Moving into our future. Super-abundance

Tags

AI, Artificial Intelligence, robotics, robots, technology

Artificial Intelligence, coupled with cheap humanoid robots that can make anything, and everything we want, and will be so cheap in five years that ordinary people will begin purchasing them for household tasks. Their price, if it falls to their basic materials, and are so similar to automobiles in many functions that they will cost about one twentieth as much as a car. If a car costs $20,000 then personal robots would be about $1,000. They will be so useful and so cheap that human labor will be replaced by robots. The robots will consume electricity for their energy, and with vast fields of solar panels, with battery back up that energy will cost near zero. The robots will be manufactured as quickly as possible, and will be used to build more robots, thus it becomes a logarithmic growth of robots building robots rather than an arithmetic one of humans building robots. Also, the solar panels will be manufactured and placed in position by these robots, with very little human supervision.

When this transition happens, it will be so quickly that we will be unable to find employment for our robots, because we will lack any more needs to be fulfilled. The robots will then have nothing to do, and neither will humans, except for self initiated interesting things. That will be the result of superabundance.

The question then becomes, “What will we want when everything we need is free”?

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Perplexity.ai – “What will humans want when everything they need is free?”

When considering a future where all basic needs are met for free, people’s desires and motivations would likely shift in several key ways:

Pursuit of Purpose and Meaning

With basic survival needs taken care of, many individuals would likely focus more on: Self-Actualization: People may dedicate more time and energy to personal growth, creativity, and reaching their full potential1. Community Contribution: There could be increased interest in volunteering, mentoring, and other ways of giving back to society1.

Experiences Over Possessions

Without the need to accumulate wealth for essentials, priorities may change: Travel and Adventure: People may place higher value on unique experiences and exploring the world1. Learning and Skill Development: There could be greater emphasis on education and acquiring new abilities for personal fulfillment rather than career advancement1.

Social Connection and Relationships

Free from financial stressors, individuals may invest more in: Quality Time: Deeper, more meaningful relationships with family and friends could become a top priority1. Community Building: People may seek to create stronger local communities and social networks1.

Creative and Intellectual Pursuits

With basic needs met, there may be a renaissance in: Arts and Culture: More people might engage in creative expression through various art forms1. Scientific Discovery: Increased curiosity-driven research and innovation could flourish1.

Luxury and Status Symbols

While basic needs are met, some may still desire: Unique Experiences: Exclusive or rare opportunities may become new status symbols1. Customization: Personalized products and services could be highly valued1. It’s important to note that human desires are complex and individual. Even in a world where necessities are free, people would likely still seek ways to differentiate themselves and find purpose. The key shift would be from survival-based motivations to those centered on personal growth, social connection, and self-expression.

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Let’s all think hard about ways to make our new relationship to reality to be a friendly experience for everyone. We can approach everything with kindness, because we will all be living in perplexity.

Ready or not, here we GO.

Tags

Human survival against robots, Human workers need not apply!, robots

My search for events of a five-hundred-year significance for the year 2019 hasn’t yielded anything yet that fulfilled my wish. With only one day to go until the new year begins it appears that I will have to improvise.

My guiding principle is that the power of computer chips is continuing to expand near the rate of Moore’s Law. That would mean that their capacity would be sixty-four times greater in 2030 than in 2020. And we know how to manufacture these things at an ever-increasing rate which could equal their increased power and in 2030 would have 4000 times more potential computing power than at present. Beating grandmaster GO players would be trivial as beating grandmaster Tic Tac Toe players. It just keeps playing until the Grandmaster goes to sleep, and then it wins and keeps winning. Boring! And on top of that capacity is their instantaneous access to all the wisdom of humankind updated a predictable way into the future. All of this was discussed by Pamela McCorduck (YouTube) in her book, Machines who Think (1979) with Ed Feigenbaum. – 5:23 “The four founding fathers were extraordinary guys, they really were. Alan Newell, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky, John MacCarthy”. – 9:15 “The primatologist Frans de Waal said, ‘AI taught us the questions to ask.'”. – 14:00 “A lot of reaction to AI is that this is somehow wicked. This is somehow blasphemous. We shouldn’t be going there.” 15:55 “If we produce a machine that can think it will out-think us and therefore replace us.” Watch the YouTube video interview because Pamala has been at the center of these issues since the beginning.

