Robotic Nation Evidence

Over the last two weeks, so many people have sent in so many articles that it has been hard to keep up. Here's a roundup of the many submissions I have received:

• Scout Robot Videos -- This is an absolutely fascinating collection of videos showing how small Scout robots can solve problems by collaborating together.
  
  
• Turning Robots Into A Well-oiled Machine -- Robot Teams To Help Emergency Responders In The Trenches - More detail about the Scout robots that appeared in the previous videos.
  
  
• Speaking of videos, this page has a multimedia section that contains videos showing a Seqway-based tele-operated robot.
  
  
• Robotic traffic cones swarm onto highways - From the article: "The self-propelled markers take the form of robotic three-wheeled bases for the brightly coloured barrels that are set out to demarcate road repair zones. Farritor says they can open and close traffic lanes faster and more safely than humans."
  
  
• Robotic Highway Safety Markers -- a more academic paper on the "robotic highway cones" discussed in the previous article. With photos.
  
  
• Fujita's unmanned construction system - Construction workers may be out of their jobs sooner than we think.
  
  
• Deloitte Study Finds $356 Billion Outsourcing Trend - The article states: "In a comprehensive survey of their moves offshore, the world's 100 largest financial-services companies indicate they expect to transfer an estimated $356 billion of their operations and two million jobs offshore over the next five years in efforts to reduce their costs significantly." Two million jobs is a lot of jobs to lose in five years, and that is in just one industry...
  
  
• Until Vertebrane is available, this system will be useful: A system that projects light beams directly into the eye could change the way we see the world. From the article: "US firm Microvision has developed a system that projects lasers onto the retina, allowing users to view images on top of their normal field of vision. It could allow surgeons to get a bird's eye view of the innards of a patient, offer military units in the field a view of the entire battlefield and provide mechanics with a simulation of the inside of a car's engine."
  
  
• If you are willing to listen through an audio file, this one contains an interesting description of new hospitals being built in California. It describes how the entire hospital is being adapted to make life easier for robots, and how one entire floor of the hospital will be inhabited only by robots. Go to this archive page, and listen to the file called "Earthquake Standards for Hospitals" on April 26, 2004.
  
  
• Here's the start of robotic policing:Florida Town to Use Surveillance Cameras - From the article: "One of the nation's wealthiest towns will soon have cameras and computers running background checks on every car and driver that passes through."
  
  
• Fear of crime makes UK most watched country in Europe - "British people are living in greater fear of crime than any other European nation, an anxiety that is fuelling the massive increase in closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras."
  
  
• And in Washington DC: More spy cameras are on the way
  
  
• Photo recognition software gives location - From the article: "For a small fee, photo recognition software on a remote server works out precisely where you are, and sends back directions that will get you to your destination."
  
  
• The 'Robotic Psychiatrist' Answers - mentions Robotic Nation.
  
  
• The Bluewater Revolution - From the article: "The buoy is the antenna, eyes, and brain of a sprawling apparatus suspended beneath the surface like a huge aquatic insect, its legs of thick steel chain tethered to the ocean floor. The creature's body is a group of three cages, each resembling a gigantic toy top. Inside the cages are swirling, stupid mobs of fish."
  
  
• Open Automaton Project - "The purpose of this project is to engineer modular software and electronic components, from which it is possible to assemble an intelligent PC-based mobile robot suitable for home or office environments."
  
  
• Robots and the Rest of Us - From the article: "Since when do machines need an ethical code? For 80 years, visionaries have imagined robots that look like us, work like us, perceive the world, judge it, and take action on their own. The robot butler is still as mystical as the flying car, but there's trouble rising in the garage. In Nobel's vaulted ballroom, experts uneasily point out that automatons are challenging humankind on four fronts."
  
  
• DARPA tech chief envisions the future - From the article: "DARPA spends $29 million per year on its Perceptive Assistant That Learns program, which develops robots programmed to think. The agency and its contractors will first develop an architecture that considers reasoning, learning, perception, language and action for robots, he said."
  
  
• Everyday robotics, highways with smarts on road ahead - Predictions of the future of robotics by Ed Lazowska, holder of the University of Washington Bill & Melinda Gates chair in computer science and engineering.
  
  
• Robot butler may rival Jeeves - A look at the house of the future.
  
  
• Talking to your car becoming natural - "Voice recognition systems have come a long way in the last decade and are used in places like call centres, home PCs and even mobile phones."
  
  
• Cognitive Rascal in the Amorous Swamp: A Robot Battles Spam - From the article: "Recently I've become acquainted with one of these idiot savants, a software robot called SpamProbe. Its one modest talent is learning by example to recognize junk e-mail messages and keep them from my in-box."
  
  
• Google is another idiot savant robot, but one having a much larger effect on our world. Google's Goal: "Understand Everything" talks about Google's plan to transition to a much higher plain.
  
