The Industries of the Future

by Alec J. Ross

Honda is also focusing much of its research and commercialization on robotic limbs and assistance devices that are robotic but not freestanding robots. Its Walking Assist device wraps around the legs and back of people with weakened leg muscles, giving them extra power to move on their own. In the future, expect to see Honda making robotic hands and arms. Its goal is nothing less than helping paraplegics walk and the very frail rediscover the speed and power of their youth.

Tokai Rubber Industries, in conjunction with the Japanese research institute RIKEN, has unveiled the Robot for Interactive Body Assistance (RIBA), which can pick up and set down humans up to 175 pounds and is designed for patient comfort: it resembles a giant smiling bear and is covered in a soft skin to guard against injury or pain.

Japanese industrial automation company AIST has created PARO, a robot baby harp seal covered in soft white fur. PARO exhibits many of the same behaviors as a real pet. Designed for those who are too frail to care for a living animal or who live in environments that don’t allow pets, such as nursing homes, it enjoys being held, gets angry when hit, and likes to nap. When President Barack Obama met PARO a few years ago on a tour of Japanese robotics innovations, he instinctually reached out and rubbed its head and back. It looks like a cute stuffed animal, but costs $6,000 and is classified by the US government as a class 2 medical device.

Japan already leads the world in robotics, operating 310,000 of the 1.4 million industrial robots i...

Japan’s private and public sectors certainly think so. In 2013, the Japanese government granted $24.6 million to companies focusing on eldercare robotics. Japan’s prominent Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry chose 24 companies in May 2013 to receive subsidies covering one-half to two-thirds of the R&D costs for nursing care robots. Tasks for these robots include helping the elderly move between rooms; keeping tabs on those likely to wander; and providing entertainment through games, singing, and dancing.

Even as they improve, some observers—like Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT—question whether patients will ever be able to form a true emotional connection with robot caretakers. As Turkle warns, “For the idea of artificial companionship to be our new normal, we have to change ourselves, and in the process we are remaking human values and human connection.”

“younger people are supposed to be listening. We are showing very little interest in what our elders have to say. We are building the machines that will literally let their stories fall on deaf ears.”

With too few caretakers, I expect robots to become a regular part of the Japanese family system.

In Europe, all 28 member states of the European Union have populations that are growing older, and in the decades ahead, the percentage of Europe’s population aged 65 and older will grow from 17 percent to 30 percent. China is already entering a period of advanced aging even as it continues to develop.

The notable exception is the United States, where immigration policies partially mitigate the effects of an aging population.

Robots will be the rare technology that reaches the mainstream through elderly users first, spreading down as grandma shows off her next cutting-edge gadget for the kids and grandkids.

The robot landscape will be vastly differentiated by country. Just as wealthier and poorer citizens reside at different technological levels, so do wealthier and poorer countries.

About 70 percent of total robot sales take place in Japan, China, the United States, South Korea, and Germany—known as the “big five” in robotics.

Japan, the United States, and Germany dominate the landscape in high-value industrial and medical robots, and South Korea and China are major producers of less expensive consumer-oriented robots.

There is quite a gap between the big five and the rest of the world. As both consumers and producers of robots, these countries outpace all others. By way of illustration, the number of industrial robots produced in South Korea, a country of 50 million people, is several times greater than the number produced in South America, Central America, Africa, and India combined, with populations totaling 2.8 billion.

Russia is effectively a nonplayer in robotics despite its industrial base. It neither produces nor buys robots to any significant degree, instead maintaining extractive industries (natural gas, oil, iron, nickel) and industrial manufacturing plants that look and function the way they did in the 1970s and 1980s.

They will own the name brands in consumer robots, and they’ll power the software and networks that enable the robotics ecosystem.

When I think about this symbiosis, I think about the Internet in the 1990s. It was not just the consumer-facing Internet companies that were born and based in Silicon Valley; it was also the network equipment makers like Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. Today Cisco and Juniper have a combined 85,000 employees and $154 billion in market value. The same types of back-end systems will exist in the robotics industry. And the big five countries will benefit from being home to the high-paying jobs and wealth accumulation that go with being out ahead of the 191 other countries around the world.

They will produce the Ciscos and Juniper...

The African Robotics Network (AFRON) offers a good model. A community of individuals and institutions, AFRON hosts events and projects to boost robotics-related education, research, and industry on the continent. Through initiatives like its 10 Dollar Robot Challenge, AFRON encourages the development of extremely low-cost robotics education. One winner was RoboArm, a project from Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria whose armlike structure is made out of plastic and runs on scavenged motors.

The ability to generate low-cost innovation based on scarcity of materials is rooted in the concept of frugal innovation, which will be discussed in chapter 6.

As robotics starts to spread, the degree to which countries can succeed in the robot era will depend in part on culture—on how readily people accept robots into their lives. Western and Eastern cultu...

Japan have an economic need and the technological know-how for robots, but it also has a cultural predisposition. The ancient Shinto religion, practiced by 80 percent of Japanese, includes a belief in animism, whi...