What is apparent, at least to me, is that the time is coming in which more human workers will be replaced by AIs than new jobs will be created for people. That AI is doing so at such a rate that human worry over being replaced is justified. The hoped-for possibility that AI will create jobs for new highly educated workers is unlikely to be realized; instead it is more likely that the AIs will do those newly created jobs better than humans, and they will do them without the years of training needed.

“We” are now about to transition into the next form of an intelligent being.

 

 

 

How can we create a company to promote a species transition?

Tags

robots, Survival of humanity, Survival of robots

What an audacious thing for an eighty-three-year-old guy be writing about? Creating a company? Dreaming about creating a company? Are you nuts, Charlie?

The answer is obviously YES to all of the above questions! So, let’s get on with it. What company should I be creating, NOW? I’m so damned old there isn’t really much time for me to do anything that will flourish while I still have healthy enough brain cells to cope with the idea or even appreciate any of its success.

However, the idea of transitioning humanity into its next form is so weird an idea that only someone who is comfortable with being weird can step forward and begin that process. I don’t look particularly abnormal walking down the streets of Bend, Oregon, even though I have been wearing a red beret even before moving here eight years ago. Hey, it is the most flexible, and therefore useful, of any chapeau I’ve ever encountered. I’m average American, male, BMI 25, and most people probably consider me sane, even though I have some nonstandard ideas I like to talk about.

For example, the idea of putting time and effort into helping humanity transition into its next state of being so it can function forever and impact the whole universe, I admit, is a bit outré. Even with that wishy-washy provision, it is an interesting idea to bandy about and if it were successfully implemented it would be important. So, why not do it now, and by now I mean NOW.

I have blogged about making things work. The general idea is that if you can’t make an idea work you will be wasting your time. Applying that logic to this problem means that we must discover what it is that we can actually do with that idea. For example, it is impossible to ever reach the end of the Universe because even a message moving out from Earth at the speed of light can’t catch up with the most distant receding stars. So, that’s impossible. Perhaps a message sent to a nearby planet would be possible. But no, even that idea isn’t workable because there hasn’t been a radio signal received from anywhere even after years of searching. Thus, it is unlikely that there is any high-tech civilization within a hundred light-years of us. So, that’s out also as a palatable goal. 

What might be possible is to create self-sustaining non-organic beings, much like computers, that don’t have any specific die-by-date. These beings if put into secure places like mines bored into stable billion-year-old rock formations might still be functional a billion years from now. That doesn’t sound very exciting, but it could be done. The problem becomes, how can we make these kinds of beings be self-sustaining and self-reproducing?

There is a problem that arises for us, because if these non-organic beings are self-sustaining and self-reproducing, the Darwinian processes of natural selection would favor those beings so that in their personal quest to gain energy from their environment they might deprive organic beings of their needed energy. Manmade solar cells are more efficient at collecting the sun’s energy than plants, so these new life-like forms would become a real threat. If these non-organic beings had even a little self-directed forethought, which organic natural selection doesn’t have, they might evolve very quickly and displace much of life as we know it. We don’t want that to happen, at least in the short run of say a thousand years. But, in the long run of billions of years, that might be the best result for converting the matter and energy of our Earth into a thinking being, and our Milky Way galaxy into a thinking being too and ultimately the whole available Universe into a large thinking being.

It’s a humble suggestion for a doable idea. Begin making devices that can evolve our world and our galaxy into a sentient being.

Robot Societies in Science and Science Fiction

Tags

Evolution of robots, robots, Why we need robots.

The discussion and analysis of actually developing a fully functioning, self-replicating, and self-evolving robot society wouldn’t be complete without checking into science history and what the science-fiction writers have created.

What my search found was a wonderful collection of Science History and other beautiful stuff by Piero Scaruffi, a cognitive scientist.

