Prepare to laugh at all your robot boss’s jokes. A new study by MIT has found that not only are workers willing to allow robots to give commands, but that they prefer robot orders to those of humans. "Our findings showed that our subjects strongly preferred when the robot scheduled the work of the team. Scheduling is an inherently difficult mathematical problem. While scheduling is not a natural ability for many people, new computational methods have given robots the ability to perform this coordination of resources quite well," Matthew Gombolay, lead author of the research, told CNBC via email. This new study, while interesting, does not mean workplaces will soon be ruled by "robot overlords,” said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, a robotics industry group. "If a computer doing the scheduling work is more efficient and you do a better job because of it, then sure, but the computer or a robot is still a tool a human being has control over, whether they programmed it or are utilizing it because they think it makes sense."
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--- Hamza Ali, CNBC.com