Artificial Retinas Can Balance a Pencil On Its End

mikejuk writes "A team of researchers has built a neural information system that is good enough and fast enough to balance a pencil in real time. If you think it's an easy task, try it! The Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH / University Zurich have used what look like video cameras to do the job but in fact they are analog silicon retinas. They work so fast that even with fairly basic hardware they can balance a pencil."

Comments

impressive tech and

[nopainogain]

unimpressive grammar.

Re:High-Speed Robot Hand Demonstrates Dexterity

[Paul Fernhout]

Even China is automating to cut costs: http://plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338
"In the wake of labor unrest, Chinese factories are adding automation to control rising labor costs. It was bound to happen. China, once considered one of the lowest-cost automotive producers because of its supply of cheap labor, is becoming another example of rising expectations as workers demand their share of the country's growing industrial prosperity."

It is the fiscal logic of mainstream capitalism in its final death spiral...

What's going to happen when a billion+ Chinese get a taste of prosperity and then lose their jobs to machine? Judging by the USA, not much... The unemployed will just suffer and die I guess... Is that the "hopeful" end to all this? Can't we hope for something better? There are other options for progressive change as I outlined, but here is a sci-fi story by Marshall Brain about two of them, suffer and die vs. a basic income as a right of citizenship:
    http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Also, people like to do a lot of jobs like raise good food, but our society and its economic model won't allow them (or at least makes it really hard) because the quality of the actual work experience itself is discounted:
    http://www.californiadreamseries.org/rfc.htm
    http://www.hulu.com/ripe-for-change

There was no net job growth in the USA for the entire last decade (despite rising population). That has never happened before in the USA. Yet, productivity in terms of the US GDP grew 40% (with the benefits almost entirely going to the business owners/investors). Why should that trend not continue? Mainstream economists, even liberal ones like Paul Krugman, seem pretty much oblivous to the implications. Offshoring is a huge red herring they are chasing...

Part of why mainstream economists don't have clue:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.html?_r=1
"But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists -- like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like-minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor -- have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record. "There is so much inbredness in this profession," says Ms. Reinhart. "They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded." "