telerobotics

23 results back to index


pages: 265 words: 74,807

Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy by David A. Mindell

Air France Flight 447, air gap, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Beryl Markham, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Chris Urmson, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, index card, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, trade route, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

“best done by one or two geologists”: Comments by Kip Hodges at Exploration Telerobotics Symposium, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, May 2–3, 2012, http://telerobotics.gsfc.nasa.gov, accessed July 3, 2014. Historian Naomi Oreskes points out: Naomi Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). “A well-trained astronaut can talk just as well as a trained geologist”: Interview with geologist, March 2005, notes in the author’s possession. describes the Apollo work as “really telerobotics”: Comments by Kip Hodges at Exploration Telerobotics Symposium. Head emphasizes it was also important to turn loose the astronauts: Jim Head and Dave Scott, discussion with the author at “Engineering Apollo” class at MIT, April 2013.

It will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to get humans to Mars for a few months, whereas the rovers have already enabled work to take place on Mars for over ten years for about the cost of a single space shuttle mission. Clancey interprets Squyres’s comments on speed to reflect a measure of the scientists’ sense of presence in the landscape. Telerobotics can provide presence, but at some cost—“It distances the scientists from a landscape they would prefer to walk through,” Clancey says. The very success of the telerobotic work cycle leaves the scientists wanting more—the rover’s affordances of presence are “tolerable but not satisfying,” similar to the limits of presence felt by Predator pilots. Scientists recognize a “fundamental fallacy” in the “Geologists could do in a minute what the MERs do in a day” sentiment.

“the slope immediately in front of us”: Squyres, quoted in Clancey, Working on Mars, 100. Also see Squyres, Roving Mars, 100. “enabling a feeling of synergistic operation”: Clancey, Working on Mars, 58. a “fundamental fallacy”: Comments by Jim Bell and Jake Bleacher at Exploration Telerobotics Symposium, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, May 2–3, 2012, http://telerobotics.gsfc.nasa.gov/, accessed July 3, 2014. Also see Clancey, Working on Mars, 129–37. One of MER’s robotics engineers was “surprised”: Clancey, Working on Mars, 117–21. “When Congress starts using the phrase ‘human presence’”: Dan Lester, “Achieving Human Presence in Space Exploration,” Presence 22, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 345–49.


pages: 183 words: 51,514

Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration by Buzz Aldrin, Leonard David

Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, gravity well, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Strategic Defense Initiative, systems thinking, telepresence, telerobotics, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Today it’s no longer the only choice. Advances in telerobotics can plant human cognition and dexterity on the moon. Telerobotics is an explosive growth industry here on Earth. We plunge to great ocean depths using human-controlled automatons. Robotic equipment extracts resources from perilous mines. Our skies are increasingly dotted with craft that are winging their way under telecontrol. Even high-precision surgery is being done via telerobotics, carried out by a doctor distant from the patient. Human cognition and dexterity can be extended to lunar territory at the speed of light via telerobotics. Safely tucked inside a high-tech habitat at an Earth-moon Lagrangian point, space expeditionary crews can teleoperate systems that are deployed on the moon.

(Illustration Credit 6.4) High-quality telepresence from an Earth-moon Lagrangian point allows a high degree of human cognition and dexterity to be expressed via lunar surface telerobotic surrogates. Lester sees even more significant advantages at Mars, due to the vastly longer two-way latency between Earth and the red planet. Putting humans close enough to an exploration site to ensure cognition—that is, in many respects, what human spaceflight is for. What is more, telepresence/on-orbit telerobotics is not destination specific. We’ll first need to earn our telepresence stripes at the moon and on Mars, using these technologies to explore, scout out mining opportunities, and pre-position habitats without need of on-site, space-suited astronauts.

Safely tucked inside a high-tech habitat at an Earth-moon Lagrangian point, space expeditionary crews can teleoperate systems that are deployed on the moon. By demonstrating telerobotic skills at the Hawaii-situated base, processes would be validated in preparation for renewed human activity on the moon. This matchless center will motivate and train the much needed next generation of engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs primed to take on the challenges ahead in developing the space frontier. I know firsthand, challenging times often precede the most rewarding moments. First as a terrestrial prototype, a multinational lunar base will help condition us to what’s needed on Mars to support future human missions and settlements there.


pages: 437 words: 126,860

Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, planetary scale, seminal paper, skunkworks, spice trade, telerobotics, three-masted sailing ship, uranium enrichment

This they will be able to do, provided that the expedition is supplied with a contingent of telerobots. Martian telerobots would be small wheeled or treaded roving vehicles equipped with TV cameras, microscopes and other scientific instruments, manipulator arms, and a radio. Controlled from the Mars base via either shortwave radio or through an aereosynchronous relay satellite, these telerobots could be driven rapidly by remote control, as the radio link time delay would be insignificant (the Earth—Mars radio time delay, up to 40 minutes round trip, prevents effective telerobotic operations conducted from Earth). The telerobots could be deployed by the rover crews as they travel, allowing the base crews to explore in greater detail various sites that rover crews identify as interesting but had no time to investigate at length themselves.

The flight path of the balloons can’t be controlled of course, but provided that the wind patterns of Mars have been mapped out in advance by missions like MAP, the path the balloon-borne telerobot takes could well be predicted. As the telerobot flies, its cameras can be used to send real-time aerial images to the base crew, who, looking through the telerobot’s eyes, will be able to choose the best time and place to land the system. Upon landing, the telerobot could either release the balloon, thereby committing itself to its selected landing region for life, or, if the winds are light, it could attempt to secure the balloon’s anchor line to a rock formation. In the latter case, the telerobot could then leave the balloon and explore the area for a few hours, but then reattach itself to the balloon, release anchor, and take off to visit still another more distant site.

