Video Monday: Rodney Brooks On The Robotics Revolution
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 8 of June , 2009 at 7:00 am
This is a talk from Maker Faire by Rodney Brooks, of MIT and iRobot, on the “robotics revolution” that we keep hearing about. As you might expect from a guy who runs a few robotics companies, Brooks is extremely optimistic about the future of robots, comparing them to the evolution of the personal computer. The metaphor here is a very common one in the robot world: robots right now are like PCs were, 30 years ago. In other words, just wait a little bit, and robots will transform our world… Here, look at some mind-blowing graphs showing exponential progress!
Generally, I buy into this idea. I think robots have a promising (and exponential) future. But realistically, it seems as though we’ve got a little ways to go yet. There aren’t any robots out there that are like the PC was when it took off: something reasonably cheap, reasonably easy to use and understand, and capable of executing many different tasks (specialized maybe, but useful) in a reliable manner. Everybody is sort of still waiting for someone to invent that killer combination of software and hardware that will prove that robots are the future, and I’m not sure what it’s going to be. What my guess is, is that it’s going to be one of two things: a robot that does something very specific and important spectacularly well, or a robot that does many different things dependably decently. In the near term, it’s more likely to be the former.
From a different perspective, the robot/computer metaphor isn’t really appropriate. PCs specifically (and computers in general) found a niche because they kick us human’s asses at number crunching, hands down. We can’t do what computers do, so of course they’re going to be important to our development as a society. And robots are already successful and well established in the same way, at doing things that humans can’t or won’t do. Industrial work and bomb disposal are just a few examples. Problem is, humans can do a lot of things really, really well, and robots have to find some way of doing these things nearly as well as we do or else we won’t use them. Yeah, we may not like vacuuming, but we’re pretty damn good at it, and to be really successful, a robot is going to need to be as good or better.
It’s a tricky problem, to be sure, and the way to victory (in my opinion) is to let the robots excel at being robots. Find the ways in which robots are hands down better than humans are and then build on them, in the same way that computers built on their talent for manipulating numbers. Robots aren’t the PC quite yet, but it’ll happen.
Soon.
I promise.
Comments (1)
Category: General
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Comment by Ironman
Made Monday, 8 of June , 2009 at 1:33 pm
I will help your prophesy come true :)