Robotic Nation Evidence

I find this article fascinating because Paul is talking about the exact sort of concentration of wealth that is discussed in Robotic Freedom:

Delphi bankruptcy signals further erosion of middle class

Here is Paul's thesis:

There was a time when the American economy offered lots of good jobs -- jobs that didn't make workers rich but did give them middle-class incomes. The best of these good jobs were at America's great manufacturing companies, especially in the auto industry.

But it has been a generation since most American workers could count on sharing in the nation's economic growth. America is a much richer country than it was 30 years ago, but since the early 1970s the hourly wage of the typical worker has barely kept up with inflation.

The contrast between rising national wealth and stagnant wages has become even more extreme lately. In 2004, which was touted both by the Bush administration and by Wall Street as a year in which the economy boomed, the median real income of full-time, year-round male workers fell more than 2 percent.

His closing line is, "America's working middle class has been eroding for a generation, and it may be about to wash away completely. Something must be done." Robots will only accelerate the process. Soon, there won't be any auto workers at all.

See Robotic Freedom for one possible solution.

Robo-Mule Gets Wheel, Leg Blend

From the article: "The new alternative would be as simple and cheap as a wheel but with the all-terrain capability of legs. Hillis is very cagey about the configuration - evidently there have been several different versions – and the picture shows one prototype. The ultimate design may be completely different."

NASA concocting robots for space flights

From the article: "Then there's Spidernaut, a 600-pound mechanical arachnid that will crawl around on the outside of space craft to fix things. Although it weighs considerably more than a person, its eight-leg design distributes the weight in manner that makes the robot's footfalls less potentially damaging to the skin of a spacecraft than those of a two-legged human."

Fast Robot Prototyping

Four vehicles finish in $2 million robot race

From the article:

Four robotic vehicles finished a Pentagon-sponsored race across the Mojave desert Saturday and achieved a technological milestone by conquering steep drop-offs, obstacles and tunnels over a rugged 132-mile course without a single human command.

The vehicles, guided by sophisticated software, gave scientists hope that robots could one day wage battles without endangering soldiers.

"The impossible has been achieved," cried Stanford University's Sebastian Thrun, after the university's customized Volkswagen crossed first.

When you consider that just one year ago, the best car went only 7 miles, this is quite an improvement.

The implications of this achievement are profound. Imagine progress continuing at this rate for the next five years. This means that:

• Self-driving cars will be a reality much sooner than people would have thought.
  
• Nearly every truck will be able to drive itself as well. This means 24x7 long-distance trucking and the elimination of up to 1 million truck driving jobs.
  
• Automatic taxis that drive themselves at much lower cost than current taxis. This will also eliminate several hundred thousand jobs.
  
• Improved autopilots in airplanes, meaning that the process of eliminating pilots will speed up. Another half million jobs are on the line.
  
• New types of vehicles and businesses that may not be possible today. For example, automatic delivery vehicles may be possible.
  
• And lets not forget DARPA's goal of automated warfare, where robots are doing everything on the battlefield.

The process should be very interesting to watch.

Hummer takes pole in robot race: "'The worst vehicle we have is as good or better than the best vehicle last year,' said DARPA director Anthony Tether."

Devices can halt cars with tardy payments: "Most of the credit-damaged customers at North Texas Motorcars learn to live with the lights.
They're attached to a black box on the dashboard and start flashing on the first day a car payment is late. On the fourth day, after two more days of warning lights, the car won't start.

'I would not undertake buy-here/pay-here without this system,' said Ray Williamson, president of North Texas Motorcars, which sells about 50 vehicles a month and installs boxes in each of them. 'There's just too much risk.'

The box - called a starter interrupt unit - is used mostly at used-car dealerships that provide financing to customers with bad credit. But other segments of the auto industry may adopt it, particularly if consumers' credit ratings continue to decline. "

Car which will book you for speeding: "Roadside speed cameras will be redundant eventually because vehicles will automatically cop themselves for speeding.

This is the plan of the Department for Transport, which has commissioned companies to develop aircraft-style black boxes for cars. They will record every aspect of a vehicle's performance and automatically issue a ticket every time the vehicle exceeds a speed limit.

The black boxes will be linked to central computers via the Global Positioning System so that the prevailing speed limit is known at any given point in time.
Every time a vehicle breaks the limit the black boxes will send a signal to the computer with the car registration number and a ticket will be issued automatically."

This trend will be short-lived. Cars will be driving themselves. However, in the meantime the idea that you will be carrying a robot police officer with you in your car at all times is interesting.

AI systems may blow weathermen away: "Weather forecasters could find themselves pushed out of a job by an artificial intelligence system designed to write clearer, less ambiguous reports.

Computer scientists at the University of Aberdeen, UK, were asked to generate an "artificial weatherperson" by operators of offshore oil rigs, who wanted more clarity in their forecasts. The vocabulary used by different forecasters can be vague and highly variable, says Ehud Reiter, who led the Aberdeen team."