The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work
by Richard Baldwin · 10 Jan 2019 · 301pp · 89,076 words
the most competitive rich-nation professionals will find more opportunities, but for the least competitive, it is just more wage competition. Second, telecom breakthroughs—like telepresence and augmented reality—are making remote workers seem less remote. Widespread shifts in work practices (toward flexible teams) and adoption of innovative collaborative software platforms
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ACTFAR in testing stages. Many seem to be drawn directly from episodes of Star Trek. The next step in almost-being-there communication is “holographic telepresence.” This projects real-time, 3D images of people (along with audio) in a way that makes it seem as if the remote person is right
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a marvelous substitute to actually being physically in the same room as other workers—it is called a telepresence robot. One company that is using it today is the online media site, Wired.com. TELEPRESENCE ROBOTS Emily Dreyfus writes for the San Francisco company Wired.com but lives in Boston. She used
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Californian sort of company, they decided to throw some digital technology at the problem. The tech took the form of a “telepresence robot” made by Double Robotics. The movements of the telepresence robot, which you can think of as Skype on wheels, are controlled by the writer in Boston, so the robot
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that was impossible before. She would turn to “face” whoever was speaking. “The crazy thing about being a human 3,000 miles away from your telepresence robot is that the divide instantly dissolves when you activate. As soon as I call into EmBot, I am her, and she is me. My
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carry the broomstick somewhere, like the charging station. The deep reason EmBot is so effective has to do with evolutionary psychology. The Mind Bugs behind Telepresence Robots Things that move have meaning—or at least that is our lizard brain’s first instinct according to social psychologists. This was powerfully illustrated
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their car and talk to their phone. Believe it or not, the Heider-Simmel experiment tells us something about why telepresence robots are catching on fast. Many hospitals and some companies use telepresence robots already, and their use is growing rapidly since the impact on team interactions is palpable. The sense of
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with patients when they are talking via a telepresence robot instead of normal video Skype, or over the phone. While telepresence robots are useful for many interactions, a static form of telepresence technology is transforming the ease of holding meetings over long distances. Fixed Telepresence Systems Telepresence systems—a static version of EmBot, if you
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will—are already widely used by big banks, consultancies, law firms, and governments. The high-end systems are still expensive. Telepresence rooms can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But
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as the digital laws advance and construction moves into mass production, telepresence will get much cheaper and more mobile. It will accelerate the trend toward telemigration
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. Think of standard telepresence as extremely good Skype—but so much better that it becomes a new experience
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. Telepresence makes it almost seem like people are in the same place even when they are not. I used it in
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Great Convergence, to the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM). I was in London with a couple of analysts and connected via telepresence with another group of NBIM economists located in New York City and with yet a third group in Oslo. At first it seemed like nothing
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. The sense of personal connection jumped up a level. It was almost as if we were all in a single room. The key is how telepresence plays on our brains’ social “hardwiring.” Everyone’s brain is a like a high-powered computer when it comes to social interactions. Deciding whether to
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believe and trust others was a key evolutionary skill. As Steve McNelley and Jeff Machtig—founders of an edgy telepresence start up, DVE—put it, humans “have mastered the gathering and processing of nonverbal communication cues. It is second nature to us, and it is
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others. It is an essential part of our humanity.”17 Thanks to life-size images on the screen, excellent image resolution, and superior sound quality, telepresence transmits much more of this nonverbal communication than does, say, Skype or Facetime. Telecommunication is only one element of the technology that is used to
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. Simmel, “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior,” American Journal of Psychology 57, no. 2 (1944): 243. 17. See Steve McNelley and Jeff Machtig, “What is Telepresence?,” undated article on DVETelepresence.com; visited June 25, 2018. 18. Melanie Feltham, “Spotlight on David Kittle, Top Rated Freelance Product Designer,” Upwork (blog), July 19
I Am a Strange Loop
by Douglas R. Hofstadter · 21 Feb 2011 · 626pp · 181,434 words
Grain Size Transplantation of Patterns CHAPTER 18 - The Blurry Glow of Human Identity I Host and Am Hosted by Others Feeling that One is Elsewhere Telepresence versus “Real” Presence Which Viewpoint is Really Mine? Where Am I? Varying Degrees of Being Another The Naïve Viewpoint is Usually Good Enough Where Does
