Tag: robotics

Future battlefield

in the future battlefield, if you stay in 1 place longer than 2 hours, you will be dead.

  • units will be in constant motion
  • There will no clear front line, no secure supply lines, no big bases
  • enemy drones and sensors constantly on the hunt (like Terminator Hunter Killers)
  • Army destroying sensors, defenses, and missiles to open paths for the rest of the force.

Soldiers will fight with everything from rifles and tanks to electronic jammers, computer viruses, and long-range missiles striking targets on the land, in the air, and even at sea

Telemedicine

Another form of anticompetitive state-level protectionism.

The biggest hurdle may be state medical boards. Idaho’s medical licensing board punished a doctor for prescribing an antibiotic over the phone, fining her $10K and forbidding her from providing telemedicine. State laws that restrict telemedicine — for instance, requiring that patients and doctors have established in-person relationships — have drawn lawsuits charging that they illegally restrict competition. Georgia’s state medical board requires a face-to-face encounter before telemedicine can be delivered, while Ohio’s does not.

2020-03-26: Robots could enable a form of telemedicine that would keep humans out of areas of contagion. A small example is Spot:

It’s using a custom mount and enclosure for an iPad or similar-sized screen to be used for video conferencing between doctors and other healthcare workers and their patients.

Another is the 4x speedup for hygiene theater:

It takes human cleaners 1 hour to carefully disinfect the CT scanning room, wiping down the equipment and surfaces. So when the pandemic hit, and the room had to be cleaned after each use, “a machine that used to be able to do 30 scans a day is down to 7.”

Violet can clean the room in just 15 minutes. It uses machine vision powered by Intel’s Movidius AI chips to map and navigate its surrounding environment. Though humans still have to wipe down the “nooks and crannies the robot can’t get to, like behind the door handles.” But by cutting cleaning times down from 1 hour to 15 minutes, the hospital’s capacity for CT scans increases 4x.

2020-04-15: Health care costs can be lowered by reimbursing at the same rates for telemedicine or treatments that are at home, and by paying fees per patient, rather than huge profit margins on elective procedures

Automation 2036

a nice summary if you have been living under a rock

My main assumptions for the next 20 years are:

  • Automation will make more and more people unemployable
  • No dystopia: Democracies will continue to function “reasonably”
  • Some form of Universal Basic Income (UBI) will become common
  • Minimum wage will probably disappear: Unions will fight a rear-guard action but in a sense, once you have UBI, much of the justification for minimum wage goes away. And even if “officially” it stays, people will simply become independent and do “consulting jobs” which are exempt from unions
  • Capitalism will be alive and well: While UBI sounds a bit like socialism, and taxes will probably be higher, capitalism as we know it will continue.
  • Automation will accelerate: Once UBI exists, why would somebody do unpleasant work? Well, if it pays very well, or it is challenging. So there will be a bigger push to automate things which are currently done by people on very low wage.

Also, once many / most people are on UBI, I think luddites / unions / special interest groups will find it harder to block further automation: People on UBI will look unkindly on a group suggesting that a service / product should stay expensive just so that group will keep their jobs. Will inequality grow? Depends on how you look at it: Income inequality will probably continue rising (even though taxes will be higher to finance UBI). But how about Quality-of-Life inequality? That’s a lot harder to measure. So what will everybody do?

  • There will be cheap, good education
  • People will have more fun
  • Everybody will be an artist
  • Religions / alternative / new-age stuff
  • Helping others

Deep Maneuver

The earliest example of robotic deep maneuver I’ve found is an operation from WW2 called Fu-Go. Fu-Go was the Japanese attempt to bomb the continental US using balloon bombs. Although Fu-Go was a complete failure, I find it useful as a way to think productively about how robotic intelligence can be used to surmount physical challenges (distance, time, etc.). This intelligence would allow them to leverage a wide variety of environmental factors to extend mission duration and range, from using wind/ocean currents to hitchhiking on vehicles (ships, trucks, aircraft, etc.) to slow self-propulsion using solar energy (or buoyancy).