Robots Are Net's Future, Says Vint Cerf 118
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! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:At last! (Score:5, Funny)
Don't forget satisfied girlfriends.
Re:At last! ! ! ! (Score:1, Funny)
Re:At last! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Forgive me if this sounds offensive or trollish; I'm just reminded of a joke I heard in my non-PC days... "If women didn't have pussies, they'd have been hunted to extinction long ago".
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BOOYA
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Don't forget satisfied girlfriends.
Imaginary conversation between a geek and a girl:
- So where do you work?
- I'm a computer programmer.
- Oh! Maybe you can help me. See, I'm having a technical problem with my "boyfriend"....
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The orgasmatron: Sleeper(1973) (Score:2)
Get off my lawn!
Re:At last! (Score:5, Funny)
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Tell me about it. Hell, I'll even skip the browsing slashdot at home and head over to LJ. Sucks I'm only allowed to post inane, pointless comments on tech sites at work and not social sites.
I like toidals!
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Don't forget CLAMPS!
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Only at slashdot would the first post be modded "redundant". [slashdot.org] Mods, please consult a dictionary, [reference.com] there are several on the internet. That was offtopic, not redundant.
As this comment will now directly address the parent, [uncyclopedia.org] it is not offtopic. Mod it -1, lame. [uncyclopedia.org]
Dude, robots are going to have to come a long, long way before... oops, bad choice of words.
Robots are going to have to, erm, get a lot more high tech before they'll satisfy. But at any rate, girlfriends go for twenty bucks here in Springfield. See A Nerd's [slashdot.org]
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It's a very tired joke. It's redundant.
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There is a long history in science fiction for robotic girlfriends.
Isaac Asimov's Robots of Dawn comes to mind, where the woman falls in love with a humaniform robot. An early STNG episode had Data having sex with Tasha Yar.
The sex industry would love to have a remote controlled sex doll/robot
I'd like one that wasn't remote controlled, but rather one that I could program to act in any way I wanted it to. If a woman wants sex with me, why would I want a robot involved? Unless, of course, I had a spouse on th
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As you're truly AC there's not much chance of your seeing this, but I'm astounded at the number of times I'll make what I think is an obvious joke and get modded "insightful" or "interestin" rather than "funny".
Maybe they think I need the karma; I don't, it's excellent. Mut some of the mods seem brain damaged; I'll make a perfevctly coherent argument, voicing a sincere opinion and be modded "troll".
Mad moderation, both positive and negative, happens to everyone, I think. But it sorts itself out; the comment
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Actually you could do remote listening and speaking through AIBOs years ago, we considered using one for teleconferencing in the boardroom for a while. It would be funny having the MD walking round the table as a little robotic dog. We actually had the AIBO but one of the managers just left it on its charging station for like a year and ruined it :/ He could have given it to me and I would have made much better use of it.
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There is a long history in science fiction for robotic girlfriends
The current best being Megatokyo, with its semi-autonomous PS3 peripheral. Oldest/best may well be the android in the Fritz Lang movie "Metropolis".
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Slashdot readers will finally have satisfying girlfriends.
Well, teledildonics have been around for a while.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledildonics [wikipedia.org]
Has to be said (Score:1)
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No, they're not your overlords. You control them. Except for one part of the world --
In Soviet Russia, robots control YOU!
Re:Has to be said (Score:4, Funny)
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Did I say "overlords"? I meant "protectors!"
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Considering the fact that Arthur Dent knocked the head off of a Battle Bot of Krikkit [wikipedia.org] with a cricket bat, and the Krikkit robobots are the most fearsome, deadly robots in the known universe, now you have me scared shitless!
I mean come on, Arthur Dent???
The worst of it.... (Score:3, Funny)
... just imagine what manifestation the new V!ag@ spam will take on.
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Spammers will literally be in your living room. I mean LITERALLY.
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Heindsight is always 20/20.
It's sandwiches. (Score:2)
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! (Score:4, Interesting)
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
reminds me of (Score:1)
Real-time Systems don't like latency.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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..
Remember the trail they did with students where you could make the recipients phone vibrate when you squeezed yours?
It, ah, wasn't used in the way they expected.
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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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They did in The Lost Saucer [wikipedia.org]!
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You could control a robot playing tennis remotely! Oh wait.. What if the network lags.
The same thing that happened ten years ago when we were playing Quake over the internet. Except, of course, bots will be LEGAL. Look at the lag the Martian robots have, and they work incredibly well.
Ever since Pac man came out there is a robotic room I wanted to build. I wanted to make a 3D pack man game you actually got inside of. I even drew up plans once.
You would have LCD screens (my original vision had projectors; it
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You could control a robot playing tennis remotely! Oh wait.. What if the network lags.
The same thing that happened ten years ago when we were playing Quake over the internet.
Take a look at what netcode in modern FPS games - they like to use client-side prediction algorithms that give you a good idea of where enemy players will be by the time your mouse click gets to the server to say that you fired your gun. With the Tennis ball's velocity/rotational velocity, wind speed, and a general idea of how lagged your network is, you can give the client side a smooth, "unlagged" feeling.
Of course, this gets more complicated in FPS games due to those evil enemy players not moving in pr
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Look at the lag the Martian robots have
Indeed, 40 minutes one-way light time at some points in the orbit. Or at least it was during the 1976 Viking I landing, but I'm so out of touch they could have changed the universal constants since then.