Scaruffi’s Timelines:
A Timeline of Science and Technology in the 20th Century
A Timeline of Science and Technology in the 19th Century
A Timeline of Artificial Intelligence
A Timeline of Computing
A Timeline of Mathematics
A Timeline of Cyberculture

The timeline of Artificial Intelligence provides the most relevant background for our coming Robot Society. Please go view the link to get a feeling for how much work has been done to bring our Artificial Intelligence and robot beings to a functioning condition.

And here is a great site for checking the deep history of exploration into the problems of robots relating to human beings, such as the morality of robots: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

My recent posts have started to explore the problems of developing what the robot society will need to function. It becomes clear that we need to get the new things being manufactured to be radio-tagged with something like RFID so they can quickly be integrated into a worldwide functional system, and we need to build a robot system that can create vast quantities of electrical power from the sun before the current supply of fossil fuel runs out and people go hungry.

Projecting the convergence of unrelated current technologies

Tags

3D Printing, Big Data, Chips, CRISPR, debt, Entertainment, Evolution of technology, Five year future, internet, Linking technological trends, Oculus, politics, Prepare for future, Projecting five years ahead, robots, SAT, Solar

It’s inevitable that evolving technologies will affect one another, and the question becomes how can we forecast the probable interactions to improve the world. With speculations of doable ideas it is reasonable to put some practical limits because there is a tendency to speculate into pure fantasy. First create a list of existing and probably evolvable technologies, and then do some five-year projections on potential interactions between them and combinations of them. Here is a Wikipedia list of some emerging technologies, and below are a few to select from to illustrate the idea of interactions.

CRISPR – The ability to insert any DNA code into any species.
Oculus – The creation of interactive visual 3D environments
Robots – Mechanical machines that replace human physical labor
3D Printing – Unique objects, living prosthesis
Internet – Worldwide high-speed data interaction
Big Data – Discovering relationships via in depth analysis of data
Chips – The conversion of massive amounts of silicon into memory
Solar – Conversion of sun and wind into energy
SAT – Concentration of intelligence, connection, and money
Debt – Enslavement of the public thru inescapable economic obligations
Entertainment – Control of the public’s thoughts, emotions, goals
Politics – Manipulating public via money, surveys, big data

It is possible to pick any two from the list and ponder how they might be interacting in five years. An obvious interaction will be 3D printing and CRISPR, where personally adapted and modified living tissue will be created for replacing failed natural organs. Another easy one is Oculus and Robots, where the robots might be largely autonomous but have an oculated human monitoring some large number of them for compliance and decision-making. Chips and Politics, where massive amounts of information are maintained on super cheap media on all individual people so the politician might serve their needs more accurately. Oculus and Entertainment is certain to be a major entertainment venue in five years when the quality and quantity of material is available and affordable.

Those are obvious, but what about some seemingly unrelated items like SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Tests) and personal Debt? – where an individual’s potential productivity, as measured by SAT-like examinations, is closely linked to their ability to purchase education, housing, medical attention. That seems like a simple projection of what has been happening for sixty years, but it will tighten up as the ability to project a person’s productivity will become more accurate.

When looking over the list of gross possibilities, that could easily be expanded, it is easy to speculate on how they might interact with each other. At the moment the public isn’t very informed on the relationships pending between CRISPR and Politics, but in five years it will probably be a major point of contention. What could be the effect of 3D printing on Entertainment is impossible to know in particular, but there will be personally crafted items made for individuals.

What will you value in five years?

It’s time to say hello to our new reality.

Tags

CRISPR, Drones, Evolution of technology, Our new morality, Our new world, robots, The web

I was going to entitle this post, “It’s time to say goodbye to our old reality!”, but then it became obvious that the old is already gone and the new is clearly here and growing fast. For example, CRISPR, robots, drones, and the web are here and improving their abilities exponentially at the moment, and when and where each of these technologies will reach their peak and stabilize is unknowable at this time.

