Next?

In this morning’s New York Times, there was a provocative article by the always interesting Thomas Friedman, here’s an excerpt:   “I did something I’ve never done before: I programmed a robot to perform the simple task of moving widgets from one place to another. Yup, I trained the robot’s arms using a very friendly screen interface and memory built into its mechanical limbs.

And therein lie the seeds of a potential revolution. Rethink’s goal is simple: that its cheap, easy-to-use, safe robot will be to industrial robots what the personal computer was to the mainframe computer, or the iPhone was to the traditional phone. That is, it will bring robots to the small business and even home and enable people to write apps for them the way they do with PCs and iPhones”.

You can read the full article here: http://www.deccanchronicle.com/editorial/dc-comment/think-revolution-think-robots-491. The name of the company that makes these machines is Rethink Robotics. http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/index.html.  

The article got me thinking about the next big innovation break-through; will it be the Personal Robot? Just remember, my generation asked the question – in all seriousness – why would anyone want a computer in their home? Now we carry them around in our pockets. So are robots next?