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Tools provide leverage for people to get work done; in many cases they enable us to do new kinds of work. Now consider robots in the workplace. They seem like bad news but do they have to be? What if robots weren't a threat to humanity, only intended to steal human jobs, but were tools that enabled all of us to do new things and live life differently? We may need to start seeing things that way, for our own sake.

The iPhone and iPad tablet manufacturer Foxconn employs more than 1 million human beings around the world. (They produce other electronics as well.) The company said last month that it plans to cut that number in half with the enlistment of 1 million new robot workers, a 100X increase in its robot workforce, over the next 3 to 5 years. "An empire of robots," the company says. Human workers? They will move up the value chain, the company says. How might that actually happen? People say that education is undervalued, what if robots saved us from that?

The Web has enabled a growing number of us to work remotely and even collaborate with one another from distant locations. While online meeting services like GoToMeeting, Fuze and WebEx are effective at letting us communicate with one another, they don't quite compare to the experience of actually being there.

What if you could go to the office without physically leaving your home? That's the idea behind telepresence robots, a few of which have become commercially available in the last year.

Have you ever felt like your household appliances are watching your every move and conspiring amongst each other? No? Oh well, I guess that's just me. It's exactly what European researchers are hoping to enable though, by building a data sharing service called RoboEarth that automated devices can use to share information between themselves.

To understand why this is useful, imagine a robot arriving at a location that it's never visited before. If another machine had explored there earlier, the map it had built up would be available on this "robot Internet." The same system could be used to pass around all sorts of information, from traffic patterns to help robots plan better routes, to the training information about how to best complete tasks.

Google will unleash 100,000 invites to use Google Wave later today. While Wave itself is obviously an exciting product, Google is also trying to create a developer ecosystem around Wave and has selected six Wave extensions to feature as good examples of what developers will be able to do with Wave: a competitive Sudoku game from LabPixies, a teleconferencing extension from Ribbit, video chat from 6rounds, travel planning from Lonely Planet, a weather widget from AccuWeather, and a map widget courtesy of Google Maps.