Each of these technologies has wonderful life-enhancing possibilities, but of course with great power comes the possibility of doing great harm. It is the responsibility of individual people to channel these new powers into life-enhancing paths, but unfortunately humans, every one of us, go through a metamorphosis from infancy, to childhood, to adolescence to adulthood, to maturity, and hopefully to sage-hood. This process takes considerable time, of course, and natural abilities, experience, social thinking, and humanity-wide level of moral development. Steven Pinker, in his book “The Better Angels of our Nature” documents humanity’s long-term trend toward more moral and kinder behavior towards one another, but the power of the new technologies will stress our human morality to new and unknowable limits. Let us do everything possible to assure that our aggregate humanity makes it possible for humanity to thrive for a long time. Here are some obvious problem areas.

CRISPR is a laboratory method for inserting any DNA genes directly into any species precisely where they are intended to go. It permits humans, for the last couple of years and for the forseeable future, to develop increasing ability to modify living organisms into anything imaginable. It appears the only limitations on CRISPR are those imposed by physical reality, and in this case we don’t know what those limits are. The Chinese are apparently already using CRISPR to create superhuman embryos, but it will take twenty years to grow these into fully functioning adults. What will come of this technology in a hundred years is certain to be astonishing. The scary part of this technology is the ease of weaponizing disease.

Robots and other machines are becoming ever more able to manufacture the things we think we need, but this makes humans ever less useful for creating new products. Already huge mining machines are being driven by computers, thus eliminating many jobs, and long-haul trucks are now being driven by computers with drivers who don’t drive them, but only monitor their operations. After the suicides of airliner pilots, having them replaced, or at least overridden by computers in many situations, is being planned.

Drones are already being used in military operations, and in many applications are superior to humans, because they don’t tire and make some kinds of mistakes. Drones are also used for surveillance, which at the moment is mostly surveillance of military situations, but this is bound to change. First will be monitoring of highways and traffic, but soon it will be the monitoring of individual people. It is already easy to do, and as the price of drones drops the quality and quantity of the surveillance will increase. The upside of this is good, but the potential misuse of these devices is potentially very bad. The Chinese are already reported to be building tens of thousands of drones.

The web is becoming more astonishing by the day, and you need only query Google to see it instantly provide multiple guesses as to what you are searching for, and that requires having some understanding of your motivations. My ASUS Nexus with the new Android program translates my speech into Google searches and provides spoken answers within seconds of my asking my question, with the various in-depth text options to be viewed while it is speaking a basic answer. This is wonderful, and getting better by the day, but how can we help but worry how far this technology will go into our personal living motivations? It already feels like Google has a better understanding of what I want than I do.

Let us do what we can to bring a humane morality to this astonishing new world. Remember, you too are human and will be forced to live with what you create. Clearly:

It’s time to say hello to our new reality.

Does the future world economy need humans?

Tags

Billions, computers, Contentment, food, future, happiness, humanity, life, Living, Machines, meaning, population, Purpose, robots, Serving, Sustainable, World

People have been being replaced since the beginning.

Top tier humans have been replacing their goods-producing entities since the advent of civilization. The first replacements were other humans somehow forced into labor either by slavery or by a social arrangement which gave them more goods for their labor than they could supply to themselves. Early on animals replaced some humans by being domesticated and forced to perform physical labor such as plowing fields and hauling materials. By 1500 AD energy was being gotten from falling water, using water wheels, and from wind using wind mills and sails on ships. By 1800 fossil fuel in the form of coal was powering steam engines for lifting, hauling, transportation and weaving. 1900 saw machines doing tabulating of data which was formerly a human mental job. 2000 had computers and their robots taking over the creative work of making new complex machines like airplanes as well as the routine physical manufacturing.

By 2011 untended machines plow and harvest fields, manufacture complex products like automobiles, and wage robotic war within human specified zones. Untended automobiles are now instructed to drive from one point to some distant point through complex environments. The creation of food and goods, and the waging of war which was formerly done by human workers is now being done, in some locations, wholly by machines. Even the most human of work, the creating of new and useful things, is being done by machines. This trend is presently accelerating, and if it is as successful as it appears it is going to be, then the need for human physical labor and mental input will end. The top tier humans will no longer have need for human workers and the robots will do everything they need done.

Who will be the benefactors of hyper-modern robot technology?

