Tim Beyers at The Motley Fool recently interviewed noted futurist Paul Saffo, and a good part of the discussion revolved around Saffo’s belief that consumer robotics may soon have as much of an impact on society as the personal computer and the Internet. Here’s a small excerpt from Beyer’s interview with Saffo:
Paul Saffo: To me, it is pretty clear what the next big, out-of-the-blue industry will be. And it will continue the pattern of a new industry emerging every decade or so. In the ’80s, it was the personal computer. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were the poster children for it. In the ’90s, it was the World Wide Web, and Tim Berners-Lee and the Google twins were the stars. Now we are teetering right on the edge of a revolution in the robotics industry — consumer robotics in particular.
It’s a thought-provoking article and a great read — check out the entire article here, and visit Paul Saffo’s own website here.
On the one hand, people are comparing a potential robot revolution to the PC revolution. But one of the great things about PC’s is that they are generic machines, that can run all sorts of software. I think the Roomba from iRobot is great, but how PC-like is it really? Something seems broken in that comparison.
By the way, I have set up an aggregated news feed on http://www.bnxt.com/community/news, that pulls the news from all the Lego Mindstorms NXT blogs I know. You can read it there, or get its RSS feed. Why do that? Because I hope to add new feeds as they appear, and that way you’ll have them too. Hoping this helps some of you.
Filip,
But before PC’s there were calculators and other dedicated computers. Robotics is in that stage now. The Roomba is a dedicated robot. As far as sharing software (behaviors), the next version of Robosapien, the Robosapien RS media, will allow people to swap personalities that will alter his behavior dynamically. The RS media is basically a walking Linux computer, which takes a big step in the direction of truly customizable behaviors in our robots. I predict it will be 3 to 7 years before we have a robot, that is generic like a PC and will have the flexibility needed to become ubiquitous. It will happen because at that point the robot will basically *be* a PC with software targeted towards robotic behaviors and sensor interpretation.
Thanks for the aggregated news feed RSS link on the Mindstorms NTXT blogs. That will help in keeping up on things.
Robert,
I agree with you on the visionary part. I just think it is odd that the article predicted a PC-like robot market is coming, and then advised people to invest in the calculator-like market…
By the time PC-like robots are here, people will think they already invested in that in the past (the article was targeted at investers and people buying stocks). Lots of opportunities get burned by early hype.
By the way, Sony Aibo (ERS-7) is another perfect example of a PC with Wifi, camera, microphone, sensors and motors, running on a generic operating system. Like early PC’s, it’s still expensive and only a small number of software titles, however.
But I’ve just written a blog entry why I think Lego Mindstorms NXT may just make all the difference (see http://www.bnxt.com/blog/2006/01/why-lego-mindstorms-nxt.html).
Filip