Meeting notice: The 02.Oct.15 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Suggested topic: Robots and the granularization of work During the last twelve months the adoption curve of robots (defined as self-navigating mobile applications) has clearly begun to turn up. The military got on board, the Robot Soccer championships introduced a biped category (next year: hacky sack), several kinds of robot window washers* and lawn mowers were introduced, GRACE** wowed the press at this year's AAAI, and iRobot's Roomba*** debuted to general acclaim. Perhaps the most interesting piece of the reaction to the latter is not how well iRobot works as a robot (how well it stays away from stairs, avoids vacuuming up the puppy, etc.) but, if the reviews can be trusted, that it works so well as a vacuum cleaner, despite what would appear to be the disadvantage of a comparatively lightweight motor. (Vacuum manufacturers compete on motor power, which leaves those reading the ads with the impression that power matters.) If these somewhat counter-intuitive evaluations hold, the reason for this functional edge will probably be that Roomba treats a given area many times, whereas humans tend to need to move on. The reason of course is that humans get paid (homeowners often pay housecleaning services $20- $25 an hour to take over this responsibility) whereas the marginal cost of keeping Roomba running is just the sum of the electricity consumed plus depreciation. The difference in these finances allow Roomba to repeat a process as many times as needed. Roomba therefore represents more than the first competent household robot (except perhaps for automatic swimming pool scrubbers) and more than the first cheap robot, though it may be that too. It is the first robot that uses its lower cost to deliver superior function. It takes a work process that had been organized around high-cost humans and redefines it to exploit the opportunities presented by a different set of economics. This is probably a generalizable idea. By and large work in the industrial world reflects not the most efficient processing systems given the function but the most efficient given the constraint of needing to be controlled by high-cost humans. City buses are the size they are not because that capacity makes sense given the function (buses are generally either mostly empty or SRO) but because their drivers make $75,000 a year. In that context systems built out of a few large busses make sense. If drivers made less, if robots drove busses, the transit system could be replaced with fleets of jitneys, which would promise both higher levels of service and lower costs. (When the fares were there, more vehicles could be dispatched; when not, fewer.) A similar point can be made about airplanes. Refinery architecture reflects the cheapest way to make as much of the system as possible accessible to expensive supervisory talent; if process manufacturing could be fully automated, refineries could shift from a model of a few large reactors each handling huge amounts of material to many small ones each handling a very small amount, etc. This would allow them to align production with demand far more precisely. And so on. In other words, cheap robots allow work processes to be broken up into higher levels of granularity. That higher granularity will allow these processes to be reorganized in ways that are hard to predict now, but are likely to change a great deal of the way we go about life. *http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/134518269_windows21.html **http://www.palantir.swarthmore.edu/GRACE/ ***http://www.roombavac.com/ <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon. -- Jules Verne, 1865 <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti- spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com.