K. S. Kyosuke's reply mirrors some of what I have to reply to your post, so I incorporate what he posted here, but would also like to add the following:

The most deployed robots today are industrial arms like Kukas, and I suspect that's what your brother repairs. The reason for this is because they are very simple as far as robots go. The future I'm talking about will have several orders of magnitude more robots than there are today, they will be as ubiquitous as cars, and will be so complex that they make current industrial robots look like tinker toys. Given the complexity of robots of the future, I would expect the support industry around them to resemble something like the healthcare industry, filled with specialists who focus on diagnosing or repairing the brain, electronics, perception, mechanics, etc.; general practitioners who would be like your local corner auto mechanic, who could fix the common problems and give referrals to specialists; and a highly specialized components industry which would resemble medical equipment manufacturers and distributors. An industry like this can support hundreds of thousands, if not millions of jobs.

And most of that work isn't going away in the near future. With the current state of robots, you're talking about taking away the most dull, dangerous, and dirty jobs out there. Some robots will even have jobs that humans aren't capable of doing because they are so dangerous or dirty. Any jobs for these robots will be a net gain in employment, creating jobs surrounding and supporting the robot that were not possible before.

Again, as for those replaced by robots, well, tough. Your job is now done by a machine. Find something else to do.

If you think that's coming any time in the near or even distant future, you have absolutely zero knowledge of what robots are actually capable of. As someone who designs robots for a living, you can rest assured that humans will be the ones designing and repairing robots for a long time to come.

It was the same "type" insofar as both made you go forward faster than walking. That's about where the similarities end between the horse/buggy industry and the automobile industry. Horsewhip makers really have no transferrable skills in a world where horsewhips don't make cars go faster. And yet the world moved on. Shocking.

And what of the millions of auto workers and those in peripheral industries who gained their jobs due to automation. I mean.... do you realize an AUTOmobile is a form of automation in itself? We automated the horse. Sure, all the horsewhip and buggy manufacturers lost their jobs, but in their place sprouted an even larger industry. I mean, there is a gas station and auto repair shop on almost every corner in my town. When robots become as ubiquitous, there will be many industries surrounding their support. Expect to see robot repair shops, with robot mechanics and technicians some time in the future.

Horse whip makers were once made obsolete, but the automation that replaced them (automobiles. Auto is right in the name!) created an industry that is now many orders of magnitude larger than the horse whip industry ever was.

Maybe your job goes away. As a roboticist, I get even more job opportunities. Sorry you chose the wrong field. For those who were made obsolete by robots, well that's progress. Maybe they can retrain as someone who repairs the robots that replaced them.

Wow, Windows really is reaching new lows here.

The word only here was not used to diminish the significance of the interface criticisms, but to refute the claim that Windows 8 is "Windows 8 is shit, from top to bottom." If Windows 8 is shift from bottom to top, yet the only thing people really have a problem with is the interface, then Windows 8 isn't really shit from bottom to top now is it?

Um, you can *very easily* use even stock Windows 8 without ever using the Metro interface or a metro app. Since update 1, Windows 8.1 is now even easier to use on a desktop setup. They have addressed pretty much every criticism of the Metro UI except for the start menu at this point. As far as I can tell, most of the criticisms on this site are outdated by about 6 months with regards to the Metro UI, because people here would rather talk out of their asses than from true experience.

No. Artificial neural networks are inspired by biology, but that's where the similarity ends. Any conclusion drawn from an ANN should not be cast onto their biological counterparts.

For some people, careers aren't about ROI. I wouldn't do mobile app development for a million dollars.

I agree with everything you said except fitting an IMU in the pen. I think it wouldn't be that hard or expensive to fit one of these in a pen: http://www.invensense.com/mems...

Sorry, I thought you were using a broad definition of distorted. Nominal accuracy of GPS is 1 - 10 m, depending on conditions, in my experience. I'm not sure where you're getting this idea that it's accurate to 20 cm. That's the kind of accuracy you'd expect with something like DGPS. If this were the case, competitors in the DARPA Urban Challenge wouldn't have needed DGPS and expensive inertial navigation systems. Would you care to offer a citation for this claim?

When I used the term "distorted", I was referring to multipath errors you will get from GPS signals reflecting off buildings. This, combined with low satellite visibility makes GPS-only localization a poor choice in urban environments.

Unless you have a map with absolute coordinates of those landmarks you still can't position yourself on the globe, only relative to those landmarks. With GPS you can create a map as you explore (SLAM), and refine the absolute locations of those landmarks over time using sensor fusion and filtering (GPS, LIDAR, INS). With survey results (as you say, millimeter level precision) as ground truth, we can say this method achieves sub-decimeter accuracy in global pose.

Depends on what your goal is. If your only goal is to get a position, then there are better techniques. If your goal is a mobile robot that can move down a sidewalk without $60,000 worth in sensors, then sub decimeter is enough. With a wheel base of 0.6 m and an average sidewalk width of 1.5 m, a robot traveling down the center can easily be off 10 cm either way and still succeed in its operation. Typical error I've seen using the described system is around 6 cm with a minimum of 0.12 cm. This is enough to navigated sidewalks, crowds, and even through doors.

The robot makes the map itself, as I described.

But GPS is *usually* distorted, especially as you point out next to buildings, where I want my robots to work. If I want a robot to follow a track on the ground using commodity GPS solutions, this is not possible. With GPS, and visibility to 3 landmarks, I can achieve sub decimeter accuracy.

Windows 8 always had the classic desktop and you could always switch back and forth with the press of a button.

What you quoted was my response to wisnoskij, who said, "A map gives you a position on a globe." So when you replied to me with "Military grids on a map IS a system", the obvious question is "a system for what?" Given the context of this thread, and the fact this whole story is about global positioning systems, the obvious interpretation of your comment is "Military grids on a map IS a system [that gives you a position on a globe]". If you didn't mean that, then why did you reply in a thread that was about global positioning?

Regardless, the map itself still isn't a "system". It's just a map, no matter how many grid lines you put on it. Given a map, you still need to figure out where you are on the map. That part *in conjunction with a map* is a system for localization. That's even something GPS can help you with!

No, I'm saying what you do with your maps is what I do with my robots. And yes, it's very easy to do better than GPS especially in a city, where there are significant multipath errors. All you need is a laser range finder, some robust perception, and kalman filtering.