Bill Gates on Robots 198
mstaj noted that Bill Gates has an article in January edition of Scientific American A Robot in Every Home."Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies, wherein a handful of well-established corporations sell highly specialized devices for business use and a fast-growing number of start-up companies produce innovative toys, gadgets for hobbyists and other interesting niche products. But it is also a highly fragmented industry with few common standards or platforms. Projects are complex, progress is slow, and practical applications are relatively rare. In fact, for all the excitement and promise, no one can say with any certainty when — or even if — this industry will achieve critical mass. If it does, though, it may well change the world."
Here's wondering... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Here's wondering... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because he has the people to collect info from experts and summarize it for him. And he has the cash and marketing clout to make it happen.
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What you are seeing coming from Microsoft is their marketing and PR machine are trying to hype the tech sector to give it, and themse
Just like Chappelle would consult Ja Rule (Score:2)
I would consult Bill gates about robots.
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BTW, notice the ads for Microsofts 3D rebotics kit?
Too bad they didn't mention the opensource 3D robotics simulator called Simbad( http://simbad.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] ).
LoB
Re:Here's wondering... (Score:5, Insightful)
Billy G gets to write the article (Score:2)
Is there a GNU alternative in the works, I wonder?
Not to wonder! (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it's Scientific American (with a very wide, cross-discpline, and NON-discpline readership and popular web site), not the Journal Of Extremely Focused Niche Robotics Researchers (which would have the same number of subscribers as it does contributors, because it would be the same people). Bill's name is universally known, and guarantees a certain amount of commentary (such
Because said robots will run Windows (Score:2, Funny)
When it BSODs, it'll be like a wild Roomba with a kitchen knife.
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Interesting. So you think that Microsoft will abandon traditional OS segments like "pro" and "home" and instead organize their product line based on whether or not the robot will be sleeping with you?
See, I woulda thought those things would be run in the user space.
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All in all, it's sort of like their XNA initiative on Xbox 360 and their Studio Express line. Get it cheap, out there, and get people interested in programming.
I remember when I was growing up learning Logo and BASIC was a requirement in our public schools. Now the best most teenagers learn is how to
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But I do think you are looking at the wrong magazine if you are looking for peer-reviewed articles in SciAm. Even in their heyday they were not a peer-reviewed place. Instead they are
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I'm sorry but Bill Gates may be a wonderful person in many respects but he is not an expert on robots by any stretch of the imagination. This is clearly a corporate puff-piece and most likely was ghost written. Hopefully, it is well written and does not contain too many errors or distortions.
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I read the article in the magazine. It was a rather rosy assessment of the future of robotics. Bill was comparing the microprocessor revolution that enabled PCs to be in every home and seeing how the latest advancements in microprocessors and sensors would someday do the same thing for robotics.
While sensors and raw computing power have become more powerful and accessible, I felt the article did not address the problem of AI. The current generations of robots: Roomba, DARPA self driving car, have very
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The article is basically a big ad for Microsoft's robotics software (which actually is pretty interesting btw) and ignores most of the past and current developments in actual robotics and computer sciences.
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Re:Here's wondering... (Score:5, Funny)
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LoB
I agree (Score:2)
I guess (Score:5, Funny)
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"Until"?
Many robots in our homes already (Score:4, Insightful)
Roomba.
Robotic multi-disk CD changer.
"Soft-touch" tape deck, VCR, CD and DVD players, and anything else that sucks in your disk or tape before playing then spits it back out at you when it's done.
Vintage-1980s Macintosh floppy drives.
Toy robots including remote-control cars for the kiddies of all ages.
And the list goes on.
The robots in your home are hiding in plain sight.
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Your Roomba has a plan (Score:3, Funny)
Be warned. [youtube.com]
Microsoft + Robots = (Score:5, Funny)
while Microsoft mumble something about patch Tuesday.
Does This Mean... (Score:2)
I wish (Score:2)
I have a Roomba and a Scooba (Score:5, Funny)
My floors are so clean now, I divorced my wife. Don't need her anymore.
-BHJ
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Well don't get _too_ attached to your vacuuming robots. [darwinawards.com]
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OK, I'm not yet sold, but willing to be sold.
