Yeah, there's a dissonance. People stay from being messed up physically and mentally by moving around and keeping their surroundings varied. On the other hand,

Yeah, there's a dissonance. People stay from being messed up physically and mentally by moving around and keeping their surroundings varied. On the other hand, you keep your mainframe CPU in a nice stable server room, not rolling around on the factory floor where it gets crushed when a bot slips and drops an airplane engine block on it. What I'm thinking about this is what will it look like 50 or 100 years on, if it catches up. People becoming physically and mentally unwell from staying still is mostly a mechanical problem beyond the lack of changing stimuli and surroundings, and the telepresence rig would provide those. The low bandwidth thing can get gradually better. The ultimate solution would be some kind of direct neural interface which would give pretty much the same sensory bandwidth as you get from your biological senses, but that would require an entirely new and really difficult to develop technology stack. What we can do now is develop VR and augmented reality technologies. At the operator end, a VR headset or some kind of CAVE environment to give 360° view of the bot's surroundings. At bot end, you could use augmented reality to project an image of the human operator captured from multiple directions as a 3D avatar that shows the operator's body language to people wearing headsets around the bot. I'm not seeing intrinsic value in people moving around in person, though of course lots of instrumental value which would need to be patched in with technology. There is, on the other hand, value in many people not moving long distances much, in the massive amounts of transportation fuel it would save.