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Podium Ian Pearson: Prepare for thousands of robots in your home
Independent, The (London), Feb 14, 2000 by Ian Pearson
From a talk given by the BT futurologist for the BBC World Service series `The Essential Guide to the 21st Century'
WHERE IS man and computer going? Well, round about 2015 we expect computers will catch up with man: we'll then have man-machine equivalents. We think that by about 2025 we'll probably have some of the basic technology and maybe some research labs will be starting to connect human brains to machines.
But we think that in the very long term, by 2040 to 2050, nano- technology (that's the engineering of things right down to the atomic scale), should allow us to get connections to every single individual brain cell and we should be able to mimic that outside on the computer.
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So, because that machine is electronic and because it can run very much faster, we should be able to take something which is basically a human mind and speed it up by a factor of anything up to a thousand million. To put that into perspective: in one second you'll be able to do 32 years worth of thinking. And we should see micro-machines, tiny little insect- like robots, coming out within the next few years. These will get smaller and smaller and we'll be able to routinely engineer them at cellular size. We will be able to make all sorts of medical advances, we'll have little nano-technology devices roaming our bloodstream, cleaning out the arteries, delivering drugs to where we need them, all manner of things. And it may be with us within 50 years.
The Internet will develop until we can use it for an awful lot of different things. There are three platforms: through the computer; through mobile telephones, and through digital TV. Just about everywhere you go you will have access to everything on the Net.
Then there's the Edeyer cell. It's really a high speed modem and it works across an ordinary phone line. The key thing about this is that it's always on. You don't have to dial up, so you can leave your computer switched on 24 hours a day, logged into the Internet so that your e-mail messages come in when they get sent instead of having to log on to retrieve them. We'll get lightning-fast access to music and video on line.
The future home, in terms of technology, is very exciting indeed. Screens will be everywhere. All you would do is integrate all of the functionality of today's gadgets into a single box of tricks hidden, say, under the stairs or in the attic and you could communicate to it in English and the computer can hear you wherever you were. You say, "I want a nature documentary," the computer interprets that, looks at the digital listings and displays a nature documentary.
Another gadget which we will definitely see within the next 10 years is robotic pets. Imagine having a little robotic cat wandering around your living-room floor. It'll have a neural network-style fairly organic brain. It will behave very much like a real cat and will have a lot of personality. But it will also have voice synthesis and voice recognition and a radio-link to the Internet.
Robots will do an awful lot of things for us. They will clean the floor, tidy up after parties, cut the grass, all sorts of things. You'll have thousands of robots around the home, little insect-style robots mostly.
We hear a lot of people talk about the question of "have" and "have not" and it's certainly a real problem. Rich people can afford technology and poor people can't. So you can imagine a scenario where a company such as BT could send training staff to an African village to show them how to make technology work. They can work as part of a virtual company just as well as anybody in Silicon Valley or London.
People have always been frightened of new technology but I really don't believe in the concept of "Big Brother". Yes, you can put video cameras everywhere, you can monitor everybody, you can recognise their faces as they walk down the street and you can monitor all the fights that break out and automatically fine and that sort of thing. You could do that in the future, although I really don't think people will accept that way of working. But we will get the benefits from technology. Politicians might try to impose negative things but we'll resist those and they will disappear.
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