Teleoperating a physical robot could become an important job in future, according to Sanctuary AI, based in Vancouver, Canada. The company also believes that this might provide a way to train robots how to perform tasks that are currently well out of their (mechanical) reach, and imbue machines with a physical sense of the world some argue is needed to unlock human-level artificial intelligence. Industrial robots are powerful, precise, and mostly stubbornly stupid. They cannot apply the kind of precision and responsiveness needed to perform delicate manipulation tasks. That's partly why the use of robots in factories is still relatively limited, and still requires an army of human workers to assemble all the fiddly bits into the guts of iPhones.

Buoyed by the success of two robotic rovers exploring the surface of Mars, NASA scientists are building smarter and more- agile robots that can rappel down cliffs, slither between cracks and even have the sense to detect trouble. Scientist Silvano Colombano stood next to one of the new machines on a recent morning at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, where he demonstrated an eight-legged robot called Scorpion. It can climb up steep hills and plunge into rough terrain where its wheeled counterparts can't go. Next to Colombano, computer engineer Maria Bualat showed off the K9 rover, a robot similar to the Mars rovers, but one that can perform tasks 10 times faster than its cousins, which have been exploring the Red Planet since early last year. The new robots might get their chance in a few years.