Book a night at LAX’s Residence Inn and you may be fortunate enough to meet an employee named Wally. His gig is relatively pedestrian—bring you room service, navigate around the hotel's clientele in the lobby and halls—but Wally’s life is far more difficult than it seems. If you put a tray out in front of your door, for instance, he can’t get to you. If a cart is blocking the hall, he can’t push it out of the way. But fortunately for Wally, whenever he gets into a spot of trouble, he can call out for help.

See, Wally is a robot—specifically, a Relay robot from a company called Savioke. And when the machine finds itself in a particularly tricky situation, it relies on human agents in a call center way across the country in Pennsylvania to bail it out. When Wally makes the distress call, a real live human answers, takes control of the robot, and guides it to safety.

Wally’s job may seem inconsequential, but it signals just how close we are to the robot revolution. The machines are finally sophisticated enough to escape the lab and the factory, where they've long lived, and venture into our everyday lives. But for all their advances, robots still struggle with the human world. They get stuck. They get confused. They get assaulted. Which is giving rise to a fascinating new kind of job that only a human can do: robot babysitter.

The first companies to unleash robots into service sectors have been quietly opening call centers stocked with humans who monitor the machines and help them get out of jams. “It's something that's just starting to emerge, and it's not just robots,” says David Poole, CEO and co-founder of Symphony Ventures, which consults companies on automation. “I think there is going to be a huge industry, probably mostly offshore, in the monitoring of devices in general, whether they're health devices that individuals wear or monitoring pacemakers or whatever it might be.” Self-driving cars, too. Nissan in particular has admitted that getting a car to drive itself is hard as hell, so it wants humans in the loop.

Which might sound, well, a bit dystopian: vast rooms packed with humans devoted exclusively to tending to the whims of robots. But it’s actually an intriguing glimpse into the nature of work in a robotic future, and the way humans will interact with—and adapt to—the machines.

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Curiously, Relay has sourced its robot call center to a company called Active Networks, which operates traditional call centers. Which meant the people who do this work had to get new training to interact with the machines. In fact, they still get recurring training. And periodically they get together to discuss issues they run into. “This was not an easy task, as if we are preparing to take phone calls,” says Marcus Weaver, who manages call center operations at Active Networks. “We had to change our agents’ mindset and get them use to handling the request via a portal instead of someone call over the phone.”

These sitter jobs, though, may be fleeting. A robot call center is a stopgap. Robots aren’t ready to be independent just yet, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be down the line. “I can completely see that eventually we'll reach a point where we don't need the humans in the loop,” says Tessa Lau, CTO of Savioke, Relay’s maker. The idea here isn’t to fashion a future in which humans tend to forever-inept robots—the idea is to get them into the real world with a little bit of help. “We're experimenting with this new technology that's sort of the first of its kind,” says Lau. “We're still getting the kinks out, we're still making Relay more reliable, more autonomous.”