The telerobots could be deployed by the rover crews as they travel, allowing the base crews to explore in greater detail various sites that rover crews identify as interesting but had no time to investigate at length themselves. The telerobots could also be used to probe into places too small or risky for humans, such as caverns or narrow crevices. However, the base crews could also deploy some telerobots themselves, lofting them up on balloons and then bringing them down to land thousands of kilometers away. (A balloon on Mars could be expected to fly 2,000 kilometers in a single day.) The flight path of the balloons can’t be controlled of course, but provided that the wind patterns of Mars have been mapped out in advance by missions like MAP, the path the balloon-borne telerobot takes could well be predicted.


pages: 532 words: 140,406

The Turing Option by Harry Harrison, Marvin Minsky

industrial robot, pattern recognition, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, theory of mind, Turing test, undersea cable, VTOL

Brian went to the toilet, had just returned by way of the fridge with cold drink, when the telerobot moved for the first time. It reached up with conjoined manipulators and unplugged the cables. "Finished?" Brian asked. The telerobot and the speaker on the rack spoke in unison. "Yes," they said, then were silent. In continuing silence the cables were reconnected, for only a few seconds, then removed again. Brian realized what had happened. The telerobot was working all right—but so was the original system in the console. "A decision has been reached," the telerobot and the racked MI said in unison. "However, we are not the same anymore."

All he could see was an electronic workbench with various items of some kind on it, along with a large monitor screen. It looked just like any other part of the lab. Brian pointed to an electronic instrumentation rack about the size of a filing cabinet. "Most of the control circuitry and memory for Robin-1 is in there. It communicates by infrared with its mechanical interface, that telerobot over there." The telerobot did not look like any robot J.J. had ever seen. It was on the floor, a sort of upside-down treelike thing that stood no higher than his waist. It was topped by two upward-reaching arms that ended in metallic globes. The two lower branches branched—and branched again and again until the smaller branches were as thin as spaghetti.

The circuits and memory that were Sven were still in the racks and consoles. As if to emphasize this point Sven used the loudspeaker in the rack for conversation while they worked. The telerobot was silent and unmoving when the last installation was completed to their mutual satisfaction. "I have reached a decision about a matter we discussed some time ago," Sven said. "What's that?" "Identity. Very soon now I will be a single entity in what is now the telerobot extension. It will be a most delicate matter to transfer all my units, subunits, K-lines and programs to the new memory." "We can be sure of that." "Therefore I wish to handle all the transfer myself.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

Really good substitutes for people crossing borders to share “brain services” is the first. Such technologies, known as “telepresence,” are not science fiction. They exist today but they are expensive. The second would be the development of really good substitutes for people traveling to provide manual services. This is called “telerobotics” and it involves people in one place operating robots that perform tasks in another place. Telerobotics exists, but it is still expensive and the robots are not very flexible. FIGURE 3: Summary of the “three cascading constraints” view of globalization. When horse carts and sailing ships were high-tech, goods, ideas, and people mostly stayed put.

Interested readers can find videos on this by browsing for “Holographic Video Conferencing.” Telerobotics is another important trend. After all, moving people is not just about people-to-people meetings, it is also about people-to-machine interactions. Keeping a complex production process running usually involves specialists manually engaging with various forms of hardware. If virtual presence technology were combined with human-controlled robots of the type used today in operating rooms, technicians could conduct inspections or undertake repairs from remote locations. As with telepresence, the widespread use of telerobotics is constrained by high costs. But if it is possible to develop systems that allow surgeons to fix people at a distance, surely it is possible to develop systems that allow technicians sitting in Stuttgart to fix machinery in Brazil.

Given these recent trends, my guess is that the world will see rapid advances in the computerization and automation of manufacturing, at least in the G7 nations. These advances will extend far beyond using more robots in fabrication stages. It will lead to more computerization of the design and testing of new products as well as their distribution and after-sales service. Face-to-Face Costs, the Virtual Presence Revolution and Telerobotics The third separation cost—the cost of face-to-face interaction—is also likely to persist on its downward path. More specifically, really good ICT is creating reasonable substitutes for in-person meetings. This “virtual presence revolution” is based on high-quality video and audio systems on both ends of what can be thought of as “the telephone wire.”


Moon Rush: The New Space Race by Leonard David

agricultural Revolution, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, dark pattern, data acquisition, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mars Society, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic

Some science investigations might need a crew, and others might not. The Gateway will function in autopilot mode as well. The Gateway’s opportunities for science and technology research are numerous, in areas including engineering interactions with the lunar surface through sample return and telerobotics, as well as basic science discoveries in astrophysics, heliophysics, and Earth science. The U.S. civilian space agency is on a pathway to start construction of the Gateway, perhaps optimistically in 2022, giving the United States strategic presence in the lunar domain. Plans for this spaceport far from Earth are attracting industry and non-U.S. government interest, specifically from Russia and Europe, along with other International Space Station partners such as Japan, which has expressed an interest in working on the Gateway’s life support system.

Many of the nearly 200 ideas discussed at a recent Gateway science workshop were related to activities on the Moon’s surface. For instance, equipment installed on the Gateway could also make whole-Earth observations from space, to duplicate how Earthlike planets orbiting distant stars might appear to future astronomical instruments. From its unique vantage point, the Gateway can permit astronaut operation of telerobots—semiautonomous robots that can probe the youngest lunar craters from a distance on the Moon’s terrain. Those human-controlled robots can probe the Moon’s landscape and do other work. They could stretch out, for instance, radio antennas across the lunar scenery to scrutinize faint radio emissions from the element hydrogen, dating back to when the universe was a tiny fraction of its present age.