As a result, Japanese culture tends to be more accepting of robot companions as actual companions than is Western culture, which views robots as soulless machines. In a culture where the inanimate can be considered to be just as alive as the animate, robots can ...

Prometheus was condemned to an eternity of punishment for giving fire to humans. When Icarus flew too high, the sun melted his ingenious waxed wings and he fell to his death. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein’s grotesque creation wreaks havoc and ultimately leads to its creator’s death—and numerous B-movie remakes.

The cultural dynamic in Japan is representative of the culture through much of East Asia, enabling the Asian robotics industry to speed ahead, unencumbered by cultural baggage. Investment in robots reflects a cultural comfort with robots, and, in China, departments of automation are well represented and well respected in the academy.

There are more than 100 automation departments in Chinese universities, compared with approximately 76 in the United States despite the larger total nu...

In South Korea, teaching robots are seen in a positive light; in Europe, they are viewed negatively. As with eldercare, in Europe robots are seen as machines, whereas in Asia they are viewed as potential companions. In the United States, the question is largely avoided because of an immigration system that facilitates the entry of new,...

A recent study in the Middle East showed that people would be open to a humanoid household-cleaning robot but not to robots that perform more intimat...

The combination of cultural, demographic, and technological factors means that we will get our first glimpse of a w...

Tasks once thought the exclusive domain of humans—the types of jobs that require situational awareness, spatial reasoning and dexterity, contextual understanding, and human judgment—are opening up to robots.

Belief space refers to a mathematical framework that allows us to model a given environment statistically and develop probabilistic outcomes. It is basically the application of algorithms to make sense of new or messy contexts.

It has led to breakthroughs in areas like grasping, once a difficult robot task. Until recently belief space was far too complex to sufficiently compute, a task made all the more difficult by the limited sets of robot experience available to analyze.

Linked to the cloud, robots can access vast troves of data and shared experience to enhance the understanding of their own belief space.

But by becoming networked devices, constantly connected to the cloud, robots can now incorporate the experiences of every other robot of their kind, “learning” at an accelerating rate.

Imagine the kind of quantum leap that human culture would undertake if we were all suddenly given a direct link to the knowledge and experience of everyone else on the planet—if, when we made a decision, we were drawing from not just our own limited experience and expertise but from that of billions of other people.

Big data has enabled this quantum leap for the cognitive dev...

Highly flexible components—such as air muscles (which distribute power through tubes holding highly concentrated pressurized air), electroactive polymers (which change a robot’s size and shape when stimulated by an electric field), and ferrofluids (basically magnetic fluids that facilitate more humanlike movement)—have created robots that you might not even recognize as being artificial, almost like the Arnold Schwarzenegger cyborg in The Terminator.

Nanorobots, still in the early phases of development, promise a future in which autonomous machines at the scale of 10-9 meters (far, far smaller than a grain of sand) can diagnose and treat human diseases at the cellular level.

President Obama launched the National Robotics Initiative in 2011 to stimulate development of robots for industrial automation, elder assistance, and military applications. Run by the National Science Foundation, the program has awarded more than $100 million in contracts. France has initiated a similar program, pledging $126.9 million to develop its industry and catch up to Germany. Sweden has similarly earmarked millions to give out to individuals and corporations through innovation awards such as Robotdalen (“robot valley”), launched in 2011. The private sector is also investing at increasingly higher levels. Google purchased Boston Dynamics, a leading robotics design

It also bought DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence company founded by wunderkind Demis Hassabis. As a kid, Hassabis was the second-highest-ranked chess player in the world under the age of 14, and while he was getting his PhD in cognitive neuroscience, he was acknowledged by Science magazine for making one of the ten most important science breakthroughs of the year after developing a new biological theory for how imagination and memory work in the brain. At DeepMind, Demis and his colleagues effectively created the computer equivalent of hand-eye coordination, something that had never been accomplished before in robotics.

Then Google bought DeepMind for half a billion dollars and is applying its expertise in machine learning and systems neuroscience to power the algorithms it is developing as it expands beyond Internet search and further into robotics.

Most corporate research and development in robotics comes from within big companies (like Google, Toyota, and Honda), but venture capital funding in robotics is growing at a steep rate. It more than doubled in just three years, from $160 million in 2011 to $341 million in 2014.

Within the robotics community, the future of technology is wrapped up in the concept of singularity, the theoretical point in time when artificial intelligence will match or surpass human intelligence. If singularity is achieved, it is unclear what the relationship between robots and humans will become.

The technology community is deeply divided about whether singularity is a good thing or a bad thing, with one camp believing it will enhance human experience as another camp, equally large, believes it will unleash a dystopian future where people become subservient to machines.

Those who believe that singularity will be achieved point to several key factors. First, they argue that Moore’s law, which holds that the amount of computing power we can fit into a chip will double every two years, shows little sign of slowing down.

Moore’s law applies to the transistors and technology that control robots as wel...

Add rapid advances in machine learning, data analytics, and cloud robotics, and it’s clear that computing is ...

The software advances necessary to reach singularity demand a detailed scientific understanding of the human brain,

but our lack of understanding about the basic neural structure of the brain impedes software development.