I am still reading The Second Machine Age. The section on the improvements in robotics made me think about creating a city that is robot friendly. Imagine a city with “self-driving car lanes” comparable to bike lanes today. My guess is that self-driving cars could be more efficient without humans.
But why not go further? Instead of making robots adapt to the human environment, why not put RFID’s on every object and surface, to make it easier for robots to operate. The place to try this out might be at an expensive resort or a cruise ship. You could be in your room and say to your phone or wristband, “I am ready for lunch.” You listen to a menu, you make your choices, and robots assemble and deliver your meal. If you are at a golf resort and are ready to play, you could summon a self-driving golf cart to take you around the course. Maybe each hole could adapt to your level of skill, with the location of the pin and various sand traps moving while you come toward the tee.
You would enjoy Brad Templeton’s blog. He works on self-driving cars for Google, and his perspective is that it’s better to integrate robots into existing infrastructure rather than–initially–to create new infrastructure just for them.
http://ideas.4brad.com/robocars-and-electrification
So instead of disability-accessibility features (wheelchair ramps, and so on), you have robot-enabling architectures as a economic-efficiency transition step until general robot progress makes them no longer ‘disabled’ and able to sense, learn about, and manipulate objects in their environments as well as any able-bodied human can.
Probably the ‘robot enablers’ will remain and make even human-capable robots even better than humans. I think cars synchronizing to start and stop at the same time, permit mergers, and un-jam traffic as efficiently as possible is something that relies on network communication of information from far away and obedience to coordination commands from higher-headquarters. This behavior would be wildly different from robots doing just what humans do, which is to act mostly in isolation following safety-based rules of reactions arising out of observations limited to the local area.
In Colorado, they plant radio-beacon pegs in the highway so that emergency vehicles can operate in night-blizzard blackout conditions, like aircraft pilots operating solely on instruments when visibility drops too low. It would be easy for self-driving cars to piggy-back on some of this already existing infrastructure.
Something very close to this is actually used in automated factories today.
Pallets of incoming parts are laid out in racks, often by human, “just so”. The parts may have their design adjusted to make it easy for them to be passed from one machine to the next. The areas where robots work, but are oblivious to humans are fenced off – we basically kick the humans out of the work area to make it “safe” (politically safe) for robots to work there.
And something qute similar happened with the arrival of electric power and good electric motors, mostly between the end of WWI and the start of WWII. You see it in the changes in factory design, in the sorts of cranes used, how machines are laid out as well as how they are powered. How the windows (if any) are arranged.
A problem with all of this that cities are full of dwellings for humans, that change over slowly. And one of the main need for robots is to support elderly humans residing in dwellings they’d like to stay in. If I have to move house to get robot aid, I might as well move to assited living and have people to talk to…..
I like the point about windows. You can nearly guesstimate the era of a factory by counting the windows. The tall robot picker warehouses one can see have zero.
Only half joking: If everyone had a robotic 3D printer fabricator in their home, what you’d want is lots of evacuated/pneumatic tubes to send parts and materials.
“You could be in your room and say to your phone or wristband, ‘I am ready for lunch.’ You listen to a menu, you make your choices, and robots assemble and deliver your meal.”
No robots are needed for most of that. In restaurants we could easily be ordering and paying by app now rather than waiter. This would save 20% of our dining costs right off the top (in tips), and service should be better (we wouldn’t have wait for the waiter to appear and notice us when we needed something). But this hasn’t happened, and I won’t be surprised if it never does — people seem to value being served by (often inefficient) humans and are willing to pay the cost.