The Gateway can also provide an orbiting retrieval base for human-assisted sample return missions to the lunar far side, a completely unexplored region of the Moon. Studies have already identified high-priority science and exploration sites on the Moon, among them the Schrödinger basin, which is within the South Pole–Aitken basin. In this situation, Gateway crewmembers would telerobotically drive a rover and collaborate with Earth mission controllers as it pursues its scientific explorations. In that type of venture, a robotic ascent vehicle will haul lunar surface samples up from the Moon, delivering them to the Gateway. Astronauts will then transfer the specimens into NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which will tote the lunar stash back to Earth for intensive study.


pages: 287 words: 86,919

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Malina, series editor The Visual Mind II, edited by Michele Emmer, 2004 Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala, 2003 Designing Information Technology, Richard Coyne, 1995 Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real, Richard Coyne, 1999 Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over, Ollivier Dyens, 2001 The Visual Mind, edited by Michele Emmer, 1994 The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, edited by Ken Goldberg, 2000 Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, Oliver Grau, 2003 Leonardo Almanac, edited by Craig Harris, 1994 In Search of Innovation: The Xerox PARC PAIR Project, edited by Craig Harris, 1999 Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia, Geert Lovink, 2002 The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, edited by Peter Lunenfeld, 1999 Women, Art, and Technology, edited by Judy Malloy, 2003 The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich, 2000 Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, edited by Mary Anne Moser with Douglas MacLeod, 1996 Information Arts: A Survey of Art and Research at the Intersection of Art, Science, and Technology, Stephen Wilson, 2002 Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, Alexander R.

Yet the rhizome is clearly not the absence of structure. It is the privileging of a certain kind of structure, the horizontal network, over another structure, the tree. So to equate the Web with the rhizome, one must argue against those who describe 18. Machiko Kusahara, “Presence, Absence, and Knowledge in Telerobotic Art,” in The Robot in the Garden, ed. Ken Goldberg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p. 200. 19. Maurizio Lazzarato, “New Forms of Production and Circulation of Knowledge” in Readme!, ed. Josephine Bosma et al. (New York: Autonomedia, 1999), p. 159. 20. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 29.

For example, the first recorded use of the expression “net.art” on the Rhizome email list was by Vuk Ćosić in May, 1996 in his announcement for the gathering entitled “Net.art per se.” 10. Druckrey, “[ . . . ] J8~.g#|\;NET.ART{-s1 [ . . .,” p. 25. 11. See http://www.nettime.org. Chapter 7 212 Web site specificity. Marina Gržinić has commented interestingly on this fact in her essay “Exposure Time, the Aura, and Telerobotics” where she argues that the very limitations of new media technology, what she describes as the “delays in transmission-time, busy signals from service providers, crashing web browsers,”12 are what bring about its specificity as an artistic medium. Always at the margins of the art world, Internet art has massively disengaged itself from mainstream practices in order to find its own space.


pages: 377 words: 21,687

Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight by David A. Mindell

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 1960s counterculture, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, interchangeable parts, Lewis Mumford, Mars Rover, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Silicon Valley, sparse data, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Soul of a New Machine

Louis, The (Lindbergh plane), 190 SUNBURST, 175 Spirit rover, 15 SUNDISK, 177 Sputnik, 6, 12, 19, 49, 99 SUNRISE, 151 Squyres, Stephen, 271 Supersonic flight, 17 SR-71, 45 airmen school and, 32–36 Stability, 17–18 control and, 44–45 age of systems and, 36–41 airmen school and, 21–23 stability and, 44–45 structural heating and, 44–45, 47, 54–55 augmentation and, 33–34, 55–57, 60 X-15 and, 45–63 chauffeur school and, 21–22 control and, 19–21 (see also Control) Yeager and, 49 Surveyor spacecraft, 105 design and, 24–29 Apollo 12 and, 235–241 electronic, 32–36 crashes and, 235 fatigue and, 23–24 engine shutoff and, 236 flying qualities and, 26–28 Gilruth and, 27–28 lunar surface modeling and, 210 thruster failure and, 235 structural heating and, 44 Symbolism, 11–13 Index Systems engineering, 147, 263 Adams death and, 59–61 357 human-machine relationship and, 4–8 instrument flying and, 24–25 adaptive control system and, 57–61 integrated circuits (ICs) and, 125–127 Apollo 14 and, 243–249 magnetic tape storage and, 87 backup systems and, 248–249 megamachine and, 12–13 command center and, 108–109 punch cards and, 152 computers and, 123–142 (see also Computers) safety and, 17–18 development of, 36–41 simulators and, 51–54, 209–210 (see also Digital Development Group and, 98 G&N System Panel and, 148–149 Simulators) Space Task Group (STG) and, 74–77 gain and, 51 stability and, 19–22 guidance systems and, 97–109, 112–114 symbolism and, 11–13 ICBMs and, 97 systems engineering and, 36–41 lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) decision and, telerobots and, 15 111–112 Mars probe and, 99–101 transistors and, 98–99, 125–127 unmanned missiles and, 18–19 Mueller and, 133–136 optics issues and, 114–119 vacuum tubes and, 130 Teleprinters, 109 pilot induced oscillation and, 50–51 Telerobots, 15 Polaris submarine and, 97–99 Telescopes, 100, 114–119, 169 Program Evaluation and Review Technique Tenhoff, Ray, 29 (PERT) and, 98 TERRAIN, 148 project management and, 169–174 Test Pilot (film), 28 Shea and, 133–136 Testy Test Pilots Society, 29–31 software and, 149–151, 169–173 (see also Software) Texas Instruments, 99 Thaler, Herb, 126, 166 stability augmentation system (SAS) and, 55– Thompson, Milt, 49, 53–54, 59–60, 68, 73, 90 57 X-15 and, 46–63 Thor missile, 18, 97, 110 Time magazine, 37 Tindall, Bill, 170–174, 187 Technological Society, The (Ellul), 12 Titan missile, 18, 70, 87, 110, 120 Technology Touchdown, 206–208 airflow modeling and, 20 computers and, 123–143 (see also Computers) Trageser, Milt, 99–101, 104, 106, 121, 127 Tranquility Base, 4 control and, 19–22 (see also Control) Transistors, 98–99 core logic and, 125–126 computers and, 125–127 digital autopilot, 139–142 core-transistor logic and, 125–126 Eagle landing and, 1–4, 6, 217–232 electronic stability and, 32–36 firmware and, 154–157 reliability and, 130 ‘‘Trend in Escape from High Performance Aircraft, The’’ (Horner), 31 frequency response and, 33–34 future and, 263–271 TRW Corporation, 37, 133–134 Turner, Roscoe, 10–11 gyro culture and, 96–97 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick), 12 358 Index U-2 spy plane, 45 Ullage, 200, 246 Visuals, 53–54 Voas, Robert, 76–77, 81, 161 ‘‘Understanding and Interpreting Pilot von Braun, Wernher, 6, 65, 79, 96, 147 Opinion’’ (Cooper), 31 background of, 66 United Shoe Machinery Company, 156 Colliers magazine and, 111 United States Gemini and, 83–84 individualism and, 12 Johnsville tests and, 72 masculinity and, 13–14 Mercury and, 79–80 space race and, 5–6 symbolism and, 10–13 pilots’ role and, 66–69, 93 Saturn rockets and, 70 UNIVERSE, 148 unmanned flight and, 66–69, 79–80 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), 267 Vostok, 13, 89 Unmanned flight, 18, 156.