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both your body and your brain, thanks to the ultrarapid transmission of data, as “telepresence” (a term invented by Pat Gunkel and popularized by Marvin Minsky around 1980). Telepresence versus “Real” Presence Perhaps my most vivid experience of telepresence occurred when I was typesetting my book Gödel, Escher, Bach. This was back in
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furiously into the work, which was extremely intense. I once worked forty hours straight before collapsing. Now what does this all have to do with telepresence? Well, each long, grueling work session at Stanford was quite hypnotic, and when I left, I would still half-feel as if I were there
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felt for all the world as if I were in Stanford, working directly at the Imlac terminal. And mind you, this powerful visual sense of telepresence was taking place solely through the sonic modality of a telephone. It was as if my eyes, though in Bloomington, were looking at an Imlac
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the phone. You can call my feeling an “illusion” if you wish, but before you do so, consider how primitive this now-ancient implementation of telepresence was. Today, one can easily imagine turning up all the technological knobs by orders of magnitude. There could be a mobile robot out in California
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home in Indiana). What one starts to realize, as one explores these disorienting but technologically feasible ideas of virtual presence “elsewhere”, is that as the telepresence technology improves, the “primary” location becomes less and less primary. Indeed, one can imagine a proverbial “brain in the vat” in Bloomington controlling a strolling
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Mark V teleological language: irresistible slide towards, in opaque systems; as shorthand telephone menu tree, droning voices in telephonic telepresence teleportation; goggles giving impression of; to Mars; of thought experiment; to Venus telepresence; via nose-mounted TV cameras; via novel-reading Teletransporters (Parfit) television salesperson temperature: as cause; as emergent tennis-playing
Smart Cities, Digital Nations
by Caspar Herzberg · 13 Apr 2017
and costs while also keeping our cities safe. What if there were ways in which citizens could connect with communities around the world via video telepresence equipment, and students could be tutored on Spanish from a teacher based in Spain. This is not the future. This is today. Young cities that
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but appreciable effect, from the Internet’s incursion into the medical field. The technology exists to take this process many steps beyond. Doctors can, via telepresence, engage with patients remotely, removing the need for many routine office visits, but also saving small amounts of the patient’s energy, resources, and time
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Economic City took place with its namesake in attendance. For the event, Cisco flew in a team of designers to engineer a demonstration of their TelePresence technology, which is notable for its “lifelike” transmission, but the use of hologram, 3-D imagery would complete the effect in such a way that
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the supporting network was reliable. Nonetheless, Cisco brought game-changing technology to the table. A key component of Songdo’s connectivity would be Cisco’s TelePresence. Initially marketed to corporations that could afford its heavy price tag, this multicamera, state-of-the-art transmission unit creates facsimiles of people that can
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. Marketed as an ideal means to reduce travel costs, NSIC and Cisco took the considerable risk of outfitting all homes in the IBD with a telepresence (TP) screen. Rather than just another appliance (although as ubiquitous as microwave ovens), the TP units hopefully would play a key role in reducing traffic
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capsule. Cisco compiled long lists of services that could function off their IP-based platform. Some already existed in the catalogue; others, such as widespread telepresence, were as new to the design team as to anyone else. This illustrates how quickly the Songdo project changed the perspective of everyone who worked
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.”14 Once reviews from early residents began to roll in, there were obvious indicators that some service verticals were not performing as the developers hoped. Telepresence, the key to improved medical and educational services (as well as a concurrent decrease in travel), did not take off. A large percentage of Koreans
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, why not show regional partners and customers how the technology benefited the company’s own operations? The Bangalore campus would become a test bed for telepresence and other aspects of modern communication technology. This wasn’t innovation for its own sake. If the underpinning technology proved unreliable, Cisco risked more than
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tags. If any vehicle deviates from its established route, the Bangalore security receives an alert. • Triage through the cloud. Bangalore’s medical center relies on telepresence to communicate with hospitals; paramedics can load relevant medical data via the cloud and expedite diagnosis and treatment options. • Finding the elusive parking spot. In
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personal devices and QR codes. Rather than unyielding forests of cubicles, employees can choose to work in gardens or conduct meetings in gaming centers or telepresence rooms. With an intramural system keeping track of the “reservations” for workspace, the campus is able to maximize space usage (it stands at approximately 58
