Category: The Future
I’ve been intrigued with robots since I was a little kid. When I was at MIT in the 1980’s, there was a huge movement around the future of robotics. A few of my friends, most notably Colin Angle, went on to do something and co-founded iRobot which he still runs 25 years later. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to robots or robotics in the 1990’s as I got caught up in the Internet, but started thinking about them again about five years ago. Over the past few years, as part of our human computer interaction theme, we’ve invested in several companies doing “robotics related stuff” including MakerBot (3D Printers) and Orbotix (a robotic ball controlled by a smartphone). I’ve also looked at lots of robot-related companies and thought hard about the notion that the machines have already taken over and are just waiting patiently for us to catch up.
Recently I met with Nikolaus Correll, an assistant professor at CU Boulder in the Computer Science department. Nikolaus does research on multi-robot systems and has a bunch of great commercial ideas about robotics. As we were talking, we started discussing other people in Boulder who were working on robotics related stuff. It turns out to be a long list and Nikolaus asked “why don’t people talk more about all the robotics stuff going on in Boulder?” I had no clue so I said “let’s start a movement – titled Boulder is for Robots. Let’s get anyone doing robotics related stuff together and create some entrepreneurial critical mass around this, just like we have for the software / Internet community.”
We agreed that Boulder Is For Robots is a great call to action and are having our first Boulder Is For Robots Meetup on February 7th from 5pm – 10pm. Bring your robots – I’ll supply pizza and beer. You have to sign up in the Boulder Is For Robots Meetup group to find out the location.
In the mean time, following are some thoughts on the robot-related stuff going on in Boulder from Nikolaus. If you are working on something interesting, please add to the list.
Why “Boulder is for Robots” can be tied to a single observation: when I was working as a Post-Doc at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, almost everything we ordered to build robots came from somewhere less than an hour from Boulder. Why is this important? Let’s consider how Steve Wozniak developed the Apple computer, which revolutionized the computer industry from a garage. Did he really create a computer from scratch, transistor by transistor? Or did he emerge from hundreds of tinkerers that relied on a large community that provided mail-order electronic kits, do-it-your-self magazines, inspirational people, and hundreds of man years of university research? The bay area was indeed the place to be at the time with the Homebrew Computer Club and marketing genius Steve Jobs who convinced Wozniak to sell his design, laying the foundation for Apple. Building robots is much more complex than building computers, however: robots consist not only of computers, but also of sensors and mechanisms that need to be invented, re-combined, and modified to create a compelling product. I therefore believe that being part of a community is even more important for developing successful robot companies and having all the tools, know-how, and manpower close by provides a unique competitive advantage.
Boulder provides this infrastructure: For example, Sparkfun enables tens of thousands of amateurs and researchers to create electronic and mechatronic artifacts. They do that not only by retailing hard-to-acquire electronic components and innovative pre-fabbed modules that drastically increase the productivity of hobbyists, entrepreneurs and researchers across the nation, but they also provide free access to a wealth of educational resources that allow amateurs to mimic industrial processes, often just using kitchen equipment. Similarly, Acroname and RoadNarrow Robotics retails sensors and ready-made devices for building state-of-the-art robots, including laser scanners, motor drivers, and digital servos. All three companies actively develop hardware and software that make the integration of ever more complex mechatronic products possible in garages. They also contribute to a pool of “Can-Do” people that spin off companies.
Boulder turns out to be also a hub for manufacturing: close-by Aurora is home to one of the best deals in PCB Manufacturing ($33/each) in the country (Advanced Circuits) and the first – and still only – assembly service in the nation (AAPCB) that assembles single boards for less than $50.
While developers across the nation benefit from these Boulder-area companies, this unique ecosystem of tinkerers, leading manufacturing techniques, and suppliers create a vivid community that amplifies innovation in the Boulder area and already has attracted a series of successful robotics start-ups: For example, Modrobotics, a CMU spin-off, makes transformative robotic construction kits that could be the next “Lego”. Orbotix co-founded by a duo of young engineers from CSU and UNC that became part of the Boulder TechStars 2010 class and subsequently raised over $6m of venture money for their new gaming robot, Sphero. OccamRobotics, founded by a serial entrepreneur who came to Boulder from the bay area, is working on low-cost, autonomous pallet trucks that build up on recent breakthroughs in robotic algorithms, availability of open-source tools, and novel sensors.
