Stay InTouch

9 responses to “Stay InTouch”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Apr 13, 2013 at 3:54 am

   and the backside seemed like a surreal nod to the rotary land lines of the Matrix… with a stage microphone duct taped on to capture the audio for his talk on stage (which was just before mine)…
   
   and a handset phone embedded in the side, and the reassuring red emergency stop button just like in the Google robocars… and his co-worker showing him a text message on what must have been the only non-smart phone in the room. =)

   And then it got meta, when he pivoted and I showed him the photo I took… and then noticed that a bunch of people in the audience were videoing this whole escapade…

   

   Reply
2. 

   js.brain

   Apr 13, 2013 at 4:08 am

   Laughing loud. So funny!
   Interesting a 2013 Robo-human with a phone from 1995.
   It is fun to communicate with a robot with blue color lights. Hope he will get some arms soon for hug back!

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3. 

   Chucil

   Apr 13, 2013 at 5:57 am

   It can talk, it can walk, can it dance?

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4. 

   scleroplex

   Apr 13, 2013 at 4:41 pm

   :-))

   when i was doing my residency at Tufts/St Elizebath’s we had a robot that independently moved from the pharmacy to the wards dispensing drugs. it took the lift up with people and graciously gave way in narrow corridors. i loved it 🙂

   beverly hospital uses a robot because of a shortage of neurologists in the boston area

   picture 8 – http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/08/more_robots.html

   http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/07/...

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5. 

   jurvetson

   Apr 14, 2013 at 4:13 pm

   Cool photo essay. You may have been seeing an Aethon Tug with the meds… which raises the hacker challenge to load it up with the DEA triplicate goodies and ambles off to an exit where a van carts the whole thing off…

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6. 

   scleroplex

   Apr 14, 2013 at 6:03 pm

   :-))

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7. 

   ukweli

   Apr 15, 2013 at 1:56 pm

   What kind of drive does this robot feature? Holonomic?

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8. 

   jurvetson

   Apr 16, 2013 at 4:43 pm

   Not sure… I did not get a peek under the skirt.

   P.S. From the earlier talks on how Robots Remake the Workplace, here are some quotes that I liked:

   “Computers democratized access to information. Robots democratize access to quality.” — Rich Mahoney, Director of Robotics, SRI International

   “Low cost manufacturing is not stable; it’s moved around for 60 years” and “From our ethnographic studies, we learned that factory workers don’t want their kids to work in the factory. There are no replacement workers coming.” — Rodney Brooks, Founder and CTO of Rethink Robotics

   “With a $90 drone, they don’t have to come back. You can double their range when they don’t have to come back. You can waste drones to get the job done. That’s what we did in Silicon Valley with transistors, and now we can do it with robotics.” — Chris Anderson, CEO of 3D Robotics; former Editor-in-Chief of WIRED

   And Sten posted some great notes on all the speakers, including some paraphrased from me on stage:

   • Robotics are like generalised AI as an investment category – it would have been fun to invest in this over the last 20 years, but it feels only now that Moore’s Law is getting us to a place where all these opportunities truly emerge as investable.

   • The reasons why you should have kept away from robotics as an investor have been the same as they used to be for cars, rockets, etc – It’s capital intensive, complex to understand, etc. All of that is changing – you can now think of them as software with a little hardware on the side. Much of everything becomes dematerialised.

   • If you asked people here to name the 2 most innovative automotive companies in the world, you’d probably hear Tesla and Google. Who is the third?

   • Human-replacement ROI seems most obvious, but you’ll often find that customers actually have better reasons to buy robots (fast scaling, inability to hire…)

   • it would be absurd to think that we should pull Excel out of organisations, because we would create more jobs when people tabulated numbers manually again.

   And here is a photoessay of other telepresence bots from the Cool Product Expo, just prior:

   

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9. 

   robots.net

   May 3, 2013 at 8:39 pm

   Thanks for adding this photo to the robots.net flickr group! It was selected as one of the best robot photos of the week and displayed in this post: Best Robot Photos of the Week, May 3.

   Reply