  
• Quick-care kiosks open in 2 Krogers - shows how health care can be sliced and diced in a Manna-like way.
  
  
• Brain Scans Arouse Researchers - More on brain scans.
  
  
• Hard disk 'speed limit' found - "The good news: This limit is about 1,000 times faster than today's state-of-the-art data storage devices." Moore's law will continue on hard disks for some time to come...
  
  
• ROBOT ARMY DECLARES WAR ON TEENAGE PREGNANCY - Robotic babies teach teenagers the rigors of parenthood.
  
  
• Koolio refrigerator robot - simple but useful.
  
  
• SAE Walking Robot Challenge Strides Toward Schenectady, New York - starts today: "The SAE Walking Robot Challenge engages collegiate teams to design, build, and test a walking machine with a self-contained power source."
  
  
• 'Paper or plastic' is now 'computer or cashier'
  
  
• Tiny Computer Could Fight Cancer - From the article: "Scientists have come a step closer to creating a minuscule DNA computer that may one day be able to spot diseases like cancer from inside the body and release a drug to treat it."
  
  
• Engineer Gives Robots A New Way To 'See' - From the article: "A Johns Hopkins University electrical engineer has developed a new robotic vision system on a microchip that enables a toy car to follow a line around a test track, avoiding obstacles along the way. In the near future, the same technology may allow a robotic surgical tool to locate and operate on a clogged artery in a beating human heart."
  
  
• New Lab Could Help Robots "Feel" More Like Humans - From the article: "Her work is part of a larger effort to create more sophisticated machines to take over tasks that are too dangerous, too tedious or too difficult for humans. To achieve this goal, many researchers are working on systems that give robots "eyes" to identify objects and avoid obstacles. But Okamura is one of the few engineers trying to replicate the sense of touch."
  
  
• NASA: Robotic repair of Hubble 'promising' - From the article: "Ed Weiler, NASA's space science chief, told reporters in February that extensive robotic servicing did not appear feasible given the current state of technology." But: "O'Keefe said what changed his mind was the quality of some of 26 responses the agency received in response to a recent call for ideas for servicing the Hubble Space Telescope without putting a space shuttle crew at risk. 'Some of the ideas we've heard are using capabilities that exist right now- actual hardware exists right now,' O'Keefe said, adding, 'It looks feasible at this juncture ... I'd have to put more stock in it right now.'" Here again, you see how quickly robotic technology is advancing -- to the point where the advances surprise even NASA officials.
  
  
• Seamless - From the article: "Textile manufacturing has a long history of sparking social and technological change. Joseph-Marie Jacquard's automatic loom, introduced in 1801, caused riots among the hand-weavers it began to displace, and later inspired Charles Babbage's Difference Engine and Herman Hollerith's punch cards. Likewise, the demise of cut-and-sew could have significant impact, allowing manufacturers to save time and money by eliminating work usually done by skilled laborers. 'Miyake is weaving garments that don't need to be sewn,' says Jack Lenor Larsen, an internationally renowned textile designer, 'and that is the wave of the future.'"

Thanks to everyone for all of your help! Enjoy!

If you haven't been keeping up with advances in nanotechnology, then this article is eye-opening:

An Overview of CRN's Current Findings

From the article:

Molecular nanotechnology (MNT) manufacturing means the ability to build devices, machines, and eventually whole products with every atom in its specified place. MNT is coming soon—almost certainly within 20 years, and perhaps in less than a decade. When it arrives, it will come quickly. Molecular manufacturing can be built into a self-contained, tabletop factory that makes cheap products efficiently at molecular scale. The time from the first assembler to a flood of powerful and complex products may be less than a year. The potential benefits of such a technology are immense. Unfortunately, the risks are also immense.

What are the risks? The article states:

The power of the technology may cause two competing nations to enter a disruptive and unstable arms race. Weapons and surveillance devices could be made small, cheap, powerful, and very numerous. Cheap manufacturing and duplication of designs could lead to economic upheaval. Overuse of inexpensive products could cause widespread environmental damage. Attempts to control these and other risks may lead to abusive restrictions, or create demand for a black market that would be very risky and almost impossible to stop; small nanofactories will be very easy to smuggle, and fully dangerous. There are numerous severe risks—including several different kinds of risk—that cannot all be prevented with the same approach. Simple, one-track solutions cannot work. The right answer is unlikely to evolve without careful planning.

It is very interesting reading, and also very interesting to ponder the social/economic ramifications.

As mentioned in Robotic Nation and Manna, the effects of technologies that will fall into our hands over the next 20 to 30 years will be unbelievable from a social and economic standpoint. These technologies have to power to create "heaven on earth", or "hell on earth", depending on how we manage their arrival and dispersion.

