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Robots Are Net's Future, Says Vint Cerf
Ned Nederlander writes "Vint Cerf talks the future of the Internet with Ed Cone: 'I expect to see much more interesting interactions, including the possibility of haptic interactions — touch. Not just touch screens, but the ability to remotely interact with things. Little robots, for example, that are instantiations of you, and are remotely operated, giving you what is called telepresence. It's a step well beyond the kind of video telepresence we are accustomed to seeing today.'"
Slashdot readers will finally have satisfying girlfriends.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.
But I thought this is what Sara Connor Was trying to prevent... Oh wait, that was Terminators.
... just imagine what manifestation the new V!ag@ spam will take on.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Well look at that, Heilein was right yet again, just ahead of his time as usual.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Vint Cerf may have created the internet, but I'm a fortune teller and therefore have more authority over the future of the internet. The future is not robots, it's ham sandwiches. Amazing, isn't it? It will give you what I call telesancwichessence.
It's a series of psychotic killer robots. Waiting... patiently...
Science fiction writers have been saying this for decades. Actually, I think the esteemed Vincent Cerf has been talking to Captain Obvious.
Robotics will have to both become far less expensive, and far more developed than now before this happens. I'm already 56, I may not see it.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Westworld
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Imagine! You could control a robot playing tennis remotely! Oh wait.. What if the network lags. Oh we just simulate what would actually be going on the remote tennis court on the local machine and just pause the remote player's screen until we actually hit the ball and then we can send him a message telling him how hard we hit it and in what direction.
Oh WAIT! We're talking about REALITY not a simulation. Well then.. If we lagged we missed the ball and there's no way to paper over it like we can in virtual worlds.
If you had a traditional robot playing tennis running a hard real-time operating system then everything from moving into place, winding up and swinging would all take a predictable amount of time and given a good algorithm one could play a pretty good game.
Anyway, Tennis is a relatively trivial example but things that happen in the physical world where physical forces are in play do not tolerate internet like latency very well. You cannot send xon/xoff like flow control signals to reality.
If a robot stands for President 2008, I'll vote for it, err... him.
slashdot rocks
Teledildonics seem to be an instantiation of what he is talking about.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I don't see how this would be possible without major commercial investment in high speed low-latency intercity links (like the .edus on Internet2). This kind of remote interactivity requires very low latency in order for it to be remotely feasible.
Remember what the original Quake was like on a 200ms connection? Talk about skating.. Oh, and you can't do client-side prediction in real-world telepresence. I wouldn't want to be in the room when someone was operating a remote machine with high latency.
Would have some definite applications in the DoD though. It might restore the original definition of "strafing".
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
For social meetings, etc, would a robot avatar be that much better than a virtual avatar? I can understand when physical actions are actually required on the other end. But meetings? That would just be creepy.
I think the guys from Penny Arcade already knew this: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/8/1/
NOT SO MUCH ROBOTS
tele-sex will be THE HIT of the internet
remote touch/feeling will allow both person to person body-interaction
but will allow also interaction with a virtual sex-partner
or with a sex partner who is real, but wears the virtual look of some sexual attractive other
I fully agree and posted my agreement before I read your comment!
From TFA: Another change I'm pretty sure will happen over the course of the next 20 to 50 years is the way we interact these online systems, or even with local ones. Today it's keyboards and mice, but I expect interactions, conversational interactions, gestural interactions to be normal.
Sounds like a quote from a prediction of how interaction with computers will evolve from about 40 years ago.
Rather I would expect humans to become part of the cloud via low level (nano) interfaces on a borg line (or part of the 'Big Media' as a successor to the 'do no evil' corp).
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
they want their web agents back
same old shit, repackaged with new terms
i wonder what the next buzzword will be used to describe client-server architecture anew?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Crush! Kill! Destroy!
Now we can outsource lawn maintenance, paper delivery, nursing, hot dog vendors....
iChokeU
One of the best things about the web is that it connects all of us without necessitating a physical presence. The resources necessary for multiple physical robots would be counter-productive and take away a good deal of what makes wide-area networks so effective and useful.
one more person who has to create another tangible step backward for technology.
its called a script, vint. ive been making these tiny robots my entire career.
theres a distint possibility Mr. Cerf is too old to be anything but a father figure to the tubes waxing steampunk on an internet he likely hasnt shared familiarity with in around a decade.. nothing to see here. move along
Good people go to bed earlier.
Yay! now we can outsource lawn maintenance, paper delivery, nurses, policemen, firefighters....
