the enterprises were looking for opportunities to reduce labour cost. This might be a big factor in disruptive success of consumer technologies. The political pressure of job loss is adding to resistance to change. Even now, enterprises are looking to exploit the improved productivity of employees. Instead, they should try to look for overhauling business processes and considering evolving relationship between man and machine to improve business efficiency in terms of reach and revenue.

The metamorphosis of the virtual world due to the growth in mobile connectivity and social networking interactions, is set to change the human behaviour forever. This dynamism is likely to be continued, as wearable devices and virtual reality applications will diminish the gap between brick-and-mortar reality and online world. Applications for augmented reality and context aware computing will expand the level of human productivity to a level that, they will start to resemble machines. The communication channels of e-mail on desktop, and landline phones were not intrusive. But the always available nature of mobile devices has been developing a compulsive behaviour in users. The peer pressure is forcing them to respond in real-time. If the side-effects of stress can be controlled, the increase in productivity can create robotic humans.

It is almost a coincidence, that the rise in human productivity has resembled a decline in focus for developing robots. Most of the human productivity applications have developed in consumer world, where developers were able to recover investments quickly, by shortening product development cycles, and running attractive promotions.

On the contrary, the developers of robots were facing rising capital spends for a long time. The acute financial pressure of economic uncertainty forced many of them to scale down investment in the development of humanoid robots. Even the end-user corporations are unable to fund the infrastructure modernization projects for increasing automation. Among other factors, the low-cost offshore labour with less productivity was considered more economical than the highly productive, costly machines.

The balance of power seems to have shifted back to humans. Humans are able to improve personal productivity using machines, instead of being replaced by them. Enterprises have bowed to consumer technologies, and allowed B-Y-O-D (Bring Your Own Device), Cloud and Social media to leverage the improved employee productivity and consumer engagement. This has made employees and consumers more valuable.

Looking ahead, the technology applications that will try to increase automation, at the expense of human labour, are likely to face resistance in enterprise domain. Whereas, applications that will strive to improve human productivity are expected to succeed. As employees and consumers will own these applications at their own expense, enterprises will frame policies and customize operations to take advantage of them. Many of them are revising rules and processes to take advantage of employee-owned tablets. If concerns for privacy and secrecy can be addressed, enterprises are getting a more productive employee, who is not dependent on enterprise funds for acquiring gadgets, gizmos and machines to improve personal productivity.

Enterprises should not be afraid of losing control of information infrastructure due to the intrusion of consumer devices. They should be willing to capitalize on the improved productivity of employees. This needs to be communicated properly as employee empowerment by allowing to work from personal devices.

Enterprises should not be afraid of losing control of information infrastructure due to the intrusion of consumer devices. They should be willing to capitalize on the improved productivity of employees. This needs to be communicated properly as employee empowerment by allowing to work from personal devices.