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city building is not the alpha and omega of IoE’s potential. The verticals of health and education present tremendous possibility for innovations such as telepresence, provided the political will and infrastructure spending can come into alignment. Can smart cities coexist with Gandhi’s vision of 70,000 villages? It is
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proximity to a new, ambitious urban zone brings up new possibilities for economic ties and collaboration that could benefit both nations. Consider the expansion of telepresence as it might be applied to the Afiat Healthpark and Singapore. Close enough for in-person consultations, doctors and patients could follow up and transfer
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people create far-ranging opportunities for trade and commerce.12 This explains why aerotropoli can thrive, as well as why a brand-new city, utilizing telepresence and other interactive devices, can actually promote rather than hinder the best exchanges among people, the exchanges that make money for partners, resolve neighborhood problems
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Real Deal, September 2013, http://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/empire-state-building-a-buyers-manual/. BEYOND SONGDO AND THE FUTURE OF THE CITY BY 2014, TELEPRESENCE (TP) technology had rolled out in selected business-to-business conditions in Songdo. U-Life Solutions developed a home network system that would, in time
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Nevertheless, the indicators point in the right direction. Songdo by now has “established residents”; their opinions—and decisions—will decide Songdo’s fate going forward. Telepresence’s status is curious. In late 2014, the first 1,400 residents had units installed in their homes. Meeting some of these early adopters to
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security of connection, how awkward will a consultation with a trusted medical professional be? It seems certain that Songdo’s residents will continue to embrace telepresence. The city’s advanced features are proving to be popular. As prices come down (and the affluent early adopters arrive in greater numbers), this test
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dispense proper doses of medicine, provide locomotion (Dean Kamen has also invented the iBOT, a motorized wheelchair),5 perform surgeries, and, through future generations of telepresence and other communication technology, keep their trusts in regular contact with their families. Human error that leads to deaths will have dropped significantly. Air-quality
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space for a shorter time. Why will companies need to purchase or rent expensive, energy-intensive sites when onsite meetings are much less frequent and telepresence and cloud services allow for routine virtual interaction? In the morning, the signage throughout an office complex might read Cisco, only to be replaced by
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atmosphere. The Internet of Everything will incorporate the world’s small communities as the means of connectivity to the cities and richer human resources improve. Telepresence and other flexible interfaces will continue to appear outside of cities—perhaps India in 2035 will set the goal of one TP kiosk per village
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growth of, 19 Streetline, 152 Success, recognizing, 214–15 Surveillance systems, 110, 111, 117, 203–4, 205–6 Sustainability, 174–75, 185, 199–200 T Telepresence (TP), 55, 77, 83, 193–95, 210 Tianfu Software Park, 104–6 Tomorrow City, 67–68 Townsend, Anthony, 66, 176, 178, 180, 186 Transcontinental Railroad
Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff · 24 Aug 2015 · 413pp · 119,587 words
a pall over the robotics industry. In the June 1980 issue of Omni magazine, Marvin Minsky wrote a long manifesto calling for the development of telepresence technologies—mobile robots outfitted with video cameras, displays, microphones, and speakers that allow their operator to be “present” from a remote location anywhere in the
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connected world. Minsky used his manifesto to rail against the shortcomings of the world of robotics: Three Mile Island really needed telepresence. I am appalled by the nuclear industry’s inability to deal with the unexpected. We all saw the absurd inflexibility of present day technology in
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absorb a year’s allowable dose of radiation in just a few minutes. The cost of repair and the energy losses will be $1 billion; telepresence might have cut this expense to a few million dollars. The big problem today is that nuclear plants are not designed for
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? The technology is still too primitive. Furthermore, the plants aren’t even designed to accommodate the installation of advanced telepresence when it becomes available. A vicious circle!6 The absence of wireless networking connectivity was the central barrier to the development of remote-controlled robots
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, because the robot was not yet able to handle loose shirts. The Industrial Perception arm wasn’t the only intelligent machine at the party. A telepresence robot was out on the dance floor, swaying to the music. It was midnight in Woodside, but Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, was
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to build a humanoid robot as a research platform. The company had developed a freely available operating system for robotics as well as a humanoid telepresence robot, PR2, that was being used in a number of universities. That evening, both AI and IA technologies were thus in attendance at Page’s