This featurette is a piece by Alex Proyas where he describes the movie "I, Robot" as a "documentary of the future":

I, Robot Video

The trailer for the movie is available here:

I, Robot trailer

Several things portrayed here are certain to happen withing the next 30 to 40 years:

• Robots will be able to speak, understand and "think" in ways that are equivalent to human beings.
  
• Robots will be physically superior to humans. I don't know if they will be able to climb up the sides of buildings as shown, but in terms of running, jumping, etc. they will surpass humans.
  
• Robots will be walking among us and taking most "jobs" that we see in public today: loading trash trucks, walking dogs, etc.

However, robots will go much further. Will Smith will not be driving his own car, for example. It is doubtful that cars will even have steering wheels. Robots will be doing all the driving -- humans will be seen as a hazard.

Robots at this level of functionality will also take nearly every job we see in our economy today. See this post for details.

Robo Rehab

From the article:

Each year 700,000 people in the United States have a stroke. About three-quarters survive, but more than half suffer from impaired movement. Their route to recovery is long and tough, as they painfully relearn how to use an arm or a leg by going through the motions over and over again with a physical or occupational therapist.

Unfortunately, all that therapist time gets very expensive, and health insurers have dramatically cut the amount of therapy they will reimburse. "When I started, it was three to five months," says Susan Fasoli, an MIT researcher and occupational therapist. "Now we're lucky if we get patients for three weeks."

Given less therapy, many stroke victims never recover as well as they might. 'The more therapy you do and the more intense the therapy is, the better your ability to recover function after a stroke,' says Richard Mahoney, president of Phybotics, a robotics startup in Westmont, NJ. But if patients can function - even one-handed - their insurance firms may tell them that their rehabilitation is done. And if training is overly focused on a few very specific tasks, it may even impede a more general recovery.

Enter rehabilitation robots, which can ease the therapist's load by delivering certain treatments very efficiently, in some cases, achieving dramatically better results than conventional therapy alone.

This article does not engender any love for insurance companies, does it? "But if patients can function - even one-handed - their insurance firms may tell them that their rehabilitation is done" is not a happy sentence.

But the point is that robots are better than human therapists in many cases today, and apparently insurance companies are happy to pay for the robots, so the robots will win. Most human physical therapists will eventually be out of work as the robots get better and better. See Robotic Nation for details. See also this post.

A picture paints a thousand words:



How long will it be before it is a second robot, rather than a human, standing on the ladder?

See Robotic Nation for details.

I can't tell you how many people have said to me, "The economy will create plenty of new high-paying jobs. Just look at Biotech -- there's millions of new jobs that will be created in just that one industry!"

For some reason, people assume that Biotech jobs will not be automated with robots, and that all the jobs to be created in Biotech will stay within the boundaries of the United States.

These two articles are therefore interesting:

Testing the offshore waters / Biotech firms experiment with moving work overseas

From the article: "The nonprofit scientific research contractor SRI International [has] become an outspoken advocate of offshoring work to tech centers like Shanghai, where labor costs are a fraction of Bay Area rates."

Are biotech jobs next to go? Stronghold of Bay Area economy not immune to trend

From the article:

There are signs that the nation's biotech industry may be on the verge of an offshoring wave of its own, awakened to an international climate where firms can get qualified workers for as little as a tenth of the U.S. cost.

"Some of the best minds in biotech are in India,'' said Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington, D.C. "You'd be foolish not to take advantage of them.''

A canvass of the Bay Area alone easily turns up biotech companies that are already testing the offshore waters. For example, Stanford University spin- off SRI International has an outsourcing deal with a research firm in Shanghai. South San Francisco's Genentech Inc., founder of the biotech industry, is manufacturing some supplies of an innovative cancer drug in Spain.

The fact is that all the mundane lab work can be done by robots. Many, if not most, of the non-automated jobs can be done for a tenth the cost by off-shoring them. And there it is. See Robotic Nation for details.

Robotics gets moving - Intelligent mobile robots are closer to being used in manufacturing plants than people think

From the article:

AS NASA’s famous robots scout around the Red Planet looking for Martians and minerals, the bizarre looking machines seem far removed from the factory floor. But intelligent mobile robots like Spirit and Opportunity are closer to being used in manufacturing plants than many people would think.

Also:

Cygler suggests that for more “clever” tasks to be carried out by robots, manufacturers should consider robots with vision based intelligent sensing systems. “The vision based system inspects the product, measures the product and recognises the product…Obviously that task could be done by a human, but a human actually could not do that task without the use of very special measuring devices…By the naked eye you couldn’t do it. Even by measuring with a gauge it would be time consuming. By using a robot with that specific type of device, this is done automatically, and very fast. It takes a couple of seconds.”

Wyeth said robot movements are also becoming more precise, allowing them to be used in new high accuracy applications.