The top tier humans have always been the primary benefactors of all of the progress made by human ingenuity, but most of humanity is presently enjoying considerable benefits of it also. There is a temporary abundance of food which permits a lower percentage of humanity living with hunger than ever before, and most people have at least some access to the high-tech world.

The cheap and long term benefit of technology, for most people, will be in the form of entertainment. Once that information has been created, packaged and stored and the machines to view it in place, the entertainment can be provided virtually free to anyone and almost without cost or consumption of further energy to power the system. A separate issue is the price of food. Food will continue to rise in price as the population grows and arable land remains constant. The price of technical devices will continue to drop as their creation is done by machines and they are made permanently failure proof. The distant future may witness massive numbers of humans starving to death while watching high quality surround sound 3D HDTV.

The need for humans is fading away.

The most human of all activities, that of humans motivating other humans to do things, may fade away. Even the actors in the entertainment industry, and politicians in the motivation industry, are being replaced by super quality animation. Androids are being made which simulate living people who are approaching being indistinguishable from real humans. Also, because entertainment can be stored, over the years there will be far more available than can ever be witnessed. Netflix already has a hundred thousand titles and enough movies for a lifetime of near constant viewing. Interactive games may come to the rescue and displace overly formulaic and rigid movies, and they are infinitely extensible in time. However, humans themselves become mere extensions of the entertainment machines and the machines have no need of humans. The stored memory doesn’t need humans, the machinery for presenting the stored data doesn’t need humans, and thus as this technology matures, humans themselves are no longer needed for creating or providing the entertainment to other humans. The need for humans to exist to provide the goods and services to make human society function has vanished.

Why feed billions humans when they don’t contribute to society?

If people are not contributing to the goods and services wanted by other people then their reason for existing, for all of those other people, vanishes. Humanity then exists only for the purpose of consuming goods and media but not for helping other humans. That doesn’t seem sustainable as a reason for existence. In the past people existed for other people, but in this Robotic New World, robots exist to fulfill people’s needs, and humans are superfluous consumers of food and energy. The need for human workers evaporates and with that the need to maintain billions of them. This trend bothers me!

Humans derive their life meaning by serving other humans.

I am a human and as a human I want humanity to maximize its vitality and contentment. But, how can we be contented if our lives have no purpose?  In the really long run, say trillions of years, the struggles of humanity become absolutely meaningless, but in the ten year, hundred year or even thousand year future I can imagine personal and human impact and meaning. Many individuals and societies more than a thousand years gone are still having real effects on our daily lives, so it is easy to imagine that some things we are now doing will have an impact in that time frame.

To talk in terms of permanent human aspirations, or even trillion year plans is clearly absurd and to talk of thousand year projects requires planning for very general types of things. A hundred year plan is clearly doable and is done in many engineering projects and ten years is within most individuals’ personal striving. When looked at in this more limited way we can choose to do things which are helpful to other people and that is what gives us personal satisfaction. We should do things for other people which we can comprehend as being meaningful to them and to ourselves.

The robots may serve us but we gain contentment by serving each other.

Robots — who love their masters.

Tags

iRobot, robots

The robots I want to have, know and to love.

The problem with drugs, servants and robots.

I am thinking of the uses of robots in the personal sense. What can robots do for me, in my personal life, as an ordinary human being, to help me live my life more pleasurably, and abundantly? How can a robot help me live longer, and get more fun out of the life? How can robots, servants, and drugs find the exact points in my being that I want stimulated, and which will be the most pleasing to me? I don’t want to pay any money or effort to get it it either. I want it now of course. I want it all, and of course I want it to be FREE.

That slipped over into overstatement to show the silliness of that way of thinking. Well, it’s not going to happen, that you get your every whim satisfied, without any effort. In fact you shouldn’t want that to happen to you. It would be a curse of the worst sort. Why? Because that would be like pleasure inducing drugs, which are the ultimate disservice to mankind, which short circuit the normal channels for reinforcing our behavior that brings us to those things we actually need. When that linking association is broken between what we need, and our efforts to acquire them, we fall out of control of our own lives. When the link is weakened we begin inadvertently training ourselves to become more and more crazy. We train ourselves to become dependent on things outside of our own control and unrelated to our personal behavior. A break in the chain of cause and effect, of actions, and rewards. When people get rewards without personal conscious effort they lose control over their real needs, and eventually lose control of their sanity. They no longer know what to do to get things done. People have to make appropriate goal directed efforts to get whatever it is that they want, and need because that is what makes them healthy, and happy. Drugs, servants, and robots can help us, but they can also set us up to destroy ourselves.