I have rugs, furniture that comes to within 2" to the floor, plenty of chair and table legs to contend with, and most importantly:
many of my rooms have floors that are as much of 3/4" high
Re:I have a Roomba and a Scooba (Score:5, Funny)
Okay, but I recommend against using your Roomba or Scooba for *ahem* unintended uses, so you might want to keep the wife around. Of course as soon as they come out with the Scrooba that won't be true anymore. Also humanity, or at least Western civilization, will be doomed.
I imagine (Score:2)
On a more serious note, ever notice that whenever there's a disruptive technology, someone learns how to make the rest of us regret it? Factories led to smog and cars, cars led to more smog, smog led to Al Gore, Al Gore led to the Internet, the Internet led to email, email led to spam, spam led to blogs, blogs led to this post.
So I wonder how the smog-loving, CO2-belching spammers of the world will abuse robots? "Sir, you have a phone call. Sir, you have
Forget Microsoft... (Score:2, Insightful)
U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. (Score:3, Interesting)
We have one! (Score:4, Interesting)
I just got a Roomba Sage off Woot about two weeks ago. I've got to say I love the little thing. It does a fantastic job and is actually fun to watch, especially if you're a gadget person.
"I love robots!"
It does a very good job and picked up and AMAZING amount of crud off my floors and filled up it's lint filter. I really ought to go over those rooms again to see how much more it can find. But it's great to be able to put it in a room, push a button, and come back later to have it vacuumed and the Roomba happily sitting and charging on it's little home base.
As for the servant robot to bring me drinks or something like that, I think it's a while off. But there is a robot for homes that is here now and is great.
Re:We have one! - enjoy it while it lasts... (Score:2)
Also, they require constant tending unless you design your house for them... (i.e. they get stuck under furniture, caught on throw rugs, wires, chair legs, heater registers, and just about anything that makes a bump in the floor.)
Economics! (Score:2)
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Pretend it is 1987 instead of 2007 and that we are talking about the internet bubble in 1997.
Now, just think what what life will be like in 2017.
The point here is that Bill Gates is talking about this rather than a scientist which means the prospect of robots have gone form the label to the business planning sector. Which means the consumer sector is not far off.
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Cars have what, doubled in horsepower, and are a bit safer, than they were 25 years ago. Perhaps 50% better in
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At the small (DC) end, they certainly have, and that can be scaled up if necessary.
Example: I'm not sure when the change happened, but back when, cheap small electric motors (as used in toys, portable cassette or CD players, etc) were low-powered, largish (0.75 to 1 inch diameter, 1 to 1.5 inches long), and heavy. Most of the culprit was the weak and bulky magnets. Modern rare-earth magne
next we'll ask a turtle to recommend a good cheese (Score:2)
OK. It is like computers until the PC x86 arch was released. Wouldn't it be better to ask people that worked at IBM or Intel about what worked?
Bill who? (Score:2)
It's pretty obvious that he's seeing Linux and opensource software spread in the robotics field and he wants to purchase his way into this market with his proprietary Windows platform. Pretty soon, bloggers will be getting free robots running Windows and a proprietary Microsoft framework and the bloggers will go gaga over it. On the other hand, developers will have to deal with memory leaks and work-a
Uh huh (Score:2)
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robots (Score:3, Funny)
just one word (Score:2)
Robot Insurance (Score:2, Funny)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3sLE-Jk0rw [youtube.com]
New Industry (Score:2)
I don't have to. I witnessed the birth and explosive growth of the software industry first-hand. I'm sorry, Mr. Gates, but if you have anything to do with birth of the next big industry, I think I'll give it a pass.
We're all going to need Robot Insurance (Score:4, Funny)
A Robot in Every Home? (Score:2)
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You forgot the last line... (Score:2)
Robots: one more energy mouth to feed (Score:2)
Do we need more servants? Like, really?
Sometimes the fancies of billionaires make me just shake my head in disbelief. This is Lucas and DivX, this is Oprah and anything she's ever said about priorities...
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A Spy in Every House (Score:5, Interesting)
The essense of many conflicts that we see in personal computers today, is that somebody thinks that some things are more important than what the user wants. Right now the hot topic is intellectual property -- things like enforcing DRM, making sure this copy of MS Windows is "genuine", etc are more important than having the computer work flawlessly to do whatever the user wants. But you'll sometimes hear about different aspects of the same issue, such as almost-invisible dots that your printer may include in its output to make your document tracable, scanners' behavior when it recognizes certain patterns that are present in paper currency, or some cellphones' inability to emit a ringtone that the user supplies rather than buys.