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iPhone were the first examples of this transition as a reimagining of the phonograph and the telephone. Augmented reality would also make the idea of telepresence far more compelling. Two people separated by great distance could gain the illusion of sharing the same space. This would be a radical improvement on
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today’s videoconferencing and awkward telepresence robots like Scott Hassan’s Beam, which place a human face on a mobile robot. Gary Bradski left the world of robots to join Abovitz
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an automotive division. He looked at the science education market, but it didn’t have much revenue potential. It seemed too early to pitch a telepresent robot. The more he looked, the more he considered the problem of aging and elder care. “Wow!” he thought to himself. “Here is a market
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’t a replacement for a human caregiver, but it will be able to listen and speak, help with medicine, relay messages, and act as a telepresence when needed. It doesn’t walk—it rolls on a simple wheel assembly that allows it to move fluidly in any direction. Instead of arms
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/21/business/the-creature-that-lives-in-pittsburgh.html?src=pm&pagewanted=3&pagewanted=all. 6.Marvin Minsky, “Telepresence: A Manifesto,” IEEE Spectrum, August 31, 2010, http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/telepresence-a-manifesto. 7.Ibid. 8.Gill A. Pratt, “Robot to the Rescue,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, December
Robot Futures
by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh · 1 Mar 2013
of what we are doing. Perhaps the word “robot” will become confusing since cell phones will behave more robotically, and robots will often be sophisticated telepresence communication devices, enabling us to tuck in a child or visit a work colleague when we are away. Come what may, what we think of
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us, and we are still busy understanding how a toy robot can twist us. These next-generation robots will be inherently schizophrenic—sometimes autonomous, sometimes telepresent and under the direct control of real people. With all manner of Dehumanizing Robots 63 robots, we will find ourselves entering the same negotiations and
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blame—no accountability to any individual who deserves responsibility. 102 Chapter 5 As technology advances, new innovations induce even newer relationships between machine and operator. Telepresence, for instance, further complicates the relationship of individual human decisions to outcomes in the natural world. The Predator drone is a militarized unmanned aerial vehicle
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always playing a role—the body is staring at a video game screen, and physical hands are giving rapid commands to a game interface. Even telepresence systems thirty years hence—described in chapter 4—do not genuinely disconnect the mind from the body. The sensing and control of that remote location
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in the asteroid belt. Each adventure can feel real, but the immutable fact is that your mind and body are together controlling that experience. Each telepresent episode is like a fancy dress party—the experience can enable you to explore a different identity, but you also will also have your own
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today, nor do they help us guide the development of technology in the near term for the best possible human good. The near future of telepresence, robotics, and communications technologies threatens to distract us, dehumanize our interactions, and erode our personal freedom and choice. The true challenge we face is in
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will observe on a massive scale and automatically respond; we will interact remotely, explore dangerous or distant spaces, invent new toy species, and even be telepresent in many places at once. Perhaps one day we will be able to assume novel physical shapes and construct experimental identities through which we explore
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the results of emerging technology fails to provide thought leadership on issues of accountability, identity, life-cycle analysis, human rights, and well-being. Every new telepresence and autonomous robot system will challenge the interpretation of our existing body of laws. Cars that drive themselves will crash in unexpected ways; robots caring
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for a child or the elderly at home will sometimes fail to notice the obvious; telepresent systems will be abused and cause mental distress to distant victims; all manners of robots will be used for crime and malicious acts in as
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connections to other neurons, 124 Glossary the number of synapses far exceeds the number of neurons in the brain: 100 trillion versus 100 billion respectively. Telepresence The ability to sense and act in a place removed from the actual location of one’s body. USAR Urban search and rescue; an important
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, 30, 74, 75, 123 Stanford University, ix, 35, 56 Star Wars, xiii, xx Street science, 115 Structure, 27–31, 46 Synapse, 97–99, 123, 124 Telepresence, 37, 65–73, 102, 104, 107, 117, 124 Terrill, Rufus, 24, 25 Therac-25, 101 Traffic calming, 113, 114 Turkle, Sherry, 62 Urban search and
The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization
by Richard Baldwin · 14 Nov 2016 · 606pp · 87,358 words
