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Bill Gates on Robots
mstaj noted that Bill Gates has an article in January edition of Scientific American A Robot in Every Home."Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies, wherein a handful of well-established corporations sell highly specialized devices for business use and a fast-growing number of start-up companies produce innovative toys, gadgets for hobbyists and other interesting niche products. But it is also a highly fragmented industry with few common standards or platforms. Projects are complex, progress is slow, and practical applications are relatively rare. In fact, for all the excitement and promise, no one can say with any certainty when — or even if — this industry will achieve critical mass. If it does, though, it may well change the world."
Why they printed an article by Bill Gates rather than one of the hundreds of professional robotics researchers in the country.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's all fun and games until the robots become hot asian girls, indistinguishable from humans, and pop out half cylon half human babies that can cure cancer. That's when the crap hits the proverbial fan. Bill has already requested a patent.
Let's see...
Roomba.
Robotic multi-disk CD changer.
"Soft-touch" tape deck, VCR, CD and DVD players, and anything else that sucks in your disk or tape before playing then spits it back out at you when it's done.
Vintage-1980s Macintosh floppy drives.
Toy robots including remote-control cars for the kiddies of all ages.
And the list goes on.
The robots in your home are hiding in plain sight.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The scene from I, Robot where all the androids take over the city...
while Microsoft mumble something about patch Tuesday.
Summation 2
I have a Roomba and a Scooba to do my bidding. This might surprise you - they actually work. I was skeptical at first, but goddamnit my floors are clean now. And if they can keep MY floors clean - I have 2 cats each with their own litter box - they can keep anyone's floor clean.
My floors are so clean now, I divorced my wife. Don't need her anymore.
-BHJ
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Note that the "First Law" referred to here is not the one listed above but the "First Law" in the book "Making Lots Of Money For Microsoft For Dummies". So, for example, should the human request the robot to re-install Windows XP on his computer, the robot may steal the human's credit card and go down to the local computer store to buy him a nice shiny copy of Windows Vista instead... and Office 2007... and a Zune player... Microsoft Laser Mouse... etc.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Or until Microsoft change this law by some additional small print in an EULA nobody ever bothers to read...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The essense of many conflicts that we see in personal computers today, is that somebody thinks that some things are more important than what the user wants. Right now the hot topic is intellectual property -- things like enforcing DRM, making sure this copy of MS Windows is "genuine", etc are more important than having the computer work flawlessly to do whatever the user wants. But you'll sometimes hear about different aspects of the same issue, such as almost-invisible dots that your printer may include in its output to make your document tracable, scanners' behavior when it recognizes certain patterns that are present in paper currency, or some cellphones' inability to emit a ringtone that the user supplies rather than buys.
Forces are at work to make sure your equipment serves what is deemed as society's interests or a vendor's interest, rather than your interest. It is possible to defend this trend, and some people try really hard to. But whether you're for it or against it, don't pretend it isn't happening.
So you're going to have a robot in your home. Ask yourself: whose robot is that going to be -- who will really be its master? If you think it's going to be your robot, keep in mind that such a silly idea completely defies the current trend, and you're sure as hell not going to get any such robot from Bill Gates or his kind.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
This is a significant change in direction for Bill Gates. Up until 2000 or so, he'd publicly stated that robotics wasn't going anywhere.
I ran one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams, Team Overbot, so I'm reasonably familar with what's going on in this area. It was amazing to me how much progress was made in three years. Much of the progress was in subsystems. Four years ago, a high precision combination GPS/INS/compass system cost about $100,000, and required 4U of rack space with air conditioning. (CMU's first vehicle actually had such a unit.) Now, such units are about $6K, the size of a thick book, and don't need A/C. LIDAR units have gone from mechanical line scanners to solid state 3D flash units; although these are still expensive, low-volume items, there's no fundamental reason they couldn't be brought down to camcorder prices.
More interestingly, computer vision in unstructured environments is actually starting to work. That was the real innovation in the Stanford vehicle - a vision system that could look at a distant section of a road and decide if it was similar to the nearby section. Several LIDAR units profiled the near section, and if the near section was OK and the far section was visually similar, the vehicle could outdrive its LIDAR range. I was amazed that that worked, but it did. It's a Bayesian statistics system, and quite clever.
Then there are the new generation of hobbyist robots. See Robots Dreams, which follows Japanese hobby robotics. You can get a good humanoid robot about 50cm high for about $1000 now. It's interesting how this happened. Robotics hobbyists have been playing around with R/C servos for decades, and quietly, under consumer pressure, those servos have been getting better. The motors used to be too weak, but better magnets fixed that. Then people complained of bearing failure, so the manufacturers switched to ball bearings. Then applied loads would sometimes strip gear teeth, so the manufacturers had to go to better gear materials. Then the things were overpowered for their dumb control algorithm, so each servo got an embedded micro controller. Then it was necessary to tune the control algorithm depending on load, so the interface became more intelligent and bidirectional. And suddenly we had servos strong enough for the legs of a small running robot.
In the hobbyist community, though, the software is way too dumb. Hobbyists are still using BASIC STAMPs and typically don't do much very exciting on the control front. By contrast, Grand Challenge vehicles typically had many CPUs running highly concurrent software. We had two Pentium IV machines running QNX and running about fifteen real time programs, along with five programmable motor controllers each closing some control loop. Gates is onto something with building better tools for hobbyist robotics. The Microsoft approach to robotics is clunky (it's a rehash of web technologies, including SOAP), but it has more integration than anything seen before, so it will catch on.
Once we get the theory and technology from the high end down into hobbyist level hardware, things are really going to take off. We have the parts now.