Robotic Future News: 2006-09-24

Artificial Intelligence Research at Duke, Harvard, and MIT

http://mit.edu/research/category/robo.html#links

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/ai/people.html

http://www.cs.duke.edu/researchers/artificial_intelligence/home.php

"World's first specialty robot store opening in Japan"

http://www.portalino.it/nuke/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=18151

South Korea's Robot Army-"late 2007"

http://communistrobot.com/viewblog.php?id=247

"Robotics is five to 10 years away [2011-2016] from realizing its potential."
-Microsoft

"If you look at the Japanese market, you'll find that both Honda and Sony are making little androids already and they are not just doing that for fun. They are doing that because they seriously believe that they can sell millions of these things into the domestic market, for two main reasons. One reason is to do little jobs around the home, and the other one is companionship, and they really believe there are big markets for that.

So I apply some basic common sense - I know that Sony's not stupid, and neither is Honda, and they wouldn't be doing this if they had not done some very thorough analysis of the marketplace."

Around the 2020's, "we won't need people to write software, because you just explain what you want to a computer and it will write it for you, and there's no reason then to have people working in that job."

"Robot expands into several surgical specialties"

http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/15627602.htm

Moore's Law

http://www.intel.com/technology/mooreslaw/index.htm

Intel Pledges 80 Cores in Four-Five Years (2010-2011)

http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/26/intel-developers-forum-roundup-four-cores-now-80-cores-later/

teraflop performance (about a petaflop, 1,000 times more, is needed to simulate the human brain)

Intel's announcements are in line with projections made by Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec on the accelerating rate of processing speed and its ultimate application to robot intelligence.

Tri-gate transistors will probably be coming out at about the same time.

"The chipmaker projected that by 2010 tera-scale servers will make up about 25 percent of all server sales."

http://www.intel.com/technology/mooreslaw/

"Real-time natural language translation. Imagine being able to speak to someone in a foreign country and having your conversation translated real-time.
Facial recognition that works accurately and instantaneously. Imagine being able to capture faces as people enter an airport and match them in real-time against a database of known terrorists, and having a turnstile lock if there is a match.
Auto chauffeur. Imagine a car that takes a verbal command for a destination, and can drive you there via the least congested route in the safest possible manner."

http://www.intel.com/technology/techresearch/terascale/index.htm

http://www.intel.com/technology/techresearch/idf/fall-2005-keynote.htm -2015-"Technologies that are 'aware'"

About 100,000 10 teraflops Intel processors would make an exaflop supercomputer, which is required for brain uploading. Supercomputers have tens of thousands of processors. "The Blue Gene/L contains 130,000 processors."

"A Complete Map of the Brain of a Mouse"

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/science/26brain.html

"It is a common scientific strategy to figure out things first in mice before moving to people."

The map is available online.

"They said putting the mouse brain online would accelerate brain research throughout the world."

"As you come up through computer science, as I did in high school and at Microsoft, you’re also fascinated by how the brain works in comparison with computers," Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, said. "You wonder how the brain does things such as vision." (paraphrase)

The new project: the human neocortex, 80% of the brain and the area where most higher function occurs, and then probably the rest of the human brain

"Paul Allen says the link between human and machine intelligence is part of what inspired him to fund the project."

http://www.roboticstrends.com/

One of Bill Gates' last initiatives before announcing his departure was the creation of a robotics software group at Microsoft.

"The very rate of the change of exponential growth is driving our collective destiny, irrespective of our narrow sightedness, clinging archaisms, or fear of change."

"Students and faculty at MIT are more open to commercial opportunities."

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=514448

2019-Machines Appear to Pass the Turing Test

"There are widespread reports of computers passing the Turing Test, although these tests do not meet the criteria established by knowledgeable observers."
-Kurzweil

http://people.tribe.net/natevoodoo/blog/3ddb4947-68c2-44a7-b4fe-8cf07767c5ec

2018

Much information points to 2016-2020 (averge=2018) for a large robot presence.

"Caterpillar looking to build robotic machinery"

http://announcements.engadget.com/2006/09/25/caterpillar-looking-to-build-robotic-machinery/

"10 or 15 years down the road" (2016-2021)

Android

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,215583,00.html

My robotics team, the Duke Robotics Team, made part of the Carnegie Mellon vehicle, which was around 2nd place, possibly due to an engine problem, in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. The part had to do with sensing.