technological developments might provoke such a plunge. Really good substitutes for people crossing borders to share “brain services” is the first. Such technologies, known as “telepresence,” are not science fiction. They exist today but they are expensive. The second would be the development of really good substitutes for people traveling to
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both ends of what can be thought of as “the telephone wire.” It is—in essence—really, really good Skype. An example is Cisco Systems’ TelePresence. This combines full-size images of participants, using three plasma screens, sound channels, high-precision microphones, custom lighting, and high-definition cameras. Audio is arranged
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likely to be part of coordination for a very long time, but the number of meetings could be greatly reduced. The next step is “holographic telepresence.” This projects real-time, three-dimensional holographic images of people (along with audio) in a way that makes it seem as if the remote person
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combined with human-controlled robots of the type used today in operating rooms, technicians could conduct inspections or undertake repairs from remote locations. As with telepresence, the widespread use of telerobotics is constrained by high costs. But if it is possible to develop systems that allow surgeons to fix people at
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two breakthroughs discussed might accomplish this. The first is really good substitutes for people traveling to be in the same room to exchange brain services (telepresence). The second is really good substitutes for people traveling to provide manual services (telerobotics). Before looking at what the breakthroughs might look like, it is
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-wage Mexican labor services instead of high-cost U.S. labor services. Offshoring, in other words, is a means of arbitraging international wage differences. Telerobotics, Telepresence, and “Virtual Immigration” Such arbitrage via offshoring is not possible for all activities. For the offshoring option to work, the firm needs some way of
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fix German-made capital equipment in China by controlling sophisticated robots placed in Chinese factories. Telepresence could do the same for brain workers living in developing nations. When telepresence meeting facilities are cheap and portable, and holographic telepresence is widespread, the need for face-to-face meetings will be greatly reduced, even if
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professors of economics), the ability to fractionalize the production of business services could lead to a great deal of “virtual offshoring.” That is to say, telepresence would make it possible for developing nation professionals to work inside G7 offices and universities without actually being there. This would be nothing more than
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, globalization’s third unbundling is likely to mean that labor services are physically unbundled from laborers. Consequences Relaxation of the face-to-face constraint via telepresence and telerobotics would make it much easier to separate the physical application of labor services from the physical presence of laborers. This is likely to
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extreme. Opportunities for arbitraging this imbalance are abundant. As wages rise in the nations that have benefited the most so far (above all China), and telepresence and telerobotics get better, firms with advanced know-how may increasingly leverage their knowledge with low-cost labor in, say, Africa or South America. Chinese
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the cost of moving ideas when the ICT revolution came along. In the future, the main driver may be transformative reductions in the cost of telepresence and telerobotics triggered by the virtual presence revolution. If I am right, it will be important for governments and businesses to start rethinking globalization. Notes
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also R11 (Rising Eleven) Austrian-Hungarian Empire, 55. See also Europe automation and robots, 164–165, 199–200, 205, 206, 287–288, 291. See also telepresence/telerobotics Autor, David, 295 Avionyx, 268 backward and forward linkages (demand-side/supply-side), 174, 187–188, 208–209 Bairoch, Paul, 54 Balassa, Bela, 263
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Globalization and, 13; offshoring and, 216; Phases and, 113; physical presence and, 98; policies and, 239, 240, 272; transportation and, 5. See also migrations, human; telepresence/telerobotics; three-cascading-constraints view multiple equilibria, 254–256, 255f, 256–257, 258f, 266–267 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 75, 135 Naisbitt, John
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ICT (information and communication technology); IT (Information Technology); moving ideas telecommunications, 82, 84f, 121, 130, 151. See also telegraph telegraph, 53, 121 telephones, 121, 130 telepresence/telerobotics, 10, 297–298 textile-mill jobs, 236–237 Thailand, 72, 87, 89, 90f, 159, 188, 250, 252–253f, 274. See also I6 three-cascading
Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy
by David A. Mindell · 12 Oct 2015 · 265pp · 74,807 words
but a robotics engineer. The amount of time I spent physically on the seafloor was dwarfed by the amount of time I spent remotely there, telepresent through the medium of remote robots and fiber-optic cables. My home technology was the remote robot Jason, built and run by the Deep Submergence
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that team on key projects that proved the technological systems. Only now, looking back on his mentorship, do I realize how much his vision of telepresence shaped my own thinking. Ballard originally came to Woods Hole from California in 1966 as a naval officer during the Vietnam era. His father was
