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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Warning: The Robots Are Coming! Slavery is coming back. In the future, we'll all have personal servants. They'll clean our homes, tend to our gardens, harvest our food, manufacture our goods and fight our battles. The slaves won't be human, fortunately, but they will be machines. Every new advance in machine intelligence and electronic sensing, along with other diverse and converging fields of technology, is hastening the adoption of these machine servants. Robots. Robots are a big, high-growth field investors need to pay attention to. Bill Gates has predicted that by 2025, robots will be as common as computers are today. If he's even half right, investors who get in on promising robotics techs today will be fantastically compensated for their vision. Getting in on the next wave of robotics now will be like getting in on Intel, AMD, Apple or Gates' own Microsoft in the 1980s. Incidentally, the word "robot" comes from a 1920s Czech science fiction play. The Czech word for servitude, robota, entered the English language as "robot" and has been with us ever since as a description for autonomous or semi-autonomous machines. The name for this field of technology, robotics, also is the product of science fiction — Isaac Asimov first coined the term for a short story in the 1940s. Although the words date from the 20th century, the idea of self-operating machines is far older. Ancient myths first described artificial and lifelike machines in motion in legendary tales. Later, in the quest to measure time, intricate clockworks — run by weights or springs and self-regulating with mechanisms like pendulums and escapements for accuracy — were developed. By the early 20th century, electrical controls allowed self-regulating machinery to come into industrial use. After WWII, of course, the invention of modern electronics, based on semiconductors and integrated circuits, meant that industrial automation could become truly "robotic." Microprocessors and sensors allowed the creation of industrial robots and computer numeric-controlled machinery. By the 1970s, the first microcomputer-controlled robots began to enter factories. Today, the international automotive industry depends entirely on robots, as do several other manufacturing fields. Chip manufacturing, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies rely on robotics to perform precise and repetitive functions in environments intolerable to humans. Industrial robots can be hard to recognize, although the International Organization for Standardization has a working definition: "an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose manipulator programmable in three or more axes." Using these terms, even a modern car might be considered robotic, since some of its internal components meet this definition. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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