Robert Scoble, the technology commentator better known as @Scobleizer on X, spent an afternoon at the Mundane shop in Palo Alto. He has covered Silicon Valley technology for more than two decades, and he came to try the system for himself.
Who Rob is
Rob has been blogging about technology from Silicon Valley since 2000 on his blog, Scobleizer. In 2003 he joined Microsoft as a technical evangelist, and he was one of five people who built Channel 9, the video blog and community that opened the company up to developers and customers in a way corporate PR had never done. The Economist wrote at the time that he had become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide who read his blog religiously, and that he had made Microsoft appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world.
He went on to run Fast Company's early online TV efforts, then spent six years at Rackspace as its futurist and Startup Liaison Officer, interviewing thousands of technologists and entrepreneurs about what comes next. He also built Building 43, a community for people fanatical about the internet, named after the Google building he toured on his first visit there.
Why he matters
Rob is known for seeing technology early. He put the first live video from inside the first Tesla on the internet, posted the first video of a Google self-driving car on YouTube, and Siri was launched in his house. First looks at companies like Flipboard, Pandora and Instagram came through him too, along with thousands of startups he has tried, filmed and written about over two decades.
With Forbes author Shel Israel he wrote three books that called decade-long trends before the rest of the industry saw them: Naked Conversations on how businesses would use social media, Age of Context on the mobile and wearable boom, and The Fourth Transformation on augmented and virtual reality. He stays close to the people he has covered: he met Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak in the 1980s and they still talk about their favorite Apple IIs, and on X he reads through lists of tens of thousands of accounts to track the best in AI for his 600,000-plus followers.
What he saw
He posted about the visit the same day, writing that the future of work will change because of robots. Mundane builds an industrial-strength robot for electrical line workers who need to work on very dangerous electrified lines, and what makes the work different, he wrote, is the haptics system.
I held a cup of water and could "feel" them fill it up.
Robert Scoble, after working through the exoskeleton
Rob worked the robot hands-on: a worker slips into the exoskeleton, drives the robot with their own arms, sees through its cameras and feels everything it touches. From the safe side of the shop, the cup felt like it was in his hand.
Who he talked to
He spent the visit with cofounder and robot hardware lead Cameron Hilman and COO Eoin O'Doherty, walking through the robot, the operator station and the economics of putting skilled tradespeople on the other end of the system.
One of the points he took away: a teleoperation system has an added benefit, because employees of an electric company see their jobs are not going away and that it lets them work from a safe, comfortable van while their robots are up on lines in windy or hot conditions. In his words, it makes them have super powers and makes their jobs a lot easier.