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presence. He maintained that Argo and its cousins under development at Woods Hole represented “a complete revolution” in underwater exploration. “It’s the beginning of telepresence, of being able to project your spirit to the bottom, your eyes, your mind, and being able to leave your body behind. . . . We’ve entered
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: after Titanic, it was never used again. Ballard and his lab still had some distance to go to fulfill the original Argo/Jason vision of telepresence on the seafloor. During the next few years, the full-size Jason took shape and underwent a series of shallow-water trials. Argo was rebuilt
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teams from the media. When all was stable, though, the whole control van would become concentrated on the seafloor. “Now, that’s the world of telepresence,” Bowen said. “That’s where I forget about my body, and I project myself onto the ocean floor, and I have to make that vehicle
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cables, digital transmission, and the very best broadcast-quality video cameras helped transport us into this other world. But this presence, or what Ballard called telepresence, was not simply a product of the technical imaging. In fact, by today’s standards the imaging was primitive, being old-fashioned color TV quality
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$17B agency,” Lester writes, “the phrase takes on some importance.” Why must human presence on Mars require “boots on the ground” when remote presence and telepresence, like those of afforded by Spirit and Opportunity, can provide a sufficient sense in such a foreign environment? Lester flags a caveat that, for him
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commitment to project from ONR, 35–36 Jason Jr., development of, 44–45 naval career of, 26 as naval liaison to Woods Hole, 26–27 telepresence vision of, 26, 43, 57 Titanic, discovery and exploration of, 42–43, 45–51 bathyscaphe, 35 bathysphere, 35 Beebe, William, 35 Benthos, 39, 40 Big
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), 167–72 Sullenberger, Chesley, 72, 77 supervisory control, 38, 62 synthetic vision, 108–9, 225 systems managers, pilots as, 80 Talos (driverless car), 204–5 telepresence, 26, 43, 57 Teller, Seth, 200 Thornton, Kathy, 170, 171–72 Three Mile Island nuclear accident, 38 Thresher (submarine), 27, 36, 42 Thronson, Harley, 188
The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind · 24 Aug 2015 · 742pp · 137,937 words
live in rural areas with limited access to traditional health services.24 In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service in Airedale, West Yorkshire, uses telepresence to provide several hundred care-homes with nurse support and, in a trial, to avoid hospital admissions for 50 per cent of prison inmates.25
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the emergence of a very different kind of customization, ‘mass customization’ (where there is no need for human beings, see section 3.7), and of ‘telepresence’ (where there is no need to meet in person, see section 3.3), neither can now be taken for granted. We choose these two examples
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platforms to preach and proselytize without meeting their congregants and possible converts in person. In Chapter 2 there are many other illustrations. Future systems, using ‘telepresence’ techniques (for example, high definition desktop-to-desktop video-conferencing), will provide an experience for both provider and recipient that is greatly superior to current
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video-conferencing systems. We think of telepresence as ‘Skype on steroids’. Notice, however, that teleprofessionalism is not a fundamental departure from traditional ways of working. The interaction is still real-time and
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communicated in three ways—face-to-face, in writing, and by telephone. That was it. Today there are many more options, from e-mail to telepresence, from text messaging to social networking, from real-time chat to online collaboration. Chapter 2 shows that these technologies are already in action. Meanwhile other
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it easy, subject to time-zones, to communicate with clients across the world as though they were in the same building. With the advent of telepresence, this new form of real-time, synchronous communication across continents is becoming natural and commonplace. Changes in regulation have also accelerated globalization, in that many
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day (in effect, twenty-eight e-mails for each human being).87 When these methods are considered alongside video calls (for example, by Skype) and telepresence (emerging steadily), it is clear there is an ongoing shift in the way that professionals communicate with those they work with and help. Our modern
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. Tele-professionalism means that personal interaction is no longer constrained by geography or a patient’s mobility—the use of video links, from Skype to telepresence, provides a real-time, ‘face-to-face’ interaction of a sort. Where new technologies do disintermediate traditional professionals, such that face-to-face time with
Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration
by Buzz Aldrin and Leonard David · 1 Apr 2013 · 183pp · 51,514 words
other hand, humans bring perception, speed and mobility, dexterity, and an inquisitive nature. Combining the two is opening up a new paradigm in space exploration. “Telepresence” makes use of low-latency communication links that can put human cognition on other worlds. Low-latency yields the appearance of “being there” in a