“The big problem with precision manufacturing with a robot arm is that typically they have a series of motors, six motors in series one after the other and each joint or motor introduces a certain amount of inaccuracy in the tool point placement. The new type of robot structures are called parallel robots where instead of the actuators acting in series, they act in parallel. This means the two actuators can really work against each other to lock the tool point in place.”

Wyeth warns manufacturers to be aware that robotics is developing very quickly.

“There’s been a period of consolidation over the past ten years where a lot of robot arm technology and the software has become very good and the robots themselves have become incredibly reliable.

See also this post.

Robot Plane Drops Bomb in Successful Test

If the Marines' Gladiator robot or DARPA's huge Spinner robot are not enough for you, then try the new robotic bomber, offically known as the X-45:



From the article:

A robotic plane deliberately dropped a bomb near a truck at Edwards Air Force Base on Sunday, marking another step forward for technology the U.S. military hopes will one day replace human pilots on dangerous combat missions.

Under human supervision but without human piloting, a prototype of the Boeing Co.'s X-45 took off from the desert base, opened its bomb bay doors, dropped a 250-pound Small Smart Bomb and then landed.

Now imagine thousands of Gladiator, Spinner and the X-45 robots operating together on the battlefield, or quelling a riot in a city.

This robotic airplane also marks another step in the elimination of humans from the cockpit.

Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle (UGCV) (Spinner)

If the Marines' Gladiator robot was not enough for you, try the Spinner robot:


Click to enlarge

Spinner is a robotic chassis. From the article:

The UGCV team designed an innovative unmanned vehicle, "Spinner", that couples extreme terrainability with fuel efficiency, survivability and weapons payload flexibility to deliver the long-range capability required by UGCV missions. Spinner is a highly durable, invertible, 6WD vehicle that responds to the need of a UGCV to surmount challenging terrain obstacles, be easily teleoperated, and withstand an occasional moderate crash and rapidly recover. Spinner exploits the uncrewed aspect by enabling inversion and maintaining a low profile. In addition to rollover crash survivability, the hull, suspension and wheels have been designed for extreme frontal impacts from striking a tree, rock or unseen ditch at speed.

The article suggests missions as long as 14 days (without refueling) for Spinner.

Imagine mounting all of Gladiator's weaponry and much more on this huge chassis and then turning it loose on a battlefield or a city. See this post for details.

Edmonton Journal - canada.com network

From the article:

The image of loupe-eyed craftspeople cutting priceless diamonds with unerring hands may soon be a part of history. Robots are invading the industry so quickly that some companies are using them exclusively to put the sparkle in their gems.

Also:

HRA's 24 cutting-edge machines cost more than a million dollars, but each one can accomplish in two hours what takes a craftsperson a whole day. The machines work seven days a week, don't get sick and never take holidays, says Ariel, whose Belgian-owned family firm also has factories in Antwerp and Vietnam. One person can run 35 to 40 machines -- critical when you're trying to compete with low-paying countries such as India, Vietnam and Armenia.

This sentence is extremely important: "Robots are invading the industry so quickly that some companies are using them exclusively to put the sparkle in their gems." One year, people are doing all the work of diamond cutting. The next year, robots "invade the industry" and an entire industry is largely gone from the labor pool.

This is not the slow, century-long process we saw with the loss of jobs in agriculture or in manufacturing. It is a three-to-five year process instead. Once robots cross over the cost/benefit cusp, everyone in the industry must convert to robots rapidly or go out of business. Thousands of workers are quickly unemployed.

Imagine the economic effects when retail, construction, transportation, etc. all automate at approximately the same time, and you understand the power of the Robotic Nation.

New Security Robot Doubles as Facility Operations' Wi-Fi Robotic Assistant

From the article:

Once a PatrolBot scans its work areas, it travels automatically to perform tasks: mapping temperatures to improve central heating and cooling efficiency; measuring wi-fi signal strength to improve coverage; enabling security guards to remotely investigate several problems simultaneously, and carrying light, emergency supplies or other equipment into an unsafe or dark building. PatrolBot systems have been used at companies including Hewlett-Packard, Pfizer Global Research and Victoria's Secret.

The new PatrolBot can carry 12kg of sensors and surveillance equipment, over 2cm cables, across 2cm sills and up ADA-compliant slopes in daylight and
dark.

PatrolBot employs revolutionary ARCS controls shared by AR MobileRobot's AGV's and other intelligent rovers. Using sophisticated sensing and software, ARCS robots map buildings on-the-fly and navigate to destinations without wires or other retrofitting. They can share maps, enabling a fleet of robots to head out with little notice. ARCS robots sense obstacles; if a path is blocked they can find alternative routes.

This ability to share maps and communicate wirelessley is fascinating, because it means that groups of hundreds of robots will be able to act much more intelligently than single robots can. Imagine a city containing millions of robots, all of them sharing information with one another like this. See also this post.

