I want my 3PO

Whatever happened to Robots? You know, humanoid metal friends that were once widely expected to be all over the place by now, but that didn't happen. Shame. I would have like to have one of those. I hate ironing.

This weekend OGD is organizing Technival, a wonderful collection of geeky and fun activities wrapped in Saturday and sunshine (or so we hope). One of the many cool things to do is fight virtual robot wars with real drones, using Parrot AR drones and iPads. However, it's still us at the controls.

There are actually quite a lot of 'robots', building cars, vacuuming houses and manipulating fuel rods. Most of these are basically automatons, with about as much interactivity as a coffee machine. Not really Asimov-grade R. Daneel Olivaw material.

In the virtual world there are also a lot of bots. Contrary to their meatspace co-inhabiting counterparts, these are highly interactive. While not quite capable of passing the Turing test, they are quite able to kill n00bs in MMORPG games, do some basic chat-based customer support on websites, and navigate virtual environments with some aplomb. Virtual bots are altogether much more sophisticated than the physical varieties. However, uploading Sansha Sleeper spawn algorithms into a Rhoomba vacuum cleaner will not produce an (evil) R2D2, not quite. The complexity gap between what we can program and what we can build is too great, and somehow programming the physical to perform at the level of the virtual bots is a lot harder.

Why the missing link? Is bipedal walking really that hard? Is there an energy-density problem preventing bots from roaming freely? Or are we just unable to program any simile of a spark into a lifeless creation?

All three are big factors leading to the dearth of robots on the streets today. Walking is pretty tough, batteries are expensive, heavy and weak, and however many cores we equip our computers with, they still lack originality. Topio, for example, moves well and plays table tennis, but is not much of a chess player, even though his hardware and processing capability could theoretically play the game. It simply wasn't built for this purpose and is unable to adapt.

Thankfully there are some promising trends. There are fairly mature navigation and collision-avoidance systems for cars, and parking-assist is gaining popularity. Ere long cars will be at least partially capable of driving themselves. The aforementioned Roomba vacuuming bot is popular and faces increasing competition, with models from Samsung, Phillips and others vying for your living room floor, and doing a good job of it. The Parrot drones at Technival are capable of hovering themselves steadily, maintaining equilibrium with their gyros and rotors, and are quite good at recognizing each other mid-flight.

One day I hope to have a metal man show up at my front door to deliver himself fresh from the factory into my service. I really do hate ironing.

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Update: Concidentally, today's XKCD is hugely relevant: http://xkcd.com/948/

The next step

IT started with electricity. Then we started switching electricity to signal across large distances, and the telegraph was born. As our technological savvy increased we could modulate signals to transport voice and connected people in a much more immediate way than before.
Nowadays we manipulate electrons, light and airwaves to transport huge amounts of data for an array of purposes, many of which have brought people closer still in spite of time or distance. I can access the minds of legends past by looking up their works online. I can see and hear my parents across the Atlantic using voice over IP technology. There are virtual places where I can communicate with friends and acquaintances, and share news, thoughts, pictures and music with them.
I wonder what the next step is. What is more meta than a social networking tool built on top of the internet built on top of a lot of computer hardware, software and interconnections built on top of an unbelievable amount of basic infrastructure? What's the next layer on the technological cake here?
Because this cake is going to keep stacking up, and one day the internet will be as present-but-obsolete as is the telegraph system today, whose dits and dahs persevere in the form of ones and zeroes zipping around our networks, the basic switching principle remains intact. What technology will be fresh and 1.0 then? How close will it bring us?