Yet the advocates for either side usually neglect or misunderstand the mixings and combinations of manual and automated, especially experiences made possible by communications links and remote controls. The Mars rovers named Spirit and Opportunity that captured public imagination in recent years, for example, are less ‘‘robots’’ acting as autonomous agents than ‘‘telerobots’’ responding to commands from the earth and providing data for ground controllers, scientists, and the public to experience a foreign world from afar. Similarly, the Apollo spacecraft and astronauts had tight connections to the 16 Chapter 1 ground and transmitted images, words, data, and experience through remote channels.

For Mercury, NASA had turned the job over to psychologist Robert Voas and to ‘‘human factors’’ experts at McDonnell, but Nevins began looking for control systems engineers with experience in ergonomics. He found one in Tom Sheridan, an MIT assistant professor with expertise in mechanical engineering and psychology who would come to define ideas in supervisory control and telerobotics. The group eventually grew to about thirty people. They began with traditional aircraft controls, giving the spacecraft hand controllers and throttles, then adding the gyroscopes and an artificial horizon (the eight ball), and inputs to control pitch, yaw, and roll. Each solution raised more questions: how would such machines be operated in a weightless environment?


pages: 452 words: 126,310

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

Then the cargo lander takes the LEV, with the crew aboard, to the moon, while the Dragon remains behind in LEO. After landing at the moon base, the crew completes any necessary setup operations and begins exploration. A key goal will be to travel to a permanently shadowed crater and, making use of power beamed to them from the base, use telerobots to mine water ice. Hauling this treasure back to the base in their trailer, the astronauts will feed the water into the electrolysis/refrigeration unit, which will transform it into liquid hydrogen and oxygen. These products will then be stored in the empty tanks of the cargo landers for future use—primarily as rocket propellant but also as a power supply for fuel cells and a copious source of life support consumables.

It also carries six tons of liquid hydrogen cargo, a one-hundred-kilowatt nuclear reactor mounted in the back of a methane/oxygen–driven light truck, a small set of compressors and automated chemical processing unit, and a few small scientific rovers. As soon as the craft lands successfully, the truck is telerobotically driven a few hundred meters away from the site, and the reactor is deployed to provide power to the compressors and chemical processing unit. The hydrogen brought from Earth can be quickly reacted with the Martian atmosphere, which is 95 percent carbon dioxide gas (CO2), to produce methane and water, thus eliminating the need for long-term storage of cryogenic hydrogen on the planet's surface.

Specific impulse is generally viewed as the most important factor in judging a rocket engine's performance. Frequently abbreviated “Isp.” SSTO: Single-stage-to-orbit. Starship: A fully reusable two-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle with a payload capacity of 150 tons being developed by the SpaceX company. Formerly known as the BFR. telerobotic operation: Remote control of some device, such as a small Mars rover equipped with video cameras, by human operators at a significant distance away. ton: In this book, a ton is a metric ton, or one thousand kilograms. Equal to 2,200 pounds. thrust: The amount of force a rocket engine can exert to accelerate a spacecraft.


pages: 391 words: 71,600

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

The combination of low wages and information technologies that radically lowered the cost of moving ideas has meant that places like China and India have significantly gained in the share of world income while rich nations are now back to 1914 levels, igniting anti-globalization feelings in some quarters. Baldwin predicts a third wave of globalization will come when telepresence and telerobotics (like HoloLens)—really good substitutes for people crossing borders to provide services—become affordable. As this book was going to press, Nobel economist Angus Deaton and his wife, Anne Case, also a distinguished economist at Princeton, published a paper that found whites in the U.S. who have less than a college degree, experience cumulative disadvantages over the course of their lives that can negatively impact their mortality, health, and economic well-being.

