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Cars driving themselves.

I know I already replied, but I was just reminded of a quote. I forget whether it was Babbage or von Neumann or whoever, but he had just finished giving a talk about the computer. During the question and answer period a woman raises her hand to ask, "That's all very nice, but of what use is it?" To which he replies, "Madame, of what use is a newborn child?"

I'd be glad if someone could tell me who said this or if it's apocryphal or whatever. I looked on google a bit with no luck.

practical applicationS: Airplans flying and not crashing into one another. Same for cars.

More practical. How about Earthmoving equipment or coal mining.

Some exotic ideas. Military robots that gather intelligence. You
drop thousands of these on the enemy's side and they look out to see what is going on and report back via "the grape vine". There would be tens of tousands of communications paths, far to many to jam. They also watch out for each other and communicate warnings like "hide, someone is coming." Sensor could be very primitive, perhaps just a microphone or a cellphone-like camera, but by working together they can use triangulation to locate moving targets.

They don't have to be robots. What about a self configuring network? Each node only sees a few other nodes but they all talk about what they've seen and the word gets around that there is a printer on the second floor available for anyone who is a member of the graphic arts department to use.

Some are complaining that they can't get to the server, so here is the text:

In his second dispatch from the Idea Festival in Louisville, Evgeny Morozov watches a podium-full of robots buzz around like bees, ask each other questions, find an orange, leave the room, form an orchestra, and prepare one day to save your life ... Special to INTELLIGENT DAILY LIFE Surrounded by buzzing robots that end the session by performing in an orchestra, James McLurkin, a PhD student at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, talks about distributed robotics and swarm behavior to a packed house. His work has its roots in "swarm intelligence"--the study of collective behavior in decentralised, self-organised systems. Think of ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, fish schooling, and many other examples in nature. During the last few hundred million years, nature has perfected such interactions. Now, scientists such as McLurkin want to get a better understanding of how these biological processes work and apply this knowledge to programming robots for doing complex tasks in groups. Perhaps, this is the ultimate interpretation of the Wisdom of Crowds thesis: individuals don't have to be smart to produce very smart group outcomes. Did somebody mention Wikipedia? Early on, McLurkin pulls up a slide of Isaac Asimov's famed three laws of robotics, intended to forestall a robot revolt against humanity. "Well, robots don't know how to read, so those laws are not particularly useful", he smiles. Robots are not even smart enough to travel from the stage to the audience: they would get trapped in wires or collapse to the floor. For all the talk about robotics, today an average squirrel can still do more than any robot, he says. He points to a number of philosophical, not just engineering problems, in his field. Problem number one is that we don't know what intelligence is, nor how to define it. Should we subject the robots to some upgraded version of the Turing test (which says that if a judge can't tell whether he is talking to a machine or a person, the machine passes the intelligence test)? Can intelligence emerge from interactions of unintelligent components? That is a second philosophical question. As we are all built from molecules, continues McLurkin, either intelligence is something that results from interactions, or molecules are intelligent. The third and final question is whether an intellect needs a body. Can a brain in a vat understand and experience the world without anything to relate to? Can we build such an intellect? That slide with the three philosophical questions is subtitled "things that make you go "hmmm", and one can hear half of the audience "hmming". Having finished with the philosophy, McLurkin gives a brief overview of earlier efforts to mass-build robots, presenting quite a few models, from iRobot Roomba to Honda Asimo to iRobot Packbot, all of them having different looks and different functionality. And, of course, NASA's successful launch of two robots on to Mars. Quite naturally, he makes a transition to his own work. He has 112 robots in his arsenal and he is trying hard to make them work together. In his view, robots are best at jobs that are dangerous, dirty, or dull: "What if we sent 20 robots to work in hot spots around the world? What if we sent 200 robots to look for surivors after an earthquake? What if sent 2,000 robots to explore Mars?". It's this last question he wants to address with his on-stage demonstration. McLurkin turns to a few dozen robots that he has on stage (he controls them with a remote). As a starter, he asks the robots to form a line; surely enough, they do. Next, he orders the robots to spread out. They do this too. The demonstration proceeds quite smoothly. One thing that the robots don't know yet is how to define boundaries of the network, so they often spread out from the center and then get disconnected. The robots can communicate via one another (they know the neighbors, but don't know about everybody else) but