How can we get robots to help us in a good way?

Personal robots should help us get what we are working towards, but they should have little choice in setting up our goals. A desirable quality in a robot is for it to require our personal input at some directive level. We want to maintain a tight link between our behavior, and the actions which the robots perform for us because this maintains our control, our health, and our sanity. Having some artificial or mechanical means for constantly stimulating our pleasure center without our own efforts would soon destroy our ability to help ourselves.

Industrial robots are manufacturing many of the consumer products we use every day, even most of the manufactured food products we eat. These robots are totally out of our personal control, but we are totally in control of choosing or rejecting their productions. So, these kinds of factory robots are not personal robots; they are simply a part of the market economy like farm workers, factory workers or college professors. The industrial robots are not a personal problem.

What personal robots might be good for us?

Generally a good robot is one that is going to do something for us that is unhealthy for us to do for ourselves. Some other marginally dangerous jobs would be better done by a robot such as cleaning the toilets, cleaning rain gutters, changing light fixtures in the ceiling, helping us into, and out of bath tubs and showers, shoveling snow, which is a real killer for indolent men, and would be better done by a robot, and perhaps the lawn and gardening chores might be made less strenuously taxing, and more mildly stimulating. Some household chores are probably good for us because they help us get some exercise, and stay in touch with the physical world. Mild activities such as washing dishes, and vacuuming are good for us, and thus an automatic dishwasher or a Roomba from this perspective is counterproductive for an already overweight, and under exercised person.

The goal for robot tasks is to alleviate the heavy, and dangerous chores, and replace them with light exercise which is invigorating. This increases our heart rate, and decreases our stress. Another thing that a robot should do is to increase the value of being human, and having human qualities. Having ones robot near should relieve the human of inhuman tasks and encourage the person to utilize their uniquely human qualities. It would be a robot therapist in a way because part of its task is to warn its person when they were doing inappropriate non-human things. Some things the robot could do better or perhaps it could remind its person that it could do things that might be dangerous. An important robot function is one that maintains our health by monitoring our healthy, and unhealthy behavior, and warning us ,and other appropriate people when we should start doing something or stop doing it.

Robots might be able to do some things which are too … too anything … too big or too small, too boring or too tricky, too cold or too hot, too radioactive, acidic, basic or biologically active or too remote, too time separated between significant actions, or too all of the above. Some jobs cry out to be robotized such as lumberjacking, mining, ocean fishing, window washing on high rise buildings, and all sorts of painting jobs. Some combination jobs of this type would be billboard painting. Some kinds of car inspections could be done by robots, rather derivative of the bomb searching robots that check under cars. Perhaps at the airport security inspection people would be more comfortable stepping up to a mechanical scanner with a wand rather than a bored guard with a wand? How soon will we have riot control by robot vehicles rather than semi armored riot police? They could be controlled remotely by real people, but be semi-autonomous. Perhaps fewer people would be injured.

Robots are not sub-humans; they are machines which can perform some functions which appear human-like to humans because the result produced may be similar to what a human might produce. But, a robot is a machine with a few more degrees of freedom than a mechanical object that has no freedom whatsoever, and is controlled in its every action by pure mechanical actions or an intelligence. There comes a time, however, when the behavior, and the products of a robot become nearly indistinguishable from that of a human, and then they need a new name. Perhaps just plain oid or perhaps compounded as  … android, manoid, womanoid, kidoid, boyoid, girloid, dogoid, dinoid, caroid, airplaneoid, roboid, etc..