Each these companies have in common that their founders identified Boulder as the place that will make them most successful – often moving here from other hot-spots for high-tech entrepreneurship and engineering. These start-ups are complemented by mechatronic giants such as Ball Aerospace, close-by Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin; small and medium-sized companies that develop robotic equipment for satellites and defense organizations; by a myriad of self-financed tinkerers that develop everything from robotic insects to robotic wheel-chairs in their living rooms and next-generation agriculture systems at Boulder’s Hacker-space Solid State Depot; and of course, the University of Colorado of which many engineering programs are among the top of the nation and the world, and which has a strong research program in unmanned aerial systems.
My lab is working on our agriculture system’s most pressing challenges, robots that can assemble large-scale telescope dishes in space to see into remote galaxies, understanding how intelligence can emerge from large-scale distributed, individually simple components, and constructing robotic facades that help save us power. These efforts are complemented by hands-on classes such as Robotics, Advanced Robotics, Things that Think, or Real-time embedded systems, and others, to shape a new generation of engineers who think of computers as devices that cannot only compute, but sense and literally change the world.
Why now? Robotics has been an industry since the 1960’s when George Devol’s Unimate was sold to manipulate steel plates in a GM plant. Indeed, robots have revolutionized manufacturing, but still have not delivered on early claims of the field. Robot stunts delivered by the Unimate on the 1961 “Tonight” show, still remain a major challenge for artificial intelligence 50 years later: opening a can of beer, pouring it, or directing an orchestra. These commercially successful robots, which led to the raise of Japan to a major industrial power in the 1980’s, were not autonomous, but simply execute pre-calculated paths. This trend is finally changing right now, documented by companies such as iRobot, Husqvarna and KIVA systems who successfully market autonomous robotic products, and is mainly driven by exponential developments in computing (“Moore’s Law”), cell phones and cars – both industries who integrate computing and sensors at high density.
“Boulder is for Robots” is not only an observation, but also an imperative to bring entrepreneurs, tinkerers, and capital together to bring the next big robotic idea to life in Boulder by exchanging know-how, man-power, and tools, and combining them into great new products. In case you already knew that “Boulder is for Robots”, please comment on this post and share what you do!
Jason Silva is a total stud. Every time he does another amazing video ecstatic metapattern rant” on Vimeo, he tweets me about it. Here’s his lastest.
TO UNDERSTAND IS TO PERCEIVE PATTERNS from jason silva on Vimeo.
Here’s what’s so amazing about this to me. I don’t think I know Jason. Maybe we’ve met once – I don’t know. I do know that he’s jason_silva on Twitter, is a Host / Producer for Current TV (so I might know him via the TechStars segment CurrentTV did a few years ago on TechStars), but I don’t recognize his picture. We might have met a few times – that’s my issue, not his, since I’m out of namespace in my brain (I have to forget someone to learn someone new.)
All that said, I think Jason is just awesome. Every video I’ve seen of his lights me up. They are beautiful, thought provoking, and something I wish I had the talent to do.
I just tweeted him back that I want to get together with him. I think he’s in NY (Twitter says he’s on 53rd between 5th and 6th) so hopefully he’ll respond and we can hang out the next time I’m in NY. He certainly has gotten my attention!
I’m a big believer that the machines have already taken over. I recently gave a talk at the Defrag Conference titled “Resistance is Futile” where I made the point that we don’t know whether – in the future – we will be machine-enhanced humans or biologically-enhanced machines, but that it doesn’t matter. In either case, I’m optimistic about the future and think the machines will be our friends.