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The robot would probably be able to handle some limited decisions should communication slow down.
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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
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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.
But if you can have sense-realistic telepresence, why need reality in the first place?
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There's lag in real life, it's called "reaction time". Most regular people have at least 150 milliseconds of this lag and probably a good deal more [humanbenchmark.com]. Yet, REALITY somehow works.
The only way to get network latency that bad nowadays is to use a dial up connection or a heavily congested link to a location on the opposite side of the world. The non-zero latency is of course something that has to be accounted for, but it's not a guarantee of failure.
Robot for President 2008 (Score:1)
If a robot stands for President 2008, I'll vote for it, err... him.
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Vote for Bender in 3008!
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Teledildonics (Score:3, Insightful)
Teledildonics [wikipedia.org] seem to be an instantiation of what he is talking about.
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I hope they choose a more mainstreamable name for this technology, which has great application for stuff beyond the naughty. I can think of a lot: teledonics, teletronics, telebotics, teletactlics, teletactics, teletouch ...
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Teletourism!
Go to Paris and don't have to deal with rude waiters, only rude electricians!
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iDildonics?
Low-latency.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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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.
So surgery [timesonline.co.uk] is right out then ?
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very low latency in order for it to be remotely feasible.
Yes, low-latency will be valuable. But remotely feasible? I'd challenge that. Latency is pretty low. Unless you are trying to react to events in split seconds, most anything can be done.
What's the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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You could always send your robotic avatar to meet her robotic avatar.
Play your cards right, and you've got an interesting variation of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots.
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I know this is /. and we're not really meant to be experts on the subject, but I'm pretty sure beating up your date is doing it wrong.
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I dunno. It sounds too much like the old joke where the punch line was, "Hand, jerk it off!"
Give me an Orb and a refurbed Orgasmatron and I will be set for life.
If you want to use that as a .sig, email me a dollar
Creativity ??? ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
1998 called (Score:1, Offtopic)
they want their web agents back
same old shit, repackaged with new terms
i wonder what the next buzzword will be used to describe client-server architecture anew?
This would be a step backwards (Score:2, Interesting)
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Thanks, responses like yours make it very easy to see if someone RTFA or not. You obviously didn't.
AnthroPCs are a good start (Score:1)
Like Pintsize and Winslow from the webcomic "Questionable Content"
Take a look:
http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1222 [questionablecontent.net]
Imagine... if you will (Score:1)
Re:Imagine... if you will (Score:4, Funny)
People would stop filtering spam.
Robots, yes. Teleoperators, no. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Yeah, I'm more interested in the field of full-body haptics as it relates to virtual reality, although I'm beginning to think lucid dreaming or astral projection might be more practical. Yes I have had lucid dreams although I can't trigger them regularly yet, no I'm not sure I believe astral projection is possible. I just want fully immersive VR damnit.
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(jokingly) How about people who are too fat and lazy to get off the couch? Sounds like a pretty big niche to me... pun intended.
THIS JUST IN: Hot new toy straight out of China (Score:2, Funny)
Remote robots modeled after the the PRC leader will be the new craze this Christmas.
I, for one, welcome our new remote maoist robot overlords.
Something like this? (Score:2)
Didn't we already have this discussion [slashdot.org] once after someone had already done it? [therecord.com]
When he was wandering around at night looking for someone to "plug him in" .... Talk about reaching out and touching someone. Wow!
Whew! (Score:2)
It's a good thing I got my insurance [robotmarketplace.com] premiums paid up!
I shall call him... (Score:2, Funny)
Robots on the Web in the future? (Score:2)
I just finished working on this project:
http://www.bpexplorer.com.au/ [bpexplorer.com.au]
(NB: Aussie and Kiwi users only can drive - sorry, but for obvious reasons of course)
Basically users queue up and control a robot tank with a web cam attached to it. The streaming IS slightly laggy, but very usable for the purpose.
I wrote the car controller etc. Lots of fun and the best dev project I have worked on. Unique challenges and all that. My degree/research just happened to be in Artificial Intellegence - so a nice (albeit acciden
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I no longer work on it. I was just the DEV. :)
Battle routine set! Execute! (Score:2)
What Do *We* Want the Future of the Web to Become? (Score:2, Interesting)
Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory (Score:1, Interesting)
If the little robots allow the long-held dream of being able to punch someone in the face through the internet, there will be griefers and it'll be banned.
If the little robots are helpless against physical humans, there will be griefers and it'll be a failure.
Data Centers (Score:2)
Finally... (Score:2)
Obligatory bash.org quote (Score:3, Funny)
#4281 :D-< :D|-< :D/-<
<Zybl0re> get up
<Zybl0re> get on up
<Zybl0re> get up
<Zybl0re> get on up
<phxl|paper> and DANCE
* nmp3bot dances
* nmp3bot dances
* nmp3bot dances
<[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)
Oh, the plumbing... (Score:2)
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However funny, it does have interesting ramifications. What will the pressure threshold be for receiving the telepresence signal? If it goes into pr0n type devices, how sensitive will it be? How hard can it squeeze? A soft grip? A pinprick? The snap of a whip? Hard enough to sever skin or crush blood vessels? There are important safety issues to look into for this.
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I think you'd just set up your gear for what ever level you wanted and no matter how high a signal comes in, doesn't override.
Unless you get hosed by a virus. Man, getting digitally blackmailed will suck!