The latest article to show how robots are advancing in the cockpit is this one: Virtual pilot lands Qantas jet. From the article:

For 45 minutes last Wednesday the flight from Singapore responded to commands despatched from the tower at Tullamarine.

Flight QF10, carrying 400 passengers, went from 39,000ft to a standing stop on the tarmac without the pilots or tower talking.

A revolutionary landing process driven entirely by digitised commands was transmitted to the aircraft via the tower computer.

See Robotic Nation and Manna for details. See also this post.

The previous post on humanoid police robots prompted a friend to send in this article on fully armed military robots: Gladiator robot looks to join Marine Corps.





From this article:

The Gladiator is loaded with all sorts of gadgets and weaponry, including day and night cameras, a chemical detection system, Light Vehicle Obscuration Smoke System, and is mounted with either M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, the M240G Medium Machine Gun, 9 mm Uzi or an Anti-Personnel/Obstacle Breaching System (APOBS).

From this article:

The target cost for the Gladiator is $150,000, which Larry Hennebeck of the Unmanned Ground Vehicles Joint Project Office said is a big departure from million-dollar Army prototype attack systems.

That is a very low price point -- not much different from the annual cost of a soldier.

The price will fall, and advancing computer and vision technology will make the Gladiator and its descendents more and more autonomous. At first it will take one soldier to operate each Gladiator. Then a soldier will be able to operate two or three simultaneously. Then a soldier will be able to operate a squad of 20 of them, and so on. In 20 years, imagine thousands of gladiators, instead of soldiers, deploying on the battlefield. Or deploying to police a U.S. city.

Spirit Stands Down for Flight Software Update

In both Robotic Nation and this blog, I talk a great deal about advancing robotic technology. Robots will be gaining new capabilities in the coming years as computers get faster and algorithms improve.

One interesting aspect of these advances is the fact that they can often be accomplished through field upgrades on existing robotic hardware. The Mars rover named Spirit received such an upgrade recently. According to the article:

The flight software update package includes three key changes. First is an update to the autonomous navigation software that will allow Spirit to travel longer distances autonomously over the extremely rocky Gusev Crater terrain.

The current autonomous navigation software sometimes gets stuck when it detects a hazard that it can't navigate around. The new version will allow Spirit to turn in place to find the best possible path.

The second part of the flight software update will allow Spirit to recover more easily from an anomaly like the one that occurred on sol 18. Although operational processes and software have already been updated to prevent something like this from ever happening again, engineers have included additional safety nets in the software that would allow the rover to autonomously react to a similar anomaly and recover to a more stable state.

The third portion of the update is specific to Opportunity and is intended to mitigate against energy loss associated with the stuck heater on Opportunity's instrument deployment device.

This ability to upgrade in the field can make robots more flexible than humans in lots of situations. Imagine, for example, a situation where the army has 100,000 soldiers deployed on a battlefield and things are not going well. There is no easy way to retrain 100,000 soldiers on the fly. If they are robotic soldiers instead, the Army can upgrade them all in a few minutes.

They’ll Be Back: DARPA’s robots founder in the desert, but their day will come

The article offers a more in-depth look at how things went at the Grand Challenge -- what the qualifying was like, what the race was like, etc. It offers some insights into the race that were not available in the quick reports that came out after the race finished.

See also this post.

This short, highly realistic movie shows us one vision of the robotic future of police:

Tetra Vaal

(If the movie is broken, try this page for a mirror)

The movie shows a single robot. Imagine instead hundreds of these robots policing in groups to protect one another and provide insurmountable force against the humans around them. Imagine hundreds of robots communicating instantaneously with each other through wireless networks, sharing and integrating views of the battlefield and seamlessly coordinating their activities.

One interesting anthropomorphic artifact in this movie is the fact that the robot has only two eyes. The robot is constantly turning its head to see things. That will not be the case in when real robotic police and soldiers arrive. They will have eight or ten pairs of eyes arranged around the head to provide a complete 360-degree stereoscopic view at all times. There will be no "sneaking up behind" a robotic police officer, especially with multiple robots integrating their views with each other.

The following article explains why such a future is not that far away:

Formerly arcane research gets new respect

From the article:

Robotics experts see a "perfect storm" heading their way, thanks in no small part to the human ravages of war.

Just as the constant march of technology is driving down the cost of key components, top universities in robotics are reporting major increases in federal funding, with the Defense Department the biggest spender.

The military desperately wants to reduce the number of soldiers killed by roadside bombs or surface-to-air missiles -- cheap implements of war that have felled scores in Iraq. Many in the Pentagon believe the answer lies in autonomous air, sea and land vehicles.

Also:

Technology that lets robots perceive and overcome obstacles has made unparalleled bounds largely because the cost of charge-coupled devices (the core of every camera), microprocessors and varied sensors has fallen away as rapidly as computing power and memory have expanded.

