Dana Blankenhorn

The Many Markets of Robotics

What's intriguing about robotics, as a market, is that it's not one market.

Robotics consists of many markets – toy markets, industrial markets, military markets, scientific markets, education markets. Which means all the trends currently taking place in computing and education can be brought to bear, profitably.

For example. Cloud computing gives robots a common platform in which to expand their internal knowledge. Social computing gives them a means with which to use all this, a way to self-program. A cloud database can give a robot artificial experience, and social computing algorithms let them share it.  The result is that computing intelligence quickly becomes something that passes for real intelligence as robots “learn” and “program themselves” based on other robots' experience.

This can be important when robots go into the field, literally. Japan wants to use robots to grow crops in the tsunami area, given the lack of young people in that country. and the high radioactivity in the area.

Industrial robots also benefit from what's happening in the renewable energy space. Microbial fuel cells could produce the low-power necessary to keep robots going on distant planets or in space.  We're talking tiny robots, and tiny robots could clear blood vessels of plaque from the inside.  Or reverse it, use robots to move a sail about the ocean that can make biodiesel out of algae blooms. 

Of course, what this whole thing really needs is a generation of young minds, like those who powered the PC revolution in the 1970s. We don't just have to reproduce MIT. We need kids playing with robots the way those in my generation played with electrical breadboards. This is what makes kits like Cubelets (above) so important. Like Little Bits these kits make the transition between playing and learning, the next step being doing.

So what you've got is a thriving industry, and a huge culture growing up into it. The real Susan Calvin may be attending an elementary school near you right now.

 

 

The Next Revolution

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 1 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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It may seem strange, at a time of chronically high unemployment, for me to write about a coming labor shortage.

But that's how I roll. I see around the next corner, or try to. Sometimes, as in the late 1990s, this can leave me depressed in a happy time. Sometimes, as in my posts this last year, it leaves me happy in a time of depression.

What I've seen over the last year, however, makes me confident that labor shortages are indeed in our future. Even if the scare-mongers are right and “peak oil” is just around the corner, I'm now convinced that's more of an economic event than a real one. The amount of new energy being created through efficiency, as well as through renewable technologies like solar, wind, tidal, geothermal and biofuel power, is going to be enough to see us through.

The benefits of this are many-fold. First, there's the economic benefit of having a thum b down on energy prices, a thumb that's only going to grow in strength as the cost of producing solar power (to take one example) falls below that of oil, then natural gas, then coal, over the next few years. There's the environmental benefit, the start of replacing our current carbon economy with one based on hydrogen. There's the social benefit, in which wars over resources are no longer necessary, because the Sun shines everywhere, and the winds blow, the tides roll, and we live on a molten rock.

Of course, these power sources have different sets of economics. For one thing, they create more jobs than what came before. Once you have an oil well drilled, once you have a field in production, the incremental labor required to keep the fuel flowing isn't great. The same is true for a solar panel. But solar panels are tiny units of power. They must be researched, they must be manufactured, they must be tested and they must be installed to deliver an economic impact.

This takes people.

So, as my late journalism professor Elizabeth Yamashita told me, back in 1978, when we sat down to our first business journalism class at Northwestern University's Medill School, I have good news for you. You're all going to have jobs.

There will not only be a lot of jobs in the new energy sector, but there will be new wealth, that must be spent on something. And those somethings will include lots of new jobs in every area of endeavor. So even if you're into video games or studies of urban predation, this applies to you. There will be money to hire you.

But there's another important trend. I, and my lovely wife, and the rest of the baby boom, and everyone in the western world is getting older. I turn 57 next week. There are days, even now, when I feel, like Bilbo Baggins, “thin, like butter spread over too much bread.” Friends are retiring now, and when I look in my loved one's eyes I see someone looking forward to a restful time, a time to read and relax and let the world drift by.

My generation will soon need to be cared for. And there won't be enough people to do the job. The immigration debate is going to shift a decade from now, and we'll be worrying about how we can attract people, not repel them.

Still, this is a tech column, and all this discussion really leads to a single, one-word description of our future, which I hope gives hope, but (as usual) also brings challenges.

Robotics.

Crossover is a Moving Target

One of my big predictions is that “crossover,” the point at which solar energy becomes the cheap energy, will be achieved around 2016.

What I may have failed to mention is that's a moving target, not so much in time as in place.

There are multiple variables, and not all are within the industry's control. Yield, production cost, installation cost and channel cost can be controlled, but many other factors can't be:

• Expected production will vary depending on where a panel is placed, on the intensity and regularity of heat and light striking it.

• The value of that production will depend on the cost of local grid energy, on the price of the alternative.

• The value of that production will depend, in part, on the local grid itself. How far away are the customers, how efficient is the grid at handling inflows. Is there a grid?

• Government policies can impact value in two ways. Subsidies like feed-in tariffs can improve the outlook, taxes can reduce it. In the U.S. this means the environment can vary from state to state and town to town.

(Image from Lux Research.)

I Robot

I am not giving up on the War Against Oil. Far from it. I will continue following its progress, here and elsewhere, through 2012 and beyond crossover.

But I've learned something about myself. I live for the bleeding edge, for the technology frontier. Once things seem set, once the byways are established, I tend to lit out for the undiscovered country.

As a journalist, that's my “thing.” Always has been. I sought out the Internet starting in 1983, got into e-commerce in the early 1990s, covered the Internet of Things as early as 2002, and became an open source reporter in 2005, before moving to The War Against Oil a few years ago.