I remember sitting across from Vint Cerf at the MCI headquarters in Virginia, looking out over the Pentagon, as he tells the board that they shouldn't buy my fledgling company because MCIMail was going to outgrow AOL and take over the corporate mail market.
He's one of those guys that people consider a leader in technology, but he hasn't really done anything of value in 40 years.
For a moment, I thought someone was trying to sell us yet another old as new. I'm glad he wasn't talking about software agents and bots from 90's.
Like Pintsize and Winslow from the webcomic "Questionable Content"
Take a look:
http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1222
And I can look at pictures of the Eiffel tower too, but nothing beats going there to see it for myself.
A slim cylinder plug that vibrates when "You've got mail!"
Say hello to my little sig.
The whole point of robots is not to require an operator.
Teleoperators have their uses, but those uses are limited. They're useful if the worksite is dangerous (disarming bombs), unsuitable for humans (underwater), or on a different scale (surgical teleoperators). Remotely piloted vehicles have their uses, too, but even there, the trend is toward automated vehicles.
The remote-presence thing might be useful for people who go to too many meetings and don't have enough clout to force them to be videoconferences. This is a niche market.
Remote robots modeled after the the PRC leader will be the new craze this Christmas.
I, for one, welcome our new remote maoist robot overlords.
Didn't we already have this discussion once after someone had already done it?
When he was wandering around at night looking for someone to "plug him in" .... Talk about reaching out and touching someone. Wow!
It's a good thing I got my insurance premiums paid up!
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Robo-David-Coppafeel.
I just finished working on this project:
http://www.bpexplorer.com.au/
(NB: Aussie and Kiwi users only can drive - sorry, but for obvious reasons of course)
Basically users queue up and control a robot tank with a web cam attached to it. The streaming IS slightly laggy, but very usable for the purpose.
I wrote the car controller etc. Lots of fun and the best dev project I have worked on. Unique challenges and all that. My degree/research just happened to be in Artificial Intellegence - so a nice (albeit accidental) complement there.
The intent for users was very similar to the experience article mentioned (without haptics) and the reaction from users was very positive. The idea of controlling something "real" over the internet instead of just interacting with bytes had great novelty.
One could imagine all sorts of extensions to this basic interaction. e.g. "robot tank counterstrike". Other types of robots. Car races.
The most obvious problem with this type of tech is scalability.
In the current scenario, users only get a max of 5 minutes each (with secret codes) and this still involves large wait times for even a modest (internet-wise) number of users.
Also, with moving parts containing hardware, the issue of upkeep is a lot more problematic. Cars will break down, require maintenance etc. To scale this scenario up is VERY expensive.
Having said this, how many people would be willing to pay for a high-bandwidth/realtime/gaming version of this? Perhaps enough to make it worthwhile?
hmm...
(runs off to drum up VC funding...)
Ro-bots, ro-bots
Fu-ture, fu-ture
Robots are our future, YEAH
That's genius! In fact, we should connect all devices to the internet, from little robots to buses to ovens. And we create a VR world as a representation of the internet. In order to navigate this world we'd develop little avatars or "Navigators" who run around and interact with semi-sentient programs and each other. Of course there will still be malware, so I think we should use unptched security holes in the Navigator protocol (which viruses will also have to use) to allow Navigators to attack and even delete other programs (like viruses). We could use small terminals to store the Navigators when we don't need them online... the form factor could be called Portable Terminal or something like that.
That's an extremely good concept and I wonder why nobody had that idea before.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
How about this as an example, the "remote controlled killers" - http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/07/09/remote.fighters/index.html#cnnSTCVideo
If the little robots allow the long-held dream of being able to punch someone in the face through the internet, there will be griefers and it'll be banned.
If the little robots are helpless against physical humans, there will be griefers and it'll be a failure.
Get off my lawn!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This would be sweet for any data operators who wish to telecommute. We could do anything but swap tapes and install, reboot, or repair servers. With a remotely controlled robot, however, we could do all that. And have litle battle with them when we got bored. Okay, that last part is what we really want them for. But still. We COULD theoretically get work done with them too!
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
... we will be able to poke people in the eye over the Internet.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
#4281 :D-< :D|-< :D/-<
<Zybl0re> get up
<Zybl0re> get on up
<Zybl0re> get up
<Zybl0re> get on up
<phxl|paper> and DANCE
* nmp3bot dances
* nmp3bot dances
* nmp3bot dances
<[SA]HatfulOfHollow> i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet
source
(using web.archive.org because bash.org is down)
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
If you thought the intartubes were slow now, wait until they get clogged with all those robots crawling through them.
... the internet is already full of robots.