The gig economy reaches its inevitable conclusion by allowing you to hire a body double with an iPad strapped to their face
Our increasingly global world has served up its fair share of increasingly global problems, along with a series of enthusiastically globular innovators looking to solve them. Case in point: A recent Select All piece highlighting a new technology called ChameleonMask, a name that sounds a lot better, disruption-wise, than “Hire some schmuck to walk around pretending to be you while wearing a tablet on their head.”
But that is, indeed, pretty much what it is, as revealed by its creator, Jin Rekimoto, at a recent MIT tech conference in Asia. According to the inventor, his twist on robotic telepresence systems does an accurate job of letting people feel like they’re talking to the “right” person, presumably because the gig economy has already trained us all to treat our sporadic employees as interchangeable cogs in the human machine.
And, hey, it’s the perfect solution to any number of contrived sitcom plots, too. Accidentally book two dates on the same night? No worries, friend; just hire your ChameleonMask double to sit in on one of them (presumably with whichever would-be paramour seems most likely to accept the substitution of a random stranger with an iPad strapped to their face.)