In today’s New York Times, Randall Stross has a great article titled Turn On the Server. It’s Cold Inside. In it he talks about a paper The Data Furnace: Heating Up with Cloud Computing. The abstract follows:
“In this paper, we argue that servers can be sent to homes and office buildings and used as a primary heat source. We call this approach the Data Furnace or DF. Data Furances have three advantages over traditional data centers: 1) a smaller carbon footprint 2) reduced total cost of ownership per server 3) closer proximity to the users. From the home owner’s perspective, a DF is equivalent to a typical heating system: a metal cabinet is shipped to the home and added to the ductwork or hot water pipes. From a technical perspective, DFs create new opportunities for both lower cost and improved quality of service, if cloud computing applications can exploit the differences in the cost structure and resource profile between Data Furances and conventional data centers.”
As data centers become a more significant part of our universe, I think this is a fantastic idea. In the Matrix, humans were used to power the machines. That’s a classical dystopian view of the machine / human relationship. How about turning it around and having the machines warm the humans.
Think about it. Would you be game to have a data center in your basement if heating for your house was free as a result?
I do not want to tangle with an army of 10,000 of these. Especially ones that have lots of sharp pokey electrocution things built in to their foreheads.
I wonder what my golden retriever would think of these dudes. Now, what would have really been sweet is if I had one of these when I was 10 and could put it in my brother’s bedroom at night. Bwahahahahahahahahaha.
After spending the last seven hours in front of my computer, a phrase came to mind that my brother Daniel recently said to me in response to reading The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Daniel said:
“What if we we are already working for the computers?”
While The Matrix and Horton Hears a Who! come immediately to mind, his comment was subtler than that. What if we turn the entire paradigm on its side? In our biological realm we “evolve”; in our computing realm we “innovate.” What if the computers are actually evolving and have figured out that the best way for them to evolve more quickly is to convince us to “innovate” for them.
I had to stop and scrunch my eyes together after typing that paragraph. The first draft I wrote was way weirder and more out there – basically a rant about how computers were having a conversation in a parallel universe that we don’t actually understand and, as part of this, had figured out how to manipulate human beings.
At Ted yesterday, my long time friend John Underkoffler, the co-founder of Oblong stated “Technology is capable of expressing generosity. And we need to demand that.”
While he meant something totally different, I think this is consistent with the parallel universe I’m pondering. As humans (at least most Americans), we regularly envision ourselves at the top of the pyramid of existence, unless you are not an atheist, in which case god factors in somewhere on your hierarchy. But – let’s leave god (or the lack of god) out and think about “humans as a species” vs. “computers as a species”. I started with constructs like collective consciousness and communication hierarchy and was able to quickly come up with a straightforward analogy for each one between the human species and the computer species.
And yet, I still type. All in the name of sharing and contributing my thoughts via this very interesting mechanism. I’m going to run for three hours this afternoon. I’ll have my Garmin 305 on my wrist (with its GPS) and my iPhone in my pack (listening to the end of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’ll be contributing a lot of data to both devices, which will then record them and upload them to “the computer”. The amount of data I’m generating is enormous; I’m not quite sure what the computers are using all of this data for, but what if it was actually something specific?
Before you discard these thoughts as the ravings of a lunatic, just think about them for a minute. This is a common construct in so much contemporary science fiction. Maybe the “collective compute infrastructure” of the world has already passed us by and now have us working for them / it. Wouldn’t that be something to discover 100 years from now.
Well – what’s old is new again. Dave Jilk – my first business partner and CTO of Standing Cloud – sent me this magnificent video on 1963 Timesharing: A Solution to Computer Bottlenecks where MIT Professor Fernando Corbato explains how timesharing works to MIT Science Reporter John Fitch (who has one of those magnificent deep reporter voices).
Since history can be so incredibly instructive to reflect on when you think about the future of science. If you draw a curve of “computer technology progress” from 1963 to 2010 after you watch this and then ponder the progress from 2010 to 2057 you will have a very interesting few moments of reflection.
The following quotes are approximate but they will give you enough sound bites to motivate you to watch it!