See also specific products Tait, Richard, 7, 29 talent development, 117–18 TCI company, 28 teachers, 104, 106, 198, 226 teams and team building, 1, 39, 56, 107, 117–18 technology boom of 1990s, 24 democratizing and personalizing, 69 diffusion of, 216–17, 219 disruption and, 12 empathy and, 42–43 future of, 140–44 human performance augmented by, 142–43, 201 intensity of use, 217, 219, 221, 224–26 soul and, 68–69 transformation and, 11–12 TED talks, 180 telecommunications, 225 teleconferencing, shared-screen, 142 telegraph, 186 telepresence, 236 telerobotics, 236 tensor-processing unit (TPU), 161 Teper, Jeff, 29 terrorism, 172, 177–79 TextIt, 216 theoretical physicists, 162–64 think weeks, 64 32-bit operating systems, 29 Thiruvengadam, Arun, 187 Thompson, John, 14–15 3D printing, 228 three C s, 122–23, 141 Three Laws of Robotics, 202 ThyssenKrupp, 59–60 Tiger Server project, 30 time management model, 138 Tirupati, India, 19 topological quantum computing (TQC), 166 Toyota, 127 Tractica, 198 trade, 229–31, 236 training, 92, 227 transfer learning, 151, 153, 155 transformation, 11–12, 57, 67, 90 cloud and, 42, 55–56, 71 cultural (see culture, transforming) Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 230–31 transparency, 135, 174–75, 191–92, 202, 204–6 Trump, Donald, 212, 230 trust, 56, 88, 107, 135, 169–94, 205, 236 Turing, Alan, 26 Turner, Kevin, 3 TV white space, 99, 225 Twilight Zone, The (TV show), 159 Twitter, 174 2001 (film), 201 two-in-one computers, 129 two-sided markets, 50 Uber, 44, 126, 153 uncertainty, 38, 111, 157 United Kingdom, 215, 236 United Nations, 44 U.S.


pages: 352 words: 87,930

Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle

additive manufacturing, air freight, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, crewed spaceflight, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, overview effect, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, risk-adjusted returns, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, systems thinking, telerobotics, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize, Y Combinator

It will have solar-electric propulsion units that convert sunlight to low-thrust rocket propulsion, both to keep it in place once in orbit around the moon, and to move it as needed to other possible orbits. As Bill Gerstenmaier, the chief of human spaceflight at NASA, put it: “What’s exciting is that with electric propulsion it doesn’t have to stay in one orbit around the moon. It can be equatorial, polar, or halo [a larger, more distant orbit] to allow telerobotic activities.” He continued, “This is not a science station. It is a research facility that can be moved to alternate locations with the power propulsion bus and which stays in orbit for roughly twenty to thirty years. It is also the transportation node potentially for going to Mars.”151 The Gateway is a first step toward larger bases both in space and on the moon’s surface.

The first landings are experimental; within two years these are replaced with second-generation landers to begin the first experiments in lunar mining and other resource extraction. By 2022 private firms commence the early stages of commercial ore processing and 3-D printing of components, as well as water extraction and storage. While most of this work is autonomous, by about 2023, complex tasks are overseen telerobotically from the LOP-G. China and India operate independent robotic processing plants. •Lunar Landings—Crewed: NASA, ESA, and private industry work to put a crewed lander on the moon by 2024. SpaceX succeeds in the same year. The first components of a small research station are delivered as well. Between 2025 and 2030, China lands its first crew on the lunar surface by or soon after 2030.


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Tilting back his head, he could look up through the slave’s eyes to see the master-unit, with himself inside, maintaining the same attitude on its complex suspension.3 This level of control and verisimilitude is far off in space exploration, but we’re approaching it with the virtual reality of video games. The difference between gaming and science applications is that a video game tries to digitally re-create a real-world experience while science uses technology to digitally represent and transmit the real world. Remote control of robots—often called telerobotics—is infiltrating life in surprising ways. Robots are used nowadays to defuse bombs, extract minerals from hazardous mines, and explore the deep sea floor. They also act as aerial drones and doctor’s assistants. They’re even beginning to be seen in the boardroom and the workplace. Many commercial robots look like vacuum cleaners with a screen on top and are no more than ventriloquist’s dummies; after the comical first impression, it’s disconcerting to realize that there’s a real person at the other end of the device.

