About a year ago, Popular Science introduced a robot into the office. One of the many virtues of working at a magazine such as ours is that we're free to test all sorts of cool stuff. So we called the guys at Suitable Technologies and asked them to send us a BeamPro, the telepresence robot made famous by Edward Snowden (no doubt, he got the idea from us).

At the outset, we thought working side by side with a robot would be little more than a weird experiment. And it was—for about three days. Then things became strangely natural. Now when I see our robot roaming the halls or dipping into meetings, I'm no longer shocked or confused. I just smile and wave. We even named it—Gus, for reasons no one can remember. One of my fondest recent memories was watching Gus lead an office tour for 25 squealing children on Bring Your Kid to Work Day. The lesson: Children love robots.