Robots are everywhere. We just don't call them robots. We call them dishwashers, CNC machines, STM machines, automatic welders, fabric cutting machines, etc, etc.
Sort of like we already have flying cars. They're called "helicopters".
When people think flying cars, they don't think of something without wheels that can only land in certain spots that requires years of training to operate that is significantly expensive to be outside of the reach of 99%.
They think of the car that anyone of legal driving age with a reasonable amount of money that anyone with some income can purchase.
No, helicopters are not flying cars. And no, dishwashers aren't what people would think of when they think of robots. Something that has a microprocessor in it isn't automatically a robot.
> When people think flying cars, they don't think of something without wheels that can only land in certain spots that requires years of training to operate that is significantly expensive to be outside of the reach of 99%.
You write down two points:
1. regulation
2. cost
"Regulation" is not an engineering problem, but a hard and deeply political one.
For "cost": When a lot of regulation comes down, the possible market size increases by a lot and it begins to make economic sense to invest lots of engineering ressources into cutting costs down by a lot (I do believe this is possible). Then helicopters will even perhaps transform into something that is much more akin to flying cars.
When people think flying cars, they don't think something without wheels that can only land in certain spots that requires years of training to operate that is significantly expensive to be outside of the reach of 99%.
I think if one eliminates the training requirement, reduces the cost, and increase the safety, then we don't need them to be road vehicles. Achieve the above, and we'll have flying taxis!
Not the person you responded to, but I think I see where they are coming from and agree: we don't call them robots because we are used to them and have a specific name. I don't see how they aren't robots, unless we are defining robots as having a specific kind of manipulator.
I think their point was that if the dishwasher was made so that mechanical hands picked up a dish, washed it, rinsed it, dried it, then set it aside before picking up the next dish and doing the same, we would call that a robot.
The definition of a robot tends to be fairly fuzzy. If you look up the Websters definition (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/robot), and ignore the first definition about being in human form, you get:
> a device that automatically performs complicated, often repetitive tasks (as in an industrial assembly line)
Which basically hinges on "complicated". I suspect most people wouldn't count a dishwasher, washing machine, etc.
No question. It was video gaming from the period roughly spanning 1990-2010 that funded gpu innovation. But programmable compute shaders caught on very rapidly in science. And Nvidia was quick to not just recognize the new market, but bet the company that supercomputing would one day be gpu cluster based.
Here's Jensen Huang talking to Stanford students about the birth of the Cg language (27:40" mark). The entire talk is gold. A text book case study of Moore's Law and the SV model of risk capital:
We got our current revolution for three major contributors:
* Big data. Lots of big data. Mostly unstructured and unqueryable driving demand for...
* Innovations in machine learning. "Deep learning" enabled by big data and algorithmic approaches that previously wouldn't have been possible without...
* Ubiquitous access to high-performance compute power, and in particular GPUs, which are optimized for the sort of math needed to train big neural networks powered by big data.
So GPU-powered compute is one of three mutually dependent things that got us here.
Most deep learning algorithms were discovered decades ago, so it's debatable that it was a driving factor behind the 2010s revolution. Backpropagation dates from 1986, convolutional neural nets from 1989 (neocognitrons), LSTMs from the late 90s...
Getting consumers to fund R&D has a big impact.
Still waiting for consumers to fund the robot revolution.