Perhaps a new form of robots could be the exact opposite of self controlling; perhaps they could be guided by a group behavior a lot of people inputting their commands coordinated, and summed up by the computer, and robot, and giving some sort of super intelligent behavior — kind of a Wikibot or Wikioid. For example, a crowd of cheering people at a football game directing the movement of the play, but each person controlling some particular action of some particular part of the Wikibot with a joy stick. The possibilities are endless as they say.

SearchMe – Google – LiveSearch – PageBull – are my favorite search engines.

Tags

Caterpillar, Helen Greiner, IRBT, iRobot, PackBot, robots, Roomba, Scooba, search, SearchMe, Top 10 Searches, Top Search Engines, tractor

Google has been everyone’s favorite search engine for quite a while, and it looked like there could never be anything that would beat it. But then along came LiveSearch by MicroSoft, and PageBull which you probably never heard of out of Edinburgh, Scotland, and now a new Gorilla in your screen. SearchMe which you have never heard of, because it just came out last week. But, it is the search-wave of the future – at least for a long long time to come, which in the computer world means a year or so. My Probaway web page lists my 42 TOP – INTERNET SEARCH ENGINES out of about 500 checked.

Probaway’s TOP 42 Search Engines

As good as some specialized ones were it still came down to Google, and Google coupled with its images tag which seemed to be the quickest way to find lots of stuff. The images worked better than the text display because it was quicker to do a general scan through the various sites using pictures than words. MicroSoft’s LiveSearch text was also good, and its Images display was much better than Google’s because one could scroll through lots more images much quicker, although it seems to have more duplicates, and more of finds seemed off topic. PageBull was the best for scanning whole sites because it presented as many at a dozen large thumbnails of active sites, and it was possible to get a much better idea of what was on the site than with either Google Images or LiveSearch images. The penalty, there are always trade-offs, was that PageBull was slow. And, now it has slowed to a death crawl, and is useless. They seem to have transmogrified into a text base auxiliary site of Google called Sidekiq (an expanded limiting tag system) (?) . I liked it the old way, but say, la V.

Google search of iRobot – Images

LiveSearch of iRobot – Images

SearchMe search of iRobot- opening screen

This new Gorilla, SearchMe just emerged on the web. (what will the next silly icon be — Gorilla on steroids? or how about — Mosquito on MicroSofts butt. ?) What the picture above doesn’t show is how quickly you can flip through the pages, and still stay oriented, because you can see the old and the new approaching pages. On this opening screen shot you can see the next page coming up. The pages are pre-loaded so they come up instantly when you click the arrows, or slide the bar. It combines the best of the various search engines. Speed of presentation, specificity of findings, and a visual display that gives the user a better control over his own findings. It works better than Google in presenting text pages, because you don’t have to decipher the usually arcane text they present. It may be a long time before they can catch up with the breadth of Google’s database for specific information, but for general topics it should prove a much more rewarding experience. It is especially easy to use because to flip the pages you just click the on-screen arrows or use the keyboard arrow keys. Even a baby can do that. Even Jeff Hawkins could do it with an eye-blink clicker. But a blind person wouldn’t be helped at all because this is totally vision centric system or maybe they would, because it flips through pages nicely.

The image search is particularly satisfying because SearchMe presents larger if not full clarity pictures of what you will see, full size, when you click on the site. There is one intuitive flaw, the keyboard up arrow key should enter the screen you are in, and scroll in that screen, and then double click the down arrow to get back to the SearchMe screen. And, I would like micro thumbnails or just numbers or even boxes along the slider bar so I could navigate back to a specific page with one click. But, the real surprise, a pleasurable surprise, is when you do videos. After the usual boot up time of your video player program it allows you to flip through videos as quickly as you click your mouse or arrows. Amazing! I think that this works so well because it pre-loads the next items. That is one aspect of ScearchMe that makes it a killer app. This is an aspect of this technology that will open up new possibilities for using your computer, and new possibilities for entrepreneurs for making money. We will all be saying next year, why didn’t I think of that it was so obvious. I should be rich – if only I wasn’t so lazy. For an unapologetic TV surfer with what I call the fastest thumb in the West, this new way of surfing through videos is really a pleasure. You have to see it in action on a good computer with a good internet hookup to appreciate it but with that becoming standard in most homes this is a new found mega-pleasure for the masses and for me.

iRobot – The new creepy crawlies are not science fiction.

