The Best Robots of 2009 51
kkleiner writes "Singularity Hub has just unveiled its second annual roundup of the best robots of the year. In 2009 robots continued their advance towards world domination with several impressive breakouts in areas such as walking, automation, and agility, while still lacking in adaptability and reasoning ability. It will be several years until robots can gain the artificial intelligence that will truly make them remarkable, but in the meantime they are still pretty awesome."
Evolution (2001) (Score:1, Interesting)
In the movie Evolution with David Duchovny and Orlando Jones, the Earth was "seeded" by alien life forms. What happened next was an evolutionary explosion with the alien life mutating at a rate far beyond the rate of normal Earth life. Things like primates and birds and even dinosaur-ish creatures developed and proliferated.
However, in the race for evolutionary supremacy, it wasn't these super-advanced life forms that finally won out. Rather it was the amorphous blob which did little except consume and grow.
Even here in the "real world", humans may be considered the apex of evolutionary development, but consider how outnumbered we are by bacteria, insects, and other small, hardy life forms that swarm everywhere.
Now extrapolate that observation to robots. Yes, there are impressive implementations of technology and these things seem really great at what they do. But human-like robots are only one genus. There are others that are much more successful in the wild, like botnets. These intelligent agents swarm together, proliferate on their own, have complex behaviors, and number in the hundreds of thousands.
Evolutionarily-speaking, botnets are the most successful robots of any year.
Re:Video for drop outs (Score:1, Interesting)
Technically, it should, politically and in actuality you will see more.
Unionized, government street sweepers won't stand for mechanical sweepers that take their jobs.
There will be laws against robots - the reasons will be because they are not "green", or they are not "safe", or whatever.
Ok, I want one. (Score:3, Interesting)
The Adept Quatro was very impressive. I'd love to see the vision system that it was using and will have to show that vid to my employer to see if I can get them to buy one.
If there is a breakthrough in portable power generation, then we will see an explosion in mobile robotics development.
Progressive thinking (Score:4, Interesting)
Belive me the guy driving a street sweeper would defenitely prefer to be designing them.
The industrial revolution's success is based on the premise that automation allows society to progress. OTOH, it's basic failure is the current tradgedy of the commons. At fifty I have lost several jobs due to technology/social changes but I've made a good living from changing things with technology, and however small it may be I am changing society with this post.
The last time I was on a factory floor was the 80's, which in itself was quite a step up the food chain from a twenty-something "trailer park" day labourer with a wife and a kid. I recall reading at the time that the UK "metal workers(?)" union after months of fruitless negotiating had put a work ban on qualified fitters and turners performing any task that took less than X minutes to cycle (such as the metal press I was working in Australia). Their rationale was that any task that was that repetitive could be performed using a "one of a kind machine" by the same fitters and turners. This kind of thinking used to be called progressive [wikipedia.org], regardless of who it comes from.
Unions, Government and Big business (UGB) are all nessacary evils unless you can find somewhere to chase furry things with a stick and not be noticed, although don't expect to live much past your next severe tooth/throat/lung infection. When two or more of the "tribes" in UGB start swinging at each other the little guy is invariably trodden on in all the commotion. Yet like the abusive "parents" that they are, they will all tell you they love you dearly, it's the other parent who want's to, as Bill Cosby would once put it; "shoot you in the face with a bazzoka".
"This is where the problems begin. Like a fragile naked human pyramid, we are simultaneously supporting and resenting each other. We bitch out loud about our soul-sucking job as an anonymous face on an assembly line, while at the exact same time riding in a car that only an assembly line could have produced. It's a constant contradiction that has left us pissed off and joining informal wrestling clubs in basements." - David Wong, "The Monkeyshere" [cracked.com].