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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.'"
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"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
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
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.
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.
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)
But their efforts to refuel their humans are a bit misguided. Not all of us run on radioactive isotopes.
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.
People would stop filtering spam.
I drank what? -- Socrates