“Computers used to be unreliable – they managed to lick all of those problems” (2:00)
“The man machine interaction is very poor” (3:00)
“The computers are very expensive – they cost between 300 and 600 / hour” (3:30) – (BAF: Kind of like a lawyer today)
“It’s a little noisy out here (in the data center) – let’s go in my office so I can show you how it works from a remote terminal” (4:30)
“It looks like a typewriter” (5:00)
The moments of drawing on a blackboard to explain how a computer works (starting around 6:00) is priceless.
“Eventually we’d like to see graphical display but there are technical problems right now” (9:30)
“Wooo the chalk is a little soft” (12:30)
“The disk memories have been available for a year or so but most people haven’t figured out how to use them yet because they haven’t figured out how to keep things from getting mixed up” (16:30)
“I’m moderately familiar with the keyboard – we have to study how humans interact with the machines” (19:00)
Watching the interactive demo at about 20:00 is just wild.
“In the long run we will have increasing needs for computer time by a large amount” (25:00)
Singularity anyone? Or not so much?
Last night I had a long ranging conversation with Amy and a pair of close friends about the singularity and the future of human and machine. The conversation centered around the notion of consciousness and what happens if (or – in my opinion – when) non-biological entities have more reasoning and processing power than biological entities, especially if this is combined with the notion of consciousness. We didn’t reach any conclusions, but we made an hour disappear really quickly.
I woke up to a fun blog post from one of my favorite biological entities (Fred Wilson) listing his Top Records of the Decade. I brought up one of my favorite non-biological entities (Pandora) and created a new channel called “Fred Wilson 2000 Decade” that consisted of the artists behind these records (I find it intriguing that Fred calls them “records” instead of “albums” or “CDs” or “disks” – it definitely dates him.) I then tweeted the Fred Wilson 2000 Decade Pandora Station and shared it with him via email. Here’s the response I got from the non-biological entity masquerading as Fred.
From: Fred Wilson
Sent: Monday, December 28, 2009 8:36 AM
To: Brad Feld
Subject: Re: Brad Feld thought you would be interested in this stationDear Pandora Visitor,
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.
We believe that you are in Argentina (your IP address appears to be 201.234.146.243). If you believe we have made a mistake, we apologize and ask that you please contact us atpandora-support@pandora.com
If you are a paid subscriber, please contact us at pandora-support@pandora.com and we will issue a pro-rated refund to the credit card you used to sign up. If you have been using Pandora, we will keep a record of your existing stations and bookmarked artists and songs, so that when we are able to launch in your country, they will be waiting for you.
We will be notifying listeners as licensing agreements are established in individual countries. If you would like to be notified by email when Pandora is available in your country, please enter your email address below. The pace of global licensing is hard to predict, but we have the ultimate goal of being able to offer our service everywhere.
We share your disappointment and greatly appreciate your understanding.
I know Fred is on vacation in Buenos Aires with his family. I even know that they got hosed last night at La Cabrera. Suddenly I was thinking about the mix of human and machine here – Pandora (machine), Geolocation (machine), my knowledge of their vacation (human), their dinner experience (human), the description of their dinner experience (written by a human, coded and transmitted by machine), and Fred’s Records of the Decade List (human, but coded by machine – the post and the music). The level of interaction of human and machine is high, although the level of sophistication is pretty low.
In an effort to be subversive, I forwarded the email to Fred with a note that said “Wild how the music licensing stuff is stupid.” He responded immediately with “Yup. Rights holders fuck everything up.” I wonder what the machines think of that?
Dell has put up a new site called Motherboard that I don’t totally understand the point of, but I very much enjoyed the interview with Ray Kurzweil.
Kurzweil has always been a hero of mine ever since I first hear of him when I was at MIT in the mid-1980’s. I’ve never worked with Ray although I got to know his business partner Aaron Kleiner near the end of my time in Boston. I’ve observed Ray from afar, read his books, and thought about his thinking. I find all of it, including the notion of the Singularity and his goal of living long enough to be able to live forever, very compelling.
Watching the interview I realized that I’ve been out of the flow of an area that is really interesting to me. I have no idea how much, if any, will show up on this blog (or in our investing), but look for more of it.