Robots Are Net's Future, Says Vint Cerf

Ned Nederlander writes "Vint Cerf talks the future of the Internet with Ed Cone: 'I expect to see much more interesting interactions, including the possibility of haptic interactions — touch. Not just touch screens, but the ability to remotely interact with things. Little robots, for example, that are instantiations of you, and are remotely operated, giving you what is called telepresence. It's a step well beyond the kind of video telepresence we are accustomed to seeing today.'"

At last!

Slashdot readers will finally have satisfying girlfriends.

Re:At last!

Don't forget satisfied girlfriends.

Re:At last!

The day when there are easily-available machines that mostly replace women for purposes of sex will be an interesting day in the history of women's liberation.

It has certainly been interesting [abovethelaw.com] since men were replaced.

Re:At last!

Personally, I'm looking forward to this finally making it possible for me to be able to work from home. I can have a robot sitting in my office chair browsing Slashdot while pretending to work, being controlled by me from my house browsing Slashdot and pretending to work.

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Don't forget CLAMPS!

The worst of it....

... just imagine what manifestation the new V!ag@ spam will take on.

It's sandwiches.

Vint Cerf may have created the internet, but I'm a fortune teller and therefore have more authority over the future of the internet. The future is not robots, it's ham sandwiches. Amazing, isn't it? It will give you what I call telesancwichessence.

Pffft!

Science fiction writers have been saying this for decades. Actually, I think the esteemed Vincent Cerf has been talking to Captain Obvious. [uncyclopedia.org]

Robotics will have to both become far less expensive, and far more developed than now before this happens. I'm already 56, I may not see it.

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I don't fear being dead, but as I actually died once [kuro5hin.org] I don't look forward to the transition from life to death. Those who die in their sleep, or die without pain or suffering, are extremely lucky. My ex-wife's mother died in mid sentence, never knowing she was dying! That's the way to go, I think.

My grandmother lived a hundred years. She outlived her siblings, her friends, two husbands, and three of her four children. As a father I can't imagine anything worse than outliving one of your children. When Grand

Real-time Systems don't like latency....

Imagine! You could control a robot playing tennis remotely! Oh wait.. What if the network lags. Oh we just simulate what would actually be going on the remote tennis court on the local machine and just pause the remote player's screen until we actually hit the ball and then we can send him a message telling him how hard we hit it and in what direction.

Oh WAIT! We're talking about REALITY not a simulation. Well then.. If we lagged we missed the ball and there's no way to paper over it like we can in virtual worlds.

If you had a traditional robot playing tennis running a hard real-time operating system then everything from moving into place, winding up and swinging would all take a predictable amount of time and given a good algorithm one could play a pretty good game.

Anyway, Tennis is a relatively trivial example but things that happen in the physical world where physical forces are in play do not tolerate internet like latency very well. You cannot send xon/xoff like flow control signals to reality.

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I don't think Tennis is to the sort of thing you'd use telepresence for..

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I can only really think of one reason to make someone else's phone buzz. Are there others?

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"Anyway, Tennis is a relatively trivial example but things that happen in the physical world where physical forces are in play do not tolerate internet like latency very well. You cannot send xon/xoff like flow control signals to reality."

That is correct, so the way it would work is to isue higher level commands. Much like a coach would to a player. The coach gives only higher level statigy like "Stay more left of center and move up a bit." As robots become better they will need les and less real-time co

Teledildonics

Teledildonics [wikipedia.org] seem to be an instantiation of what he is talking about.

Low-latency..

I don't see how this would be possible without major commercial investment in high speed low-latency intercity links (like the .edus on Internet2). This kind of remote interactivity requires very low latency in order for it to be remotely feasible.

Remember what the original Quake was like on a 200ms connection? Talk about skating.. Oh, and you can't do client-side prediction in real-world telepresence. I wouldn't want to be in the room when someone was operating a remote machine with high latency.

Would have some definite applications in the DoD though. It might restore the original definition of "strafing".

-molo

What's the point?

For social meetings, etc, would a robot avatar be that much better than a virtual avatar? I can understand when physical actions are actually required on the other end. But meetings? That would just be creepy.

Creativity ??? ...

From TFA: Another change I'm pretty sure will happen over the course of the next 20 to 50 years is the way we interact these online systems, or even with local ones. Today it's keyboards and mice, but I expect interactions, conversational interactions, gestural interactions to be normal.

Sounds like a quote from a prediction of how interaction with computers will evolve from about 40 years ago.

Rather I would expect humans to become part of the cloud via low level (nano) interfaces on a borg line (or part of the 'Big Media' as a successor to the 'do no evil' corp).

CC.

Robots, yes. Teleoperators, no.

The whole point of robots is not to require an operator.

Teleoperators have their uses, but those uses are limited. They're useful if the worksite is dangerous (disarming bombs), unsuitable for humans (underwater), or on a different scale (surgical teleoperators). Remotely piloted vehicles have their uses, too, but even there, the trend is toward automated vehicles.

The remote-presence thing might be useful for people who go to too many meetings and don't have enough clout to force them to be videoconferences. This is a niche market.

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Teleoperators are required when the decision tree is too complex for a robot to do autonomously. They are used when nothing but a wet human brain will do, but the human hardware (fragile and/or poorly dexterous tissue and bone) is not up to task.

Your examples (bomb diffusing, underwater exploration, surgery) all fit this mold. Better to have a human brain making the decisions for hardened robotic hardware than to have a simplistic autonomous decision tree in charge. These applications are not going away.

Obligatory bash.org quote

#4281
<Zybl0re> get up
<Zybl0re> get on up
<Zybl0re> get up
<Zybl0re> get on up
<phxl|paper> and DANCE
* nmp3bot dances :D-<
* nmp3bot dances :D|-<
* nmp3bot dances :D/-<
<[SA]HatfulOfHollow> i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet

source [archive.org]
(using web.archive.org because bash.org is down)

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I just love all the articles that get past the firehose, that offer no scientific benefits except "theories" or rather predictions on the future... Still waiting on my flying car, and no, the German scientists haven't offered me sex for it yet. [imdb.com]

Re:Has to be said

But their efforts to refuel their humans [wikipedia.org] are a bit misguided. Not all of us run on radioactive isotopes.

Re:

Heindsight is always 20/20.

Re:

Vote for Bender in 3008!

Re:Imagine... if you will

People would stop filtering spam.