Change Is in the Air the Technology of Smoother, Smarter Air Travel
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Will mobile phones The digital divide, Dispensing justice kill off the iPod? seen from below through software page 16 page 22 page 34 TechnologyQuarterly March 12th 2005 Change is in the air The technology of smoother, smarter air travel Republication, copying or redistribution by any means is expressly prohibited without the prior written permission of The Economist The Economist Technology Quarterly March 12th 2005 Monitor 1 Contents Humanoids on the march Robotics: Humanoid robots are becoming ever more advanced. Are the rms making them just interested in publicity, or are they chasing a new market? IRST came Asimo, Honda’s childlike ruthless assassin of Terminator. Hu- Frobot, which was introduced to the manoid robots have walked into our col- world in 2000. Sony responded with lective subconscious, colouring our On the cover QRIO (pronounced curio) in 2003. Now views of the future. New technologies, from a competition has broken out between But now Japan’s industrial giants are mobile-phone check-in to Japan’s industrial rms to see which of spending billions of yen to make such ro- wireless luggage tags and them can produce the most advanced hu- bots a reality. Their new humanoids rep- on-board mobile telephony, manoid robotand South Korean rms resent impressive feats of engineering: will make air travel smoother are getting involved, too. They are seri- when Honda introduced Asimo, a four- and swifter for passengers, ous about humanoids, says Dan Kara of foot robot that had been in development while also boosting the Robotics Trends, a consultancy. They for some 15 years, it walked so uidly that fortunes of beleaguered have made a conscious decision to head its white, articulated exterior seemed to airlines. What it all means for in that direction. Corporate rivalry, ad- conceal a human. Honda continues to you, the Economist-reading vancing technology and a desire for pub- make the machine faster, friendlier and traveller: pages 18-20 licity, together with a fascination for more agile. Last October, when Asimo machines that resemble their human cre- was inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame ators and the distant prospect of a vast in Pittsburgh, it walked on to the stage Monitor new market, have conspired to create a and accepted its own plaque. 3 Humanoid robots, a new unit of fresh breed of robots. At two and a half feet tall, Sony’s computing capacity, electronics The idea of humanoid robots is not QRIO is smaller and more toy-like than and the environment, novel uses new, of course. They have been part of Asimo. It walks, understands a small for camera-phones, bespoke the imaginative landscape ever since Karl number of voice commands, and can materials, speech-recognition Capek, a Czech writer, rst dreamed navigate on its own. If it falls over, it gets chips, software-retail kiosks, them up for his 1921 play Rossum’s Uni- up and resumes where it left o. It can medicated contact lenses, and versal Robots. (The word robot comes even connect wirelessly to the internet telephony’s spiritual connection from the Czech word for drudgery, ro- and broadcast what its camera eyes can bota.) Since then, Hollywood has pro- see. In 2003, Sony demonstrated an up- Rational consumer duced countless variations on the theme, graded QRIO that could run. Honda re- 16 The device that ate everything from the sultry False Maria in Fritz Lang’s sponded last December with a version of Will mobile phones kill the iPod? silent masterpiece Metropolis to the Asimo that runs at twice the speed. wittering C-3PO in Star Wars and the In 2004, Toyota joined the fray1 Reports 18 Change is in the air The technology of smarter, smoother air travel 21 Behind the digital divide The view from the ground in rural India Case history 25 United we nd How collaborative ltering nds things you weren’t looking for Reports 28 Dusting for digital ngerprints The growing importance of forensic computing 30 AI am the law Articial-intelligence software that dispenses digital justice Brain scan 33 The future, just around the bend Are Ray Kurzweil’s visions of the future as crazy as they seem? Fanfare for the increasingly common man-shaped robot 2 Monitor The Economist Technology Quarterly March 12th 2005 2 with its own family of robots, called Partner, one of which is a four-foot hu- manoid that plays the trumpet. Its ngers work the instrument’s valves, and it has Who wants to mechanical lungs and articial lips. Toyota hopes to oer a commercial ver- buy a computon? sion of the robot by 2010. This month, 50 Partner robots will act as guides at Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. Grid computing: Electricity is sold by Other Japanese companies including the