"Nobody is inventing the wheel anymore," Kara said. "The core of research that occurred over the last 10 years is driving this market intellectually and now there's a ton of money coming from the military side of the aisle."

The Pentagon, which spent $3 billion on unmanned aerial vehicles between 1991 and 1999, is expected to spend upward of $10 billion through 2010. Under a congressional mandate, the Defense Department is pushing for one-third of its ground vehicles to be unmanned by 2015.

Welcome to the Robotic Nation.

This page and its mirror show videos of a highly advanced small humanoid robot:

http://www.vstone.co.jp/e/rt01e.htm
mirror: http://outboxes.com/www.vstone.co.jp/e/rt01e.htm

Watch the videos of it kicking a ball, or getting up from a prone position, or doing a handstand. The flexibility is amazing.

This post discussed the ability of robots to take over marital counselling in the near furure. The following article shows another form of therapy that robots are practicing in Japan:

In gadget-loving Japan, robots get hugs in therapy sessions

From the article:

Finding that the patients favor fuzzy and huggable items, Tamura dressed the metallic Aibo in soft clothing. He'd like to give the robot additional features, such as the ability to monitor a patient's blood pressure or body temperature.

Tamura and colleagues recently published research that found that some patients' activity, such as talking, watching and touching, increased with the introduction of the robot in therapy sessions.

Speaking of Aibo, it is interesting to look at Sony's Aibo Web site and see what this robot, now in version ERS-7, is capable of today. When I visit the site, the tag line is, "From the first day you interact with AIBO, it will become your companion." Here's what the site has to say:

In autonomous mode, the ERS-7 walks more fluidly, plays soccer with its Pink Ball, plays with its AIBOne, sits, lies down, rights itself, and even self-charges. The ERS-7 also uses its newly developed Illume-Face, tail, ears, lights, and MIDI sounds to express a wide variety of emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, dislike, surprise, anger) and instincts (play, search, hunger, sleep), to entertain you. The ERS-7 also now pays special attention to its owner thanks to new Owner’s Face and Voice Recognition technology.

Using your PC and wireless network (IEEE 802.11b), you can remotely control the ERS-7. You can remotely view pictures the ERS-7 takes and send e-mail commands to have the ERS-7 play pre-recorded messages and songs to others at home.

One can only imagine what it will be able to do in 20 years...

As discussed in the previous post, millions of white-collar jobs are going to be outsourced to India over the next 10 years. This process has a big effect on the tax base, because these are primarily upper-middle-class jobs that are leaving. According to this article: As jobs leave, taxes do also:

As U.S. companies shift jobs to low-paid workers in developing nations, a growing number of economists and politicians worry that offshore outsourcing could damage the nation's fiscal health by draining tax coffers.

Although proponents of offshoring dismiss such concerns as far-fetched or naive, some tax experts say the migration of lucrative technology jobs to India and China is shrinking U.S. employee tax contributions and could exacerbate state budget shortfalls. Others say offshoring could erode already strapped Social Security, Medicare, workers compensation and other payroll-deduction funds more quickly than anticipated.

The loss of these jobs would not be a concern if economists thought that these millions of jobs were going to be replaced with even better, higher-paying jobs in the U.S. Apparently, many economists do not feel that is going to happen.

Now imagine the outsourcing trend combining with the loss of manufacturing jobs to robots, as well as the loss of service sector jobs to robots, etc. See Robotic Nation for details.

At least when you are replaced by a robot, you are not asked to go through this:

Workers asked to train foreign replacements

From the article:

More cost-cutting companies are hiring workers in other countries to do jobs formerly held by U.S. employees. But in a painful twist, some employers are asking the workers they're laying off to train their foreign replacements - having them dig their own unemployment graves.

Almost one in five information technology workers has lost a job or knows someone who lost a job after training a foreign worker, according to a new survey by the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. The study is the first to quantify how widespread the practice is.

Here's what typically happens: U.S. workers getting pink slips are told they can get another paycheck or beefed-up severance if they're willing to teach workers from India, China and other countries how to do their jobs. The foreign workers typically arrive for a few weeks or months of training. When they leave, they take U.S. jobs with them. The U.S. employees who trained them are then laid off.

Also:

In the next 15 years, American employers will move about 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages abroad, according to Forrester Research. That's up from $4 billion in wages in 2000.

See also this post.

Robots and Teachers

The BBC is reporting, in an article entitled "Watching TV is bad for children", on the effects of TV on young children. The article says:

Children under two should not be allowed to watch any TV, experts say. Older children should watch no more than two hours a day, the researchers at the Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Centre in Seattle said.

Each hour in front of the TV increased a child's chances of attention deficit disorder by 10%, their research in the Pediatrics journal showed.

The most provocative part of the article, however, is this sentence:

Children who were exposed to the unrealistic levels of stimulation at a young age continued to expect this in later life, leading to difficulty dealing with the slower pace of school and homework.