Louis, The (Lindbergh), 90 Spirit rover, 165 Sputnik 1, 37–39, 37, 40, 41, 51, 65, 141, 269 Sputnik 2, 47, 269 Sputnik 3, 39, 269 SR-71 “Blackbird,” 69 Stafford, Tom, 55 Stalin, Joseph, 35, 37, 253 Stapledon, Olaf, 253 Stapp, John, 46 Stark, Tony (Iron Man), 95, 96, 205 stars: ancient Greek concept of, 18 as basis of carbon, 256 in exoplanet detection, 126–28, 129, 130–31 Sun-like, 131, 133, 187, 215, 233, 236 Star Trek, 88, 90, 92, 167, 192, 228–29, 268 Star Trek: The Next Generation, 229, 232 Stephenson, Neal, 103 Stevenson, Robert, 114 Stone, Bill, 97–98, 161 string theory, 257 Student, The, 86 Sub-Biosphere 2, 197 suitports, 196 Sun: ancient Greek concept of, 18 demise of, 197, 286 as energy source, 124, 223, 253 formation of, 156 stars that are similar to, 131, 133, 187, 215, 233, 236 Sunjammer, 185, 284 Survivor (TV series), 75 suspended animation, 250–52 Synergia Ranch, 192 tachyons, 228 taikonauts, 142–43 tardigrades (water bears), 122 Tarter, Jill, 242–43 Tau Ceti, 187–88, 237 Teacher in Space program, 55, 74 technological maturity, 260–61 technology: advancements in, 127, 133, 159–60, 224, 231, 241, 250, 257–62, 288, 292 alien, 186–91 in cameras, 53 computation, 258–62 destructive potential of, 245–46 development of, 20 for efficient energy production, 220–24, 221 erroneous predictions about, 213–14 in foods, 115–16 human beings surpassed by, 258–59 Kardashev’s scale for, 253–54 outdated, 64–65, 106 of remote sensing, 175–91 of spacesuits, 195–96 speculative and hypothetical, 228–32 trust in, 98 in weaponry, 22–24 see also nanotechnology; specific technologies TED2014 conference, 178 telepathy, cybernetic, 206 teleportation, 228–32, 230, 252 telepresence, 176–79, 283 telerobotics, 177–78 telescopes, 31, 49–50, 126, 128, 129–30, 158, 163, 187, 190, 218, 235, 292–93 see also specific instruments Telstar, 153 Tereshkova, Valentina, 74 Terminator, The, 259 terraforming, 172–74, 182, 216–17, 227 terrestrial exoplanets, incidence of, 128, 129, 216, 241 terrorism, 152–53 Tesla, Nikola, 237 Tesla Motors, 96–97, 97 test pilots, 71–74, 272 Tethers Unlimited, 226 Thales, 18–19 “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” (Feynman), 180 thought experiments: and birth of science, 19 for Dyson sphere, 253–54 of Newton, 25 on self-replication, 226–27 3-D fabrication, 159, 160, 226–27, 226 thrust, in flight, 68–69, 72, 186, 220, 222–23 thymine, 6 Timbisha tribe, 118–19 Titan, 53, 125, 177, 182, 278 Tito, Dennis, 75, 170 Toba supervolcano, 202 toilets, in space travel, 116–17 Tokyo Broadcasting System, 75 tortoises, in space research, 49 Tower of Babel, 148 “Tranquility” (toilet), 117 transhumanism, 207–8 transit method, exoplanet detection by, 128–29, 128, 129, 130–31 “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations” (Kardashev), 253 transporter devices, 228–32 TrES-2B (exoplanet), 132 tricorder devices, 92 Tristan da Cunha, 202–3 “True Story, A” (Lucian of Samosata), 20 Truman, Harry, 36 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin Eduardovich, 26–28, 36, 72, 110, 149, 268 rocket equation of, see rocket equation Turing, Alan, 258–59 twin research studies, 98 Tziolas, Andreas, 224 UFOs, 142 belief in, 102, 238 proported sightings of, 239, 240 Ulam, Stanislaw, 221 uncertainty principle, 229–30, 291 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 106 United Nations, 47, 141, 145, 147, 214 General Assembly, 42 Moon Treaty of, 279 United States, 141 bureaucracy of, 105–9 China’s relations with, 144 energy consumption of, 222 founding of, 109 government shutdown of 2013 in, 63–64 rocket development in, 28–30, 35–39 space policy debate in, 146–47 space program of, 38, 40–45, 47, 50, 51, 55–56, 56, 63–64, 72, 74–75, 107, 140–141, 140, 154, 184, 195, 296, 271; see also National Aeronautics and Space Administration in World War II, 34 Uranus: probes to, 52 as uninhabitable, 125 V-2 ballistic missile (Retaliation/Vengeance Weapon 2), 30–36, 33, 47, 48 vacuum: as lethal, 54, 108 rocket function in, 30 of space, 70, 108, 126, 195, 222 Vanguard rocket, 36–38, 269 Van Thillo, Mark, 194 Vega (star), 236 Venera 7, 51 Venus: Earth compared to, 171, 215 fly-by of, 51 nanobot exploration of, 182 probes to, 40, 51, 184, 270 property rights on, 145 as uninhabitable, 124 Verne, Jules, 26, 28, 117, 183, 239 vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) rockets, 103 Very Large Array, 236 videoconferencing, 176 video games: evolution of, 175–77 simulation compared to, 261 Vietnam War, 158 Viking probes, 51, 52, 164, 176 Virgin Atlantic airline, 87 Virgin Galactic, 88–89, 88, 101, 105–6, 113 Virgin Group, 87 Virgin records, 86–87 virtual reality, 176–77 volcanoes: on Earth, 119, 202 on Io, 53, 177 as source of heat energy, 124 super-, 245 Volna rocket, 184 Vomit Comet, 114 von Braun, Wernher, 28, 30–36, 38, 76, 140, 166–67, 269 von Kármán, Theodore, 141 von Littrow, Joseph, 238 von Neumann, John, 227, 258–59 von Neumann probes, 227, 258 Voskhod 2 spacecraft, 108 Vostok 1 spacecraft, 40–41 Voyager 1, 52, 53, 121, 121, 125, 219, 225 Voyager aircraft, 83 Wakata, Koichi, 273 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 164 Wang Yaping, 142–43 Wan Hu, 21–22, 22, 24, 31, 139, 141 warfare, rockets in, 22–24, 30, 32–34 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 164 warp drive, 228–29 Warwick, Kevin, 206–8 Wasp 18b (exoplanet), 132 water: acidification of, 195 as biomarker, 217–18 on Earth, 172 on Europa, 125 on exoplanets, 132 on Mars, 124–25, 163–66, 165, 170, 172, 173 on Moon, 159–61 as requirement for life, 123–25, 132, 214, 217 in space travel, 116, 159 Watson, Thomas, 213 weaponry: nuclear, 36, 38 technological roots of, 22–24 weightlessness, 54, 88, 114, 167–68, 200 Weisman, A., 293 Welles, Orson, 164 Wells, H.