Forces are at work to make sure your equipment serves what is deemed as society's interests or a vendor's interest, rather than your interest. It is possible to defend this trend, and some people try really hard to. But whether you're for it or against it, don't pretend it isn't happening.
So you're going to have a robot in your home. Ask yourself: whose robot is that going to be -- who will really be its master? If you think it's going to be your robot, keep in mind that such a silly idea completely defies the current trend, and you're sure as hell not going to get any such robot from Bill Gates or his kind.
Bill is right (Score:3, Insightful)
robot meme older than computer meme (Score:2)
Isaac Asimov wrote about both- though many more about robots. Notable computer stories are "the last question" where computer pondering about
I wonder... (Score:2)
Just imagine fully automated factory, that can operate by itself with little, or no human intervention. Now imagine robots smart enough to interpret a building plant, prepare the building site, and build everything almost on their own. Entire farms being operated from a single computer console...
Now imagine a world where nobody will have to clean a toilet, or make Big Macs, or sweep the floor.
How far we are
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I hate to be cynical, but I imagine that unless our society undergoes dramatic changes first, the result will be very bad for those people. I don't see the ones who today use cheap or even illegal labor caring to support those laborers when their services a
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It's a very good work indeed
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Dream On Bill (Score:2)
They should have talked to a person who knows what he's talking about, from Honda or someone like that, rather than drivel from someone who doesn't care about the robotics industry but simply wasn't to make some money.
No doubt all the robotics hobbyists currently doing their thing, and shaping the whole area of robotics, are crimina
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It is not at all conclusive to say Japanese are light years ahead if you have attended one of the major annual robotic conference (e.g. ICRA or IROS). In fact, I believe the US still leads.
The Japaneses built the best humanoid robot in this planet. Not many people has any doubts. The Honda robot is a prime example. The Americans have
Bill Gates on.... robots? (Score:2)
Geez. Kids nowawdays! I don't even know what the hell you'd DO with robots. What, do you grind them up and smoke 'em something?
Gates has changed direction. This is significant. (Score:5, Informative)
This is a significant change in direction for Bill Gates. Up until 2000 or so, he'd publicly stated that robotics wasn't going anywhere.
I ran one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams, Team Overbot [overbot.com], so I'm reasonably familar with what's going on in this area. It was amazing to me how much progress was made in three years. Much of the progress was in subsystems. Four years ago, a high precision combination GPS/INS/compass system cost about $100,000, and required 4U of rack space with air conditioning. (CMU's first vehicle actually had such a unit.) Now, such units are about $6K, the size of a thick book, and don't need A/C. LIDAR units have gone from mechanical line scanners to solid state 3D flash units; although these are still expensive, low-volume items, there's no fundamental reason they couldn't be brought down to camcorder prices.
More interestingly, computer vision in unstructured environments is actually starting to work. That was the real innovation in the Stanford vehicle - a vision system that could look at a distant section of a road and decide if it was similar to the nearby section. Several LIDAR units profiled the near section, and if the near section was OK and the far section was visually similar, the vehicle could outdrive its LIDAR range. I was amazed that that worked, but it did. It's a Bayesian statistics system, and quite clever.
Then there are the new generation of hobbyist robots. See Robots Dreams [robots-dreams.com], which follows Japanese hobby robotics. You can get a good humanoid robot about 50cm high for about $1000 now. It's interesting how this happened. Robotics hobbyists have been playing around with R/C servos for decades, and quietly, under consumer pressure, those servos have been getting better. The motors used to be too weak, but better magnets fixed that. Then people complained of bearing failure, so the manufacturers switched to ball bearings. Then applied loads would sometimes strip gear teeth, so the manufacturers had to go to better gear materials. Then the things were overpowered for their dumb control algorithm, so each servo got an embedded micro controller. Then it was necessary to tune the control algorithm depending on load, so the interface became more intelligent and bidirectional. And suddenly we had servos strong enough for the legs of a small running robot.
