Hans Moravec, robotologist and engineer extraordinaire made the following prediction during an interview with Wired magazine back in 1995:
By 2000, he foresees that this type of machine will find its own way around complex, cluttered places without using markers and without needing to be installed by experts. At first these robots will be expensive and specialized, but Moravec predicts they will become smaller, cheaper, and more user-friendly in just the same way that microcomputers evolved from mainframes. “Once we have a robot that customers can take out of the box, show it a job, and trust it to work without doing silly things - then the market will grow easily to hundreds of thousands and beyond. Any institution that does regular cleaning will find that it’s cheaper to use a robot than a person. The same goes for delivery jobs.”
In addition to the hundreds of thousands of industrial robots that are used to assemble cars, planes, and other machines, Moravec’s divination seems to have come true, in the form of the Roomba.
For those unfamiliar with the toy-like device, it looks like a bloated Frisbee with several wheels attached to its underbelly.
Not only is it programmable, but it is designed specifically to vacuum household floors (you can schedule the cleaning times); and after it is done with business, it sits back on the charger and awaits for your command.
Oh, and because it is so user friendly, more than 2 million units have been sold. Automation for the rest of us.
See also: Seth Lloyd and the Million Megahertz CPU (which incidentally, was also written in ‘95) as well as an interesting op-ed in Scientific America by Bill Gates which discusses Microsoft’s Robotics Studio.