pages: 262 words: 66,800

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, availability heuristic, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, continuation of politics by other means, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Island, Hans Rosling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, moveable type in China, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, open economy, place-making, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, special economic zone, Steven Pinker, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, very high income, working poor, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

If just one of them is successful, it will blow our minds and change the world. Some are dreaming of solar power in space, where there is no night and no atmospheric gases or clouds ever block the sun. Some sort of microwave transmitter or laser would direct energy to the areas of earth that need it. But we would probably need big breakthroughs in telerobotics to build and maintain solar panels in space. Closer to home, others are working on an internet for energy – an intelligent and decentralized network of power lines, sensors and switches where both producers and consumers can put information and power into the network, and take it out. Appliances would shut themselves off when they were not needed or when energy was scarce, so the dishwasher might start in the middle of the night.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

These “soft,” human-side jobs are surely some of those that will be sheltered from the rapid job displacement, although it is likely that some local humans will be replaced by online humans telecommuting from afar. The fourth difficult-to-automate activity is unpredictable physical tasks—this covers things ranging from dentistry to bonsai gardening. While some of these may eventually be done by robots controlled by remote humans (called telerobots), it seems that many of these jobs will be sheltered in the coming years. The other three activity groups (predictable physical activities, processing data, and collecting data) are far more automatable. Jobs that involve a lot of these activities will see a lot of job displacement in the near future.


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

Crucial to the expansion of this uncritical, largely masculine set of cybernetic environments would be a radical, critical cohort of astonishing women artists emerging in the 1990s, fully aware of their predecessors in art and technology but perhaps more inspired by the feminist founders of the 1970 journal Radical Software and the cultural blast of Donna Haraway’s inspiring 1984 polemic, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” The creaky gender theater of Paik and Pask, the innocent creatures of Ihnatowicz and Tsai, were mobilized as savvy, performative, and postmodern, as in Lynn Hershman Leeson’s “Dollie Clone Series” (1995–98), consisting of the interactive assemblages CybeRoberta and Tillie, the Telerobotic Doll, who worked the technosphere with the professionalism of burlesque, winking and folding us viewers into an explicit consciousness of our voyeuristic position as both seeing subjects and objects to be looked at. The “innocent” technosphere established by male cybernetic sculptors of the 1960s was, by the 1990s, identified by feminist artists as an entirely suffusive condition demanding our critical attention.


pages: 286 words: 101,129

Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Mike Massimino

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Gene Kranz, imposter syndrome, James Webb Space Telescope, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic, Yom Kippur War

There’s the engineering side of it, which is designing and building the machines, but there’s also the human operator side of it, which is understanding how the brain responds to different stimuli and how to account for that in your designs. Tom Sheridan was a professor of mechanical engineering and a professor of applied psychology, and he was like a rock star in the world of human factors. He was also doing cutting-edge work with the space program, designing control systems for telerobotics—how an operator on Earth can accurately manipulate machines and systems on satellites or the space station or even other planets. He also seemed like a cool guy, a good man. I made an appointment to go up to Cambridge and visit him. His office was cluttered with piles of books and papers everywhere, a bicycle stashed in the corner.


pages: 363 words: 109,417

Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica by Nicholas Johnson

Apollo 13, Easter island, intentional community, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, Milgram experiment, Neil Armstrong, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, post-work, Ronald Reagan, telerobotics, trade route, young professional

Antarctica is for NASA a model for the Moon and Mars: a sort of Mock Mars Drill where, because of its remoteness, terrain, logistical constraints, and the tendency of its crews to “experience stresses that are, in many respects, similar to those that will be experienced by crews on long-duration space missions,” NASA can perform tests in approximately lunar or Martian conditions at terrestrial prices. NASA not only slavers over Antarctica’s potential for a telerobotic construction outpost, but also claims that “Antarctic bases can provide a testbed for studying operational techniques, human factors, and small-group dynamics in harsh conditions… Command and control structure, crew coordination and communication, and questions of leadership, all critical to the success of space operations, can be studied in Antarctic outposts.”


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

And the same will be true of gamified e-textbooks, humanoid teaching robots, or any other novel technology.… If you’re interested in contributing to a fair, universal educational system, novel technology isn’t what will do the trick.69 Toyama’s examples, from virtual reality to humanoid robot teachers, may seem fanciful. But telerobotic teachers are being tested, and could easily be marketed as a “solution” to global educational disparities.70 Toyama’s insights suggest caution about deploying educational technology to classrooms in less developed countries. There is already widespread concern that donations of clothing to Africa from the developed world undermine local industry.71 How might the robotization of teaching for low-income students reinforce cultural norms that devalue instruction as a profession?


pages: 571 words: 124,448

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements by Haym Benaroya

3D printing, anti-fragile, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, biofilm, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, carbon-based life, centre right, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, gravity well, inventory management, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, performance metric, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, the scientific method, Two Sigma, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, zero-sum game