Tags

d: Caterpillar, happiness, Health, Helen Greiner, IRBT, iRobot, PackBot, personal needs, robots, Roomba, Scooba, tractors

Today was another wonderful day for me because I went to a really fun, informative and worthwhile lecture. It was presented by the cofounder and chairman of iRobot Corporation, Helen Greiner. — IRBT — She, and her team have created lots of robots with lots of different functionalities over the last fifteen years. The Roomba is commonly available for helping you with your housework, and there are others which are deployed in Iraq to do things which are too dangerous for soldiers to do, like find and defuse bombs.

Helen Greiner while being introduced by by Robert J. Full, CiBER Director at the University of California, Berkeley, Bechtel Engineering Center on May 5, 2008.

This is a little home companion which keeps you connected to your friends with a video camera and mic hookup to a wireless network so you can cruise with your friends remotely.

The iRobot Roomba comes out at night or whenever you program it to and cleans up your dirt and then returns to its hidden charging station, out of sight and supposedly out of mind.

This little fellow can go lots of places you can’t go, and wouldn’t want to go and with the front traction tracks it can climb stairs, and over stuff. This one is mounted with what appears to be a stereo camera, but the US Army has put a lot of more interesting stuff on their models.

Helen Greiner talked about these things, showed us several movies of them in action, and lots more. This is all such cool stuff, and I dreamed of doing that kind of thing as a kid, but somehow got distracted by softball, golf and the Lone Ranger. I had a little windup caterpillar tractor that could crawl slowly along for a little while at age 7, and about age 9 I had a real Caterpillar tractor to drive about for my grandfather because all of my uncles were off to WW II.

He put blocks on the pedals, and a box behind my back so I could reach the pedals, and steering bars, while he manned the equipment at the back. That was sort of fun for a while, but soon became very boring for a kid. I went on to flying airplanes, and then jets for the USAF, but now this looks a lot more interesting. I need to develop a relationship with these people to help do the remote control setup on my power generating kites.

After the lecture I left, being hesitant to go to the reception, but came back to it, and talked to Helen, and the others for a while. She is a fascinating person, and reminds me of Michael Marks of Flextronics whom I talked to last week, because of her enthusiasm for what she is doing, which is rather similar to what he is doing — making really neat stuff that really works wonders. She hasn’t made the inordinate amounts of money that Marks has, but she said she likes to talk about her company as worth a quarter billion dollars because she said, she likes the sound of billion dollars attached to what she has created. I suspect she would like to own a quarter of Tesla Motors and be its CEO like Michael, and do some really neat things with it.

In a few years I think she, and her company may make a lot more money than a mere 65 billion dollars, because when they hit the right product this company will explode with profits. I said to her that what iRobot was doing was fabulous, but that it was so limited relative to what she might develop, and spend her time working on. I spend a minute or two a day on cleaning up the floor, and no time at all looking for unexploded bombs, and asked her what she was doing that would impact my life, as an ordinary person, in terms of time and usefulness. We didn’t get very far with that although I think she thought it was a valid question. The reception ended, and I left still thinking about that, and while outside walking away she, and Bob Full were also walking away. I re-approached them, and said I thought I had an answer to my question — that I spent eight hours a day sleeping and I was wondering if a robot could help me sleep better — that would occupy one third of my time. She enthused over that idea for a bit about things being attached to a sleeping person’s head which helped them wake up at the best possible time for them to get rested properly. That’s great I said, but I was thinking more in a mechanical sense, because that is what her robots were doing. I said I would like a robot to lift the covers a bit when it perceived that I was about to roll over so I wouldn’t get tangled up in them, and have to wake up a bit to straighten them out. Or, that a robot would realize I had been seeping in some position for a certain period of time and needed to get into some other position. I want a robot to pamper me, to cater to my every whim, even my unconscious whims and I suspect that is what everyone else wants too. I had some other ideas along that line but felt that I was imposing on their group which appeared to be heading out to dinner. So I departed and we all happily went our separate ways.