What this sentence brings up is the fact that there are now two ways to look at the world:

• In our current view of the world, kids who get over-stimulated become a problem because their brains expect more than school can deliver. Therefore, we label them as "sick", calling the disease Attention Deficit Disorder, and we medicate them with Ritalin et al to slow their brains down.
  
  
• In the new view of the world, we would instead encourage kids to over-stimulate their brains as much as possible. This would speed their brains up, allowing them to accomplish more in shorter periods of time, reach higher levels of intellectual achievement, absorb new material faster, etc. Then we would label things like traditional classrooms and homework as "Stimulation Deprivation Environments" (SPEs). These would be dangerous places that cause the highly advanced, super-saturated brains of these stim-kids to wither from boredom.

At some point, traditional physical environments will all become SPEs, and kids will only feel comfortable in artificial environments pumped into their brains either through Vite Racks or through Vertebrane systems.

What does this have to do with teachers? Clearly the BBC article is pointing out that the days of the traditional teacher in a traditional classroom setting are numbered. Why would we continue to educate our children in boring, Stimulation-Deprived Environments? Instead, we will begin the changeover to robotic and computer-enhanced education of a highly stimulating nature. This will begin an upward cycle of ever increasing stimulation for our children's brains, to the point where the people alive today seem "slow" and "backward" by comparison.

See also this post.

Robo-Cars Make Cruise Control So Last Century

According to the article: "Industry engineers and executives view [new car automation] as the start of a trend that will play out over the next decade, in which automobiles become increasingly in touch with their surroundings and able to act autonomously.

The article lists a number of new technologies for cars:

• "Mercedes S-Class sedans will even start shutting the sunroof and lifting reclined seats if a collision is deemed likely."
  
• "microprocessors can take control of the most basic driving functions, like steering and braking."
  
• "this year Toyota started selling its Lexus LS430 sedan with radar tucked in the grille. If the car's computer processors sense a collision is imminent, they will cinch up the seat belts, increase the driver's braking pressure and in some cases alter the suspension, moving the car closer to the ground."
  
• "Nissan's Infiniti division said that it would embed a camera on the rearview mirror of its 2005 FX sport utility vehicle. It is part of a system that warns drivers if they drift from their lane, the first such system in the United States. In Japan, Honda sells a similar system that actually steers the car back into a lane if a driver does not heed a warning. "
  
• "For instance, the Ford Freestar minivan weighs anyone who sits in the passenger seat with a flexible plastic scale in the cushion. If a lightweight occupant like a small child is detected in the front passenger seat, the minivan will deactivate the frontal air bag so that it does not lead to an injury upon impact."
  
• "BMW already offers an optional "active steering" system on its 5- and 6-series cars that can override the driver and steer out of trouble."
  
• "General Motors and other companies are also developing transponders that can communicate with other cars to create on-board traffic-snarl warning systems."

This quote is particularly interesting: "Combine [GPS] with radar cruise control, add a lane-changing system and throw in a transponder, or cameras, and pretty soon you could have a car that self-drives itself in the middle of a bunch of conventional cars." This is just 10 or so years away.

Once cars are driving themselves, so are trucks. So are taxis. Etc. Several million people are out of work in very short order. See this post and this post for details.

The article Robotic Freedom states that robots and automation will turbocharge the concentration of wealth. This article from the NY Times provides more evidence that this is exactly what is happening: We're More Productive. Who Gets the Money?. It states:

American workers have been remarkably productive in recent years, but they are getting fewer and fewer of the benefits of this increased productivity. While the economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, has been strong for some time now, ordinary workers have gotten little more than the back of the hand from employers who have pocketed an unprecedented share of the cash from this burst of economic growth.

What is happening is nothing short of historic. The American workers' share of the increase in national income since November 2001, the end of the last recession, is the lowest on record. Employers took the money and ran. This is extraordinary, but very few people are talking about it, which tells you something about the hold that corporate interests have on the national conversation.

The problem with this process, if it continues, is that wealth concentrates more and more until America starts to look like a Third World plutocracy. See Robotic Freedom for details and a solution.

For numerous examples of this unprecedented concentration of wealth at work, Click here.

There is an Apple ad in Scientific American magazine. The headline for the ad is, "The dawn of a new PC era. The 64-bit processor." Here's part of the text from the ad:

Before now, a chip this formidable could only be found in the world's fastest servers and supercomputers. Which is precisely where the G5 chip came from. Developed by IBM and Apple, the G5's DNA is from the core of IBM's highest-performance, 64-bit POWER4 processor. But just as impressive as the G5's pedigree is how it's manufactured. In IBM's (and the world's) most advanced semiconductor facility, the G5's 12-inch silicon wafers are untouched by human hands as robots guide them through 500 processing steps, creating 58 million transistors..."

