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Technology: 2014 Realizes Many Predictions from the Past
Isaac Asimov, science fiction author, futurist and science historian, wrote in an essay in 1964 for the New York Times speculating on what the world will look like 50 years later in 2014, said that “Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present world’s fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the ‘brains’ of robots.”
Great advances have been made in robotics over the last 50 years, and in particular, the last five. Companies like Google are taking a keen interest in robotics and AI technology. In 2013, for example, Google purchased eight robotics companies. Boston Dynamics has a four-legged robot that can run up to 16 miles per hour. Flutter is a company that specializes in gesture recognition. Bot & Dolly is a company that makes robotic cameras, including the one used to create the movie ‘Gravity’. In January 2014, Google bought the advanced AI company DeepMind which specializes in machine learning.
Gavin Kelly of the Observer writes that “the power of intelligent machines is growing as their cost collapses. They are doing things reliably now that would have sounded implausible only a few years ago. By the end of the decade, Nissan pledges the driverless car, Amazon promises that electric drones will deliver us packages, Rolls-Royce says that unmanned robo-ships will sail our seas.”
While great progress has been made in the last 50 years, the future ahead is poised to bring significant advances. The new book ‘The Second machine Age‘ by co-authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee suggests that there are three reasons why computers/robotics are poised for ‘sudden progress’:
- Exponential improvement in computational power, memory, storage capacity and bandwidth
- The immense amount of digital information already available
- The combinatorial nature of innovation — digital innovations can be combined and recombined to create ever-more value