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overhead. NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover takes a self-portrait. (Illustration Credit 6.3) My close friends Robert Ballard and James Cameron can attest to telepresence-enabled undersea exploration, operating vehicles outfitted with high-definition video cameras, sensors, and manipulator arms—run from a mission control. Teleoperation of underwater equipment is
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also a routine task performed by those maintaining deep-sea oil rigs. The counterpart in space, albeit showcasing low-quality telepresence, was used decades ago by controllers in the Soviet Union. They wheeled about their automated Lunokhods on the moon. More recently, recall the plucky Spirit
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and Opportunity Mars rovers run by NASA, precursors to the now-on-Mars Curiosity mega-robot. Telepresence, low-latency telerobotics, and human spaceflight are leading to redefining what constitutes an “explorer.” A leading champion of exploration
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of Astronomy at the University of Texas in Austin. Lester tackles the serious concern about how this strategy meshes with our historical concept of “exploration.” Telepresence may be effective, and it may be cheap, but if it’s not seen as “out there” exploration, it’s not going to take hold
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. A piloted craft designed for deep-sea exploration faces challenges similar to those of crafts designed for outer space. (Illustration Credit 6.4) High-quality telepresence from an Earth-moon Lagrangian point allows a high degree of human cognition and dexterity to be expressed via lunar surface telerobotic surrogates. Lester sees
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exploration site to ensure cognition—that is, in many respects, what human spaceflight is for. What is more, telepresence/on-orbit telerobotics is not destination specific. We’ll first need to earn our telepresence stripes at the moon and on Mars, using these technologies to explore, scout out mining opportunities, and pre
Beyond: Our Future in Space
by Chris Impey · 12 Apr 2015 · 370pp · 97,138 words
best sense of the experience is the dramatic opening sequence of the 3-D movie Gravity. The future of Solar System exploration may lie in telepresence, a set of technologies that allow a person to feel that he or she is in a remote location. Videoconferencing is one familiar and simple
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we “look” at Mars through the camera eye of the Curiosity rover or “sniff” the atmosphere with its spectrometer, we are using a form of telepresence. NASA has used red–green stereoscopic imaging on all of its recent rovers, but it missed a big chance to grab the public eye when
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then have “watched” the volcanoes on Io, “listened” to magnetic storms on Jupiter, “sniffed” the atmosphere of Titan, and “tasted” the icy geysers on Enceladus. Telepresence implies something more than remote sensing; it’s a technology that allows someone to feel as if he’s in a remote location. The word
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turned toward the audience to answer questions; he could see and hear everything that was going on. At a 2012 symposium on “Space Exploration via Telepresence,” held at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, scientists rubbed shoulders with roboticists and technology entrepreneurs. A major topic was latency—the time it takes
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International Space Station in 2011. The torso can be positioned to help the crew with engineering tasks and extra-vehicular activities (EVAs). The frontier of telepresence is its merger with artificial intelligence, a development foreseen by computer science pioneer Marvin Minsky in 1980.7 A robot doesn’t need to be
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1. “Why Oculus Rift Is the Future of Gaming,” online at http://www.gizmoworld.org/why-oculus-rift-is-the-future-in-gaming/. 2. Intriguingly, telepresence doesn’t have to convey the remote scene with perfect fidelity, because the brain has a tendency to “fill in the blanks” and “smooth out
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the rough edges” of any representation that is familiar. See “Another Look at ‘Being There’ Experiences in Digital Media: Exploring Connections of Telepresence with Mental Imagery” by I. Rodriguez-Ardura and F. J. Martinez-Lopez 2014. Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 30, pp. 508–18. 3. Brother Assassin
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/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Tokyo, pp. 3043–50. 6. Human Haptic Perception, ed. by M. Grunwald 2008. Berlin: Birkhäuser Verlag. 7. “Telepresence” by M. Minsky 1980, Omni magazine. The magazine is defunct, but the paper can be found online at http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers
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/Telepresence.html. 8. Feynman delivered his lecture at the American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. A transcript of the talk is online
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-Earth human beings in, 215, 250–51 prototype experiments for, 192–97 space elevators, 27, 148–53, 150, 160–61, 185, 280 “Space Exploration via Telepresence,” 178 Spaceflight Society, 28 space hotels, 102–3 Space Launch System (SLS), 104 space mining, 155–56, 161–62 “Space Oddity,” 142 spaceplanes, 71–72
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, 228–32 trust in, 98 in weaponry, 22–24 see also nanotechnology; specific technologies TED2014 conference, 178 telepathy, cybernetic, 206 teleportation, 228–32, 230, 252 telepresence, 176–79, 283 telerobotics, 177–78 telescopes, 31, 49–50, 126, 128, 129–30, 158, 163, 187, 190, 218, 235, 292–93 see also specific
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