yossarian wrote:
Cool technology. Doubt that will be the application. But it is very interesting as proof of concept. In the end, stuff like this will be all around us. You'll go to the store and just touch the goods you want and the descendants of van Geest's robotic chair will, say, take them to your car - or to your home. But then maybe you won't even actually be at the store. Maybe you'll be shopping via a video camera moving around by robot.
I guess I just still see this as envisioning future use of technology by trying to use it in a way that matches how you did things before the tech appeared. Kinda reminds me of reading old predictions of "the future", where you'd have nuclear powered houses that would pop up the exact same appliances that they used back in the 40s or 50s.
A far more likely use of this sort of technology would not be automated "robots' that move around. That's just wasteful IMO. It makes far more sense in the store example to simply provide you with some kind of computerized list of things. You select what you want and the automated equipment gathers the stuff from shelves in the back, either bringing it all to the counter for you to take, or shipping it to your home (if you ordered remotely from home). It just makes vastly more sense to automate things in a way that doesn't put humans and automated stuff in close proximity. While I know it's popular and seems futuristic to have robots walking around with humans, there really are very very few real world situations in which that would make any sense at all.
Automated factories? Yeah. Automated warehouses? I just don't see the logic in building automated shopping carts that follow you around. Makes far more sense to automate the entire storage area and retrieval process and leave the cart alone. Automated chairs? Silly. I could possibly see some kind of automated multi-purpose room maybe. But that's still a stretch. When renting a hall, you're going to want to decorate it for the occasion, and there's just no way to automate that. If you have to have people do that, the extra work involved in setting up tables, chairs, podium, etc is minimal and the extra expense of paying for someplace with robotic chairs and tables that set themselves up wouldn't justify what you get.
People have been predicting home that do stuff for you automatically for decades. Automatic cleaning rooms. Appliances that pop up when you need them and disappear when you don't. Furniture that changes based on what you want the room to do at any given time. All sorts of stuff. But so far none of that has happened. Want to know why? Because you simply can't automate that to the same degree that you could simply do it yourself, and in the real world stuff breaks down. If my toaster breaks, I toss it out and spend $20 on a new one. If the automated pop-up toaster that's incorporated as part of my house breaks, it'll probably be a lot harder to fix. And if it breaks in a way that prevents the 5 other appliances that might pop-up in its place from being able to work properly, I've just made my "house of the future" into a nightmare.
The trend with technology has not been finding ways to make doing things you do today easier themselves, but by replacing them with process that don't require you to do them at all. For example. If we replace the library with say a neato thing that I can connect my computer to, that's world wide, and contains all the same information as that library (and perhaps more), then I don't need a chair that follows me around. I simply read the library while sitting in my own chair at home. That chair doesn't need to move at all.
Dunno. I just don't see this happening soon. People want things that make their own lives better and easier, not harder. And some things just become more complicated when you automate them, not easier. Chairs are pretty simple things. It's just kinda hard to improve on that...