kilowatt-hour. Now a researcher Fujitsu, Sanyo, Hitachi, Mitsubishi and has proposed that computing power Epson have also built humanoid robots, should be sold by the computon most of which walk around and under- stand a few simple voice commands. AST month, Sun Microsystems, a big Kawada Industries, a Japanese construc- Lcomputer-maker, announced the de- tion rm, has devised a ve-foot robot tails of its plans to rent computers over called HRP-2 Promet with the ability to the internet. Instead of crunching num- put one foot directly in front of the other, bers on their own in-house machines, as if walking the plank. It is intended to customers of the Sun Grid service can help carry light loads on building sites. pay $1 for every hour that they use a pro- South Korea is also entering the game. cessor on one of Sun’s computers, and $1 The Advanced Institute of Science and The Daleks could never do this per month for every gigabyte of storage. Technology has created Hubo a child- This is the sort of thing people have in sized humanoid robot. And Samsung, a of the various humanoid robots attest, mind when they talk about grand, but of- South Korean consumer-electronics this is currently their main function. The ten vague, visions of utility computing giant, is rumoured to be working on a Asimo humanoid robot from Honda or grid computing, in which computer humanoid robot of its own as well. makes news wherever it goes, says power is supplied when needed, like Despite their sudden proliferation, Honda’s website, while Sony calls QRIO electricity, over a network by a central however, humanoids are still a mechani- a corporate ambassador. provider. Unveiling the service on Febru- cal minority. Most of the world’s robots In the longer term, humanoid robots ary 1st, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s number are faceless, footless and mute. They are could be pressed into service as domestic two, submitted a computing job to the bolted to the oors of factories, stamping helpersand since homes are designed Sun Grid. In a ash, the answer was out car parts or welding pieces of metal, for use by people, humanoids might in- ready, at a cost of $12: in a few seconds, 12 machines making more machines. Ac- deed be the best shape. We human be- processor-hours of work had been car- cording to the United Nations, business ings have engineered our environment to ried out by hundreds of processors. orders for industrial robots jumped 18% accommodate our physiology, observes It is all very clever. But oerings such in the rst half of 2004. They may soon Jerey Smith of Honda. So a very e- as Sun Grid, while novel, do not solve the be outnumbered by domestic robots, cient shape for operating in that world is ultimate problem: the ecient allocation such as self-navigating vacuum cleaners, a humanoid one. of networked computing resources. Peo- lawn mowers and window washers, In particular, robot-makers expect ple do not think of their computing needs which are selling fast. But neither indus- great demand for helper robots as mil- in terms of, say, 50 processor-hours; in- trial nor domestic robots are humanoid. lions of baby-boomers reach old age. stead, they have specic tasks of varying And a good thing too, says Hans Mora- There will be far more people in the fu- importance and urgency, and want to get vec, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon Uni- ture in need of assistance in their homes those tasks done economically, using versity. The human shape is an than people willing to do those jobs, whatever resources are available. evolutionary accident, he says, and says Mr Smith. I think the rst applica- The issue therefore comes down to slavishly imitating it is more about show tions will be in assisted living environ- economics as much as technology. As business than good engineering. Even ments, and once the cost has dropped to long as the number of computers and us- though robotic technology has advanced the price of a car, you may then see them ers is smallas in a cluster, rather than a rapidly, Dr Moravec says it is still far too in homes. Hideki Komiyama of Sony genuine gridresource allocation can be early to pretend that any machine can agrees. Robots are going to be a part of done socially, or by an omniscient ad- truly emulate human capabilities. A everyday life, he says. They’ll be as ministrator who simply decides who will three-armed, wheeled cylinder that common as cell phones. be allowed to do what. But as soon as the crawls up stairs and folds up like a house- But even if a mass market for human- grid becomes big, any such arrangement plant when not in use may be a better oid robots never materialises, there is a will fail for the same reason that the So- conguration than a big mannequin, he third and nal justication for building viet Union’s economy broke down.