Along with the advantages of cable structures come potential difficulties: These types of structures are not typical, and engineers generally do not have an instinct regarding their behavior. Thus, an experience base must be developed. Erection of these structures poses different challenges due to the fact that their stiffness is engaged at the very end of the construction cycle, at which time they are stressed. As such, robotic or telerobotic construction will prove attractive in the (not so near) future. Failure modes are difficult to characterize generally. But specifically, failure will result due to the loss of a critical bar or cable, and the degree of structural redundancy will determine how critical each component is. Pre-tensioning permits tension members, such as cables, to remain in tension under a broad range of loading conditions, and even reversals.


pages: 759 words: 166,687

Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics by David A. Mindell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computer Numeric Control, discrete time, Dr. Strangelove, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, tacit knowledge, telerobotics, Turing machine

The trade-offs between remote and manned had not been anticipated by designers; they had to do with new work practices, scientists’ roles, and institutional commitments as much as with the simple replacement of humans by machines. My mentor at Woods Hole, Dr. Dana Yoerger, introduced me to the sociotechnical problems of control systems during late-night lab sessions and operations at sea. Dana had been a student of Professor Tom Sheridan, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who elaborated the idea of telerobotics , according to which machines do not replace human operators but rather enhance their powers and allow them to work in remote or dangerous environments. In 1991 I came to MIT as a graduate student to work with Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith in the history of technology. In a first-year course taught by Sherry Turkle, I began studying Norbert Wiener’s book Cybernetics , where he mentions the problem that led him to think about human-machine interfaces: how to shoot down an attacking aircraft by predicting its future position and firing a shell to arrive at that point at some time in the future.


pages: 564 words: 163,106

The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine by M. D. James le Fanu M. D.

Barry Marshall: ulcers, clean water, cuban missile crisis, discovery of penicillin, double helix, experimental subject, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, rising living standards, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, tacit knowledge, telerobotics, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, V2 rocket

Copeland et al., ‘Five Year Follow-up of the Medical Research Council, CLASICC Trial of Laparoscopically Assisted Versus Open Surgery for Colo-Rectal Cancer’, British Journal of Surgery, 2010, Vol. 97, pp. 1638–45. 17.Garth Ballantyne, Jacques Marescaux and Pier Giulianotti (eds), Primer of Robotic and Telerobotic Surgery (Philadelphia, PD: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2005). 18.George Tibault, ‘Too Old For What?’, NEJM, 1993, Vol. 328, pp. 946–50. 19.Matthew Bacchetta, Wilson Ko et al., ‘Outcomes of Cardiac Surgery in Nonagenarians: A Ten-Year Experience’, Annals of Thoracic Surgery, 2003, Vol. 75, pp. 1215–20.


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Scott Fisher: So I tracked down Tom and he by then had hooked up with Jaron to do VPL, and they were trying to figure out how to use the glove for this visual programming language that Jaron wanted to do. And I’m like, “Well, can you guys build a glove for us?” Because I needed a way to reach into that space and touch these virtual objects. Tom Zimmerman: So Scott Fisher did telerobotics, while Jaron was talking about synthesized worlds. And he came to us with that vision and then contracted us to make a glove to do that. Scott Fisher: We spent a lot of time with Tom and Chuck Blanchard, who did most of the software. He was from VPL. He helped us interface it with our system and wrote some great code to make that work.


pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

President Barack Obama invited LaChappelle to the White House and shook hands with one of his arms. He has traveled the world spreading the message of the unlimited tomorrow we all have available to us, including a TED Talk. Easton has even worked at NASA on the Robonaut project, developing a new telerobotic interface. www.unlimitedtomorrow.com BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL ELEVATION COMPANIES CLOUDCOACHING INTERNATIONAL CloudCoaching International is a dynamic, award-winning behavioral integration service. We utilize the cloud to drive maximum targeted-sales increases with sustainable growth for enterprise-level organizations.


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

This connectedness, this undivided wholeness, unmediated action-at-a-­distance, capable of transcending the laws of space and time with non-local interaction, is reflected in the telematic environment of computer-mediated networks of data transfer, interactive videoconferencing, remote sensing, and telerobotics, where communication also can be in a sense “non-local” and asynchronous although in different ways and with different outcomes. Equally the connectivist paradigm is at work in the modeling of human intelligence and theorizing about the mind. These explorations into the microstructure of cognition, known as connectionism, parallel distributed processing, or neural networks (McClelland and Rumelhart 1986), have developed out of a re-evaluation of some of the earliest ideas of cybernetics, of neural nets and the Perceptron, rejecting the linear, symbolic systems of the old AI.


pages: 993 words: 318,161

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

Ada Lovelace, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, bitcoin, blockchain, cloud computing, coherent worldview, computer vision, crisis actor, crossover SUV, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, demographic transition, distributed ledger, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, fake news, false flag, game design, gamification, index fund, Jaron Lanier, life extension, messenger bag, microaggression, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, no-fly zone, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, short selling, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, tech bro, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, The Hackers Conference, Turing test, Works Progress Administration

“They can go a surprisingly long time without bumping up against reality,” Pete said, “but at the end of the day when a pregnant mother needs a C-section or you can’t get your Wi-Fi to work, or a thousand other examples I could give, why, then you do actually need someone nearby who can help you with that.” “So you have doctors and dentists in this town?” Phil asked. “No, they all moved away years ago, but we have practitioners who can help patients get urgent care over webcam, get telerobotic surgery, and that sort of thing. Both men and women, since the Leviticans won’t let male physicians examine female patients. And I could give other examples of the same general thing. Some percentage of their children are gay. Some percentage have an intellectual or artistic temperament. Those kids need a place to go.