The "untouched by human hands" line is interesting. We can assume that these ads have been through a dozen focus groups and numerous other forms of vetting and tweaking before publication, so the "untouched by human hands" line must strongly resonate with consumers.

In other words, humans have already started to see humans as a liability rather than an asset. Robots are now better than people.

It is easy to imagine the "untouched by human hands" line transferring to lots of other businesses. For example, McDonald's could cook all the food robotically and advertise that your meal is "untouched by human hands". An airline could advertise that the controls of the airplane are "untouched by human hands". Your new clothes could be manufactured in a robotic factory "untouched by human hands". So could your new car. And so on.

This trend will be a key driver for the Robotic Nation. When robots are better than people, it is easy to hire robots.

This article in the NY Times this morning talks about time shaving: Altering of Worker Time Cards Spurs Growing Number of Suits. Time shaving is the act of altering employee time cards to reduce the number of hours they worked and pay them less. According to the NY Times:

Experts on compensation say that the illegal doctoring of hourly employees' time records is far more prevalent than most Americans believe. The practice, commonly called shaving time, is easily done and hard to detect — a simple matter of computer keystrokes — and has spurred a growing number of lawsuits and settlements against a wide range of businesses.

Workers have sued Family Dollar and Pep Boys, the auto parts and repair chain, accusing managers of deleting hours. A jury found that Taco Bell managers in Oregon had routinely erased workers' time. More than a dozen former Wal-Mart employees said in interviews and depositions that managers had altered time records to shortchange employees. The Department of Labor recently reached two back-pay settlements with Kinko's photocopy centers..."

And so on. It's a growing problem.

There are several quotes on productivity, like this one:

"The pressures are just unbelievable to control costs and improve productivity," said George Milkovich, a longtime Cornell University professor of industrial relations and co-author of the leading textbook on compensation.

And this:

Kim Danner said that when she ran a Family Dollar store with eight employees in Minneapolis, her district manager urged her to erase hours so that she never paid overtime or exceeded her allotted payroll.... Ms. Danner said her employees could not do all the unloading, stocking, cashier work and pricing of merchandise in the hours allotted. "The message from the district manager was, basically, `I don't care how you do it, just get it done,' " she said.

This kind of pressure to increase productivity will be one of the things that makes it so easy for companies to replace humans with robots the minute that the robots are available.

The Valet You Don't Have To Tip
- The mesmerizing extravagance of mechanized parking.

The article discusses an automated, 74-space mechanical carport in Washington DC. It has the ability to detect oversized cars (more and 6' 6" tall) and overweight vehicles (more 6han 5,500 pounds). "The underground vault that stores the car is arranged like a closet outfitted with a pair of giant shoe racks. The cars are stacked in columns four-high along two walls."

The largest robot parking structure in the world is in Istanbul and holds over 600 cars.

The company that makes these robots is called Wohr. There's a very cool photo on this page.

In this article: Robotic Planes Complete Fly-by Testing is this quote: "The flights are part of a NASA project to develop a collision-avoidance system that would allow fully autonomous, and not just remotely piloted, aircraft to operate in civil airspace." See this post and this post for more details.

Lots of companies are outsourcing to India. Here's an example of the process:

AOL sets up software center in India

From the article:

AOL, based in Dulles, Virginia, has set up a software development center in the southern Indian metropolis of Bangalore, hiring about a dozen people for now, a company spokesman said Wednesday. Many other positions have been advertised in local newspapers.

Also:

AOL follows competitors Yahoo! and Google, who also have set up operations in Bangalore to develop software that runs various online services.

Also:

A shift to India could help American corporations save up to 80 percent in wages and operating costs. Scores of companies have fired U.S. employees to hire in India.

And:

AOL laid off 450 software developers in California in December and closed two offices in the state.

The employment landscape for U.S. programmers has changed dramatically. This process is not happening over the course of a centrury, as it did with agricultual automation and factory automation. Instead it has happened in just a few years.

There is no stopping the offshoring process, and it will not stop at IT. Accounting, tax preparation, financial analysis, reporting, writing, film making, customer service, billing/payroll, editing, illustration, engineering, design, manufacturing, etc., etc. -- millions of jobs across a wide spectrum of white-collar and blue-collar activities -- can all move off-shore to some degree. And they will.

As mentioned in Robotic Nation:

We are seeing the tip of the iceberg right now, because robotic replacement of human workers in every employment sector is about to accelerate rapidly. Combine that with a powerful trend pushing high-paying IT jobs to India. Combine it with the rapid loss of call-center jobs to India. When the first wave of robots and offshore production cut in to the factory workforce in the 20th century, the slack was picked up by service sector jobs. Now we are about to see the combined loss of massive numbers of service-sector jobs, most of the remaining jobs in factories, and many white collar jobs, all at the same time.

See Robotic Nation for details.