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Robot Family in Every Home?
cswilly writes: "Yahoo has a story that Sony wants to see a robot animal in every home. I was wondering if Sony has a total cost of ownership argument for these things? Let's see, $2500 for a robot dog + $100 in electricity oven ten years. A real dog costs, say $1/day to feed, lives ten years for $3650 on food, plus $1000 in vet bills. The robot wins hands down." But keeping it in Mom's Robot Oil isn't cheap either...
Sony is talking to sell this dog to everyone in China, not US.
Free artificial Minds for robots are now available from http://mind.sourceforge.net in both MSIE JavaScript (for learning about AI) and in Win32Forth (for implementation in robots). Some tweaking or porting to new languages may be required. Ports have already been launched for Visual Basic and Java.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mind/ is just one of well over three hundred (300) Open Source AI projects on SourceForge, and the AI "Mind" project is unusual in that it is based on awell-developed and highly original linguistic Theory of Mind (see SourceForge/ Mind/ Docs/ Theory of Mind) drawing upon Chomskyan linguistics and the neuronal feature-extraction for which Hubel and Wiesel won their Nobel prize.
Onwards to http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html -- Technological Singularity!
Interesting article here on sony's attempts to standardize robot architecture. At least they're playing nice with whatever competitors they have.
$2500 for a robot dog + $100 in electricity oven ten years. A real dog costs, say $1/day to feed, lives ten years for $3650 on food, plus $1000 in vet bills. The robot wins hands down."
Firstly, a dog does not cost $1/day to feed. A medium sized dog would probably cost 25-50 cents at most to feed if you were feeding it dry food.
More importantly, however, since the majority of the costs you attribute to the real dog occur in the future (some of it in the far future) you have to discount those dollars spent in the future to today. For those of you who flunked economics, this means that the value of $100 in 1 year is less than the value of $100 today, the value of $100 2 years from now is less than the value of $100 in 1 year, etc and the decline of value of moneys to be paid/received in the future is exponential. I don't have a calculator handy but you will find that the cost of ownership of a real dog (assuming the already unrealistic cost structure as explained above) is far less than the $4650 you came up with.
Whereas with the Sony dog, almost all the costs of the dog are up front so the present value/cost of the Sony dog is very close to its $2500 sticker price.
Actually, the average dog costs its owner $13,500 over the life of the animal... way too much for me to pay.
Smart enough to be rich?