Each has represented a sea change in how we look at life and technology. The Internet is the biggest story of our time, by far, and e-commerce is a big part of it. The War Against Oil will be the biggest story of this decade, returning us all to prosperity and turning today's unemployment problem into tomorrow's labor shortage.

But what comes after that? What comes after is something I've dreamed of since I was a kid. Useful, commercial, consumer robots. Thus I call this section of the blog Asimov Ville. (Asimov wrote his short story The Last Question, in which the universe was created by a robot, in 1964.

Into the Cloud XIV

Thirty-One

“This is our chance,” said Martin to Marian. “Let's not blow it.”

The Librarian was back at a terminal, not in the main room but here in what had been my house, which a little imagination (from a number of people) had turned into a rebel command center, with a half-dozen terminals lined along the back walls of the bedroom Susan and I had shared for so long. Since I didn't need it any more.

I now had plenty of other places where I could close my eyes and rest, leaving my programs untethered from this real-unreality, places where I could imagine myself with my loving wife once again. It was what I needed, a fantasy to maintain my cyber sanity.

You wouldn't think an imaginary computer construct could sleep, even dream, and not of electric sheep, either. But I knew better now. Dreams are how we process what is coming at us while we wake, combine it with past memories, deal with harsh realities, and grow inside. Dreaming is how we learn.

I'd been spending a lot of time dreaming lately, learning and processing. The excitement of the last weeks had allowed me to finally accept Susan's death. That and the fact that, thanks to Martin, Sophie, Marian and Liza, I now had more friends in death than I had at any time in my life, true friends I could depend upon.

But now was no time for distractions. It was go time. D-Day. H-Hour.

Marian's screen showed news feeds and live data from the outside world. Liza's showed status checks on how The Doctor was proceeding with his plan to cross over to that world and, in effect, take control of it. Martin was looking into the rules of The Community, following threads in which souls considered a succession plan to the “benevolent” (their term) rule Dr. Emile Hoskie had given them for so long.

I had a terminal as well, but I didn't have it open to anything but an empty word processing window. I was typing this story from memory, trying to make sure it could all be told, from both sides of Life, and either published or (if necessary) squirreled away somewhere in deep memory for future generations. As most of my career had been.

It was a furious few hours, a time of high excitement, in which I felt more alive than I had in many decades.

I glanced over at Marian's screen, where dignitaries were gathered in one window awaiting the arrival of their new Overlord. I glanced over at Martin's screen, where he was reading a passionate argument on behalf of a more democratic system of Cloud governance. All I saw on Liza's screen was a collection of text-based windows, scripts and programs and tests only programmers could understand.

And it was while looking at Liza's screen that my heart broke again. Because that was the language Susan understood. That was her world. Say what you want about computing being a man's world. That has never really been the case. Ada Lovelace programmed for Babbage, Grace Hopper and her team did the same for ENIAC, and there had always been women at every industry meeting I'd ever attended. Maybe there weren't many of them, maybe they weren't doing much of the talking, but they were there, quietly organizing what the men were imagining into a coherent form, turning it into something that worked.

So now the moment had come. The transfer was at hand. Martin looked over at me and gave me a quick thumbs-up.

As with so many things relating to The Cloud, nothing seemed to happen, but everything happened. One moment The Doctor was here, the next he was there. The lights on the Exoskeleton Marian was looking at suddenly lit up, they came alive. A voice came from the creature, not the weak computer-based joke voice we'd become used to during the life of Emile Hoskie, weakened as he was by ALS, locked in his chair, head tilted to the side with barely a hint of expression. No, this was a real voice, a commanding voice, more like those heard on car commercials or movie trailers.

The voice was expressing great joy, although nothing in the expression of the creature betrayed emotion. The voice was exultant over his new strength, his new power, both physical and political, and making the kinds of promises I remember from Inaugural Addresses years ago. It was a little like Neil Armstrong's first step on the Moon, if we'd all been there on the Moon with him, combined with Barack Obama's First Inaugural Address, so filled with hope and purpose.

Meanwhile, Liza's fingers were flying over her keyboard. I noticed that she was wearing a headset with a microphone, and was speaking quietly into it, nodding in response to whatever she was hearing.

Everyone in this room was busy except for me.

Thirty-Two

Even Martin was surprised when it happened.

Me, I was struck dumb. I felt like I'd just been shot.

Coming out of the terminal in front of Martin was a familiar voice, one I knew better than I'd ever known my own.

“Looks like we have a new leader,” Martin said, smiling. From somewhere in the center of what had been The Doctor, from among that tangled web of souls Anon had just torn asunder from him on this side of the Great Divide, and separated, there was one voice that was already quietly organizing, adapting, controlling, listening, and (now) speaking, not as a collection harvested but as a CIO hired.

“Who is it?” I croaked out.

“Says her name is Susan,” said Martin. “That was your wife's name, wasn't it?”

“But she died. We talked about it. She refused to cross over. I have her ashes...had.”

A few minutes later, I felt Liza's hand on my shoulder. “Had,” she said. “John promised not to tell you, but she did come over. She was recruited to The Cloud Community by The Doctor, and had never lived here as a separate entity, only as part of his larger plan.

“And with the plan gone to pieces, as it were, she's among the survivors. Apparently, the strongest one.”

“Go to her,” said Martin, tears in his eyes. “Go to your wife.”

And so I did.