In the hobbyist community, though, the software is way too dumb. Hobbyists are still using BASIC STAMPs and typically don't do much very exciting on the control front. By contrast, Grand Challenge vehicles typically had many CPUs running highly concurrent software. We had two Pentium IV machines running QNX and running about fifteen real time programs, along with five programmable motor controllers each closing some control loop. Gates is onto something with building better tools for hobbyist robotics. The Microsoft approach to robotics is clunky (it's a rehash of web technologies, including SOAP), but it has more integration than anything seen before, so it will catch on.
Once we get the theory and technology from the high end down into hobbyist level hardware, things are really going to take off. We have the parts now.
good at predicting the past .. (Score:2)
Gates regularly changes directions and is good at predicting things after the fact. How soon will Encarta show him predicting robots in 2002. His book the Road Ahead [salon.com] barely mentioned the Internet, the updated version had more.
was Gates has changed direction. This is significant. (Score:5, Informative)
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Although I can't believe you patented PD controllers for rag dolls.
Still ... (Score:2)
The reasons are maily two. First, robots designed for different uses are going to look, and act differently. Ok they may share _some_ high level algorithms sometimes but that's going to be it, all the rest is going to be different.
So i think we will see gradually more and m
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What I think is that however it does not look to me that robotics as an industry could ever enjoy the _same_ degree of modularization enjoyed by the computer industry.
Take a look at the LynxMotion Servo Erector Set. [robotshop.ca] Modular robot kits are already here, and we're not taking about Lego.
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The number of people who've actually done anything in this area isn't that big yet, and not many of those who have write much beyond academic papers. There's something of a dearth of mid-level robot material. There's the low-end stuff from Tab Books, and the theory from IEEE Transaction on Robotics, but not much practically-oriented material in the middle. I try to encourage people to take the high end technology and actually use it.
I bought this magazine for the article (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks for the commercial for MS, but this didn't deserve to be the front-page article of SciAm. SciAm just lost some points in my eyes after pimping this BS from MS out.
Laziness (Score:2)
Many years ago when factory and engineering work was a more common occupation then yes, robot assistants would have been good for a tired out worker.
Of course I have no problem with robots assisting the disabled or elderly, so long as they're reliable.
Ahhh The Dream! (Score:2)
All running Windows of course.
Legal tarpit? (Score:2)
Just suppose a "home robot" does harm. Who do you sue? The hardware maker, the software maker, both or neither. Obviously the standard EULA will limit the compensation to the cost of the software or $5.
and Gates' answer is? (Score:2)
So, his answer is going to be to create another proprietary, overpriced platform that's two decades behind the state of the art, like he did with desktop operating systems?
I just hope the industry will be smarter than to fall for such idiocy a second time.
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Intel seems to be doing the most industrial work along side the academics, and reigning them in.
Is this guy still trying to predict the future? (Score:2)
in other words... (Score:2)
translated from GateSpeak .. (Score:2)
I would like to see the robot industry so as Microsoft and a few niche players will have total control of the sector. Of course the niche players won't have any real choice in the matter. If you bozos let us we will run it like we run the Windows franchise achieving total lockin. Anyone disagrees, bugs in the software will cause the ro
Things are changing...not just robotics, but (Score:2)
Hell Parallax released a new micro with 8 32-bit cores on it for robotics/embedded systems development this year- And then there are the improvements in PICs, AVRs, even the Freescale based stuff showing up from Netburner. The reason that robotics development is slow is that it takes skill in so many areas to be successful...
Having used the
Why Bill? (Score:2)
For all the excitement and promise... (Score:2)
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Keep in mind $5,000 is much as some real dolls and I believe there is a market for fully automated versions.
Secondly, I would gladly pay $5,000 (or more) for a general purpose house hold robot. This would of course have to car
re: robots in war (Score:2)
It just occurred to me, though, that this may not help with human casualties at all. I think one of the main premises to having a war is injuring the opposing side so badly that both the leaders and the general population are finally willing to give in to the demands of the opposition.
If you're just blowing up a
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Seriously, who really thinks it's a good idea to put something like that into combat?
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You want significant advances in robotics? Enforce immigration laws.
There's historical precedent of a sort: the ancient Greeks knew of t
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Freudian slip? right after a comment about robotic Real Dolls.
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Gee, you think? Let's see what the second paragraph of the article says...