Robots are a hot ticket in today’s writing world. They’ve gotten very good at doing all sorts of things that used to belong to humans. So naturally, contemporary authors should consider including them in any creative writing piece. So where to find them? Just look around you:

• Bots move boxes in warehouses. Amazon has a “robot army” – a fleet of cute, short, bright orange bots that zoom around on wheels to fetch items from shelves and deliver them to workers for scanning. Saves a lotta steps and time.
• On several cruise ships, bots tend bar. And they are tough to stump; they know hundreds of drink recipes. What they won’t do is give you a shoulder to cry on.
• If you need to clear a road of land mines – call the bots. The U.S. Army plans to replace many boots on the ground with wheels on the ground.
• No more dangerous drug interactions if your pharmacist is a bot. And their error record? Zero in 300,000 scripts filled at the U of C campus pharmacy in San Fran.
• Farms in France are already using wine-bots to prune vines, drive tractors, and harvest grapes. And of course the cellar vats are monitored by bots.
• Who’da thought journalism would succumb to the lure of bots? Any number-heavy story with math stats is easy prey for the bots. So look out sports reporters and Dow-Jones statisticians.
• Gotta love that Roomba that dashes about sucking up lint, dirt, and Fido fur. Now you can get a Scooba to scrub your floors, sweep the kitchen, or clean out the gutters. Will cutting lawns come next?
• Who goes to the live teller at the bank anymore? Far less hassle to punch in your numbers, deposit your paycheck, take your money, and run.
• Don’t you love the auto checkout clerks at the grocery store, gas station, hardware store?
• Now bots are being designed that will sew clothing. The big challenge of working with a flexible material that can bunch up has been solved by focusing a camera on the eye of the needle in the robot. Counting the threads of material as they pass the needle (thousands per second) eliminates the bunching. So the garment industry will return to our shores – but there won’t be many people – just robots – doing the stitching of your next fashions blue jeans.

So the bottom line here is that bots are taking over many tasks that used to be done by humans. What will the humans be needed for? To take care of the robots. So better stay in school, study, and graduate because you won’t be able to walk out the door of your local high school with no special training and have a solid job on the factory floor for life. And when you want to add some contemporary flavor to your creative writing, add a bot or two.