Willow Garage Robot Fetches Beer, Engineers Rejoice 114
kkleiner writes "Willow Garage has pulled off the ultimate engineering feat: teaching a PR2 robot to fetch you a beer from the fridge. Not only can the PR2 select the correct brew from the fridge, it can deliver, and even open the beer as needed. That's right, all the humans have to do is drink and relax. Prepare yourself for some major robot-envy as you check out the PR2 delivering much-needed refreshment in the video."
Good but... 5 minutes to get a beer? (Score:3, Interesting)
5 minutes to get me a beer? Think I'll just get a dog. [youtube.com]
Declining value of human labor & what to do... (Score:3, Interesting)
For possibilities on restructuring our economy to deal with the decining valued of human labor from similiar innovations, starting from Marshall Brain's ideas and including many other people's suggestions, see this section of a knol I organized on moving beyond the jobless recovery resulting from structural unemployment (due to automation, robotics, better design, voluntary social networks, and limited demand due to "reduce, reuse, recycle" and the law of diminishing returns etc.): http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives [google.com]
Believers in mainstream economic theology saw fit to delete most of that content from Wikipedia in part on the grounds that Marshall Brain's and other people's points on the declining value of most human labor is just "speculation" and science fiction. Our scarcity-based economics is more and more out-of-sync with our social and technical realities of potential abundance, but it is apparently heresy to talk about it, and the most people will usually do is talk about ways to make "artificial scarcity" to keep the system working via "business as usual".
I've been thinking about the social aspects of advanced robotics on and off for a quarter century since I spent a year hanging out in Hans Moravec's Mobile Robot Lab (and Red Whittaker's FRL) around 1985 (when Hans was working on the book "Mind Children"). I applied to Willow Garage a couple months ago to get these robots to pick up toys, sort LEGO, etc. (be nice to have them do food prep, too, for improved human health) but they were not interested. :-( Though I was looking for something where I could work from home on the East Coast, so that may have been part of it, since what (human) homeschooling family guy can afford to buy a house with room for a human child near Stanford? :-) I'm also not blaming them, since they probably have their pick of applicants, and I have not worked professionally with robots in two decades, and I have spent a lot of the past decade doing stay-at-home Dad stuff. I'm not sure *I'd* even hire me at this point to do anything technical. :-) Still, with the Stanford area being as pricey as it is, Willow Garage is probably mostly left with rich people or young people building these mind children, which is why you see this video of a robot fetching a beer and not, say, putting away toys, preparing a nutritious soup for the family from whole foods, or being a good playmate for a human child (like Robbie in Asimov's story about a robot nanny and playmate). I can hope that those sorts of things will come sooner rather than later.
Working with a PR2 might have been a lot of fun, but in any case I had also hoped applying might get the people (and maybe eventually robots :-) at Willow Garage to at least read my writings like the above about socio-economic apsects of this work. Creating technology like this without at the same time promoting social change as outlined above (to a gift economy, a basic income, local subsistence, and/or a resource-based economy) is otherwise just asking for massive social unrest and suffering, like Marshall Brain talks about in his short story "Manna". Willow Garage is getting everything else right (like a FOSS focus and as in this video obvious technical excellence) -- except it may be missing talking about that economic transition big picture part needed to make robots like this a blessing and not a curse. So, in that sense, Willow Garage may dangerously lack a coherent vision (even if it makes amazing technology)? I don't know -- they may be clued in and not talking about it, but is does not seem to be reflected on the web site, with nothing directly relevant for these searches:
http://www.google.co [google.com]