THE ANNOUNCEMENT IN November 2013 by Amazon’s boss, Jeff Bezos, that he wanted to use drones for deliveries was, to many in the industry, something of a stretch. Applying drones safely on such a scale without line-of-sight control, and re-engineering the company’s logistics model accordingly, would be a big undertaking. But it generated a lot of media interest, and just in time for Christmas, too. His company’s most serious commitment to robotics to date—its acquisition in early 2012 of Kiva, a company whose robots move shelves around in warehouses—got far less attention. This is one example of a pervasive quality of robotic technology: the high visibility of its promises and the near-invisibility of its successes.In the 1990s Danny Hillis, a computer scientist and entrepreneur, pointed out that when people talk about “technology” they really mean “everything that doesn’t work yet”; once technologies work they simply become computers, televisions, phones and the like. Robots suffer from a similar double standard. When they are seen as providing a reliable, routine solution to a problem—cleaning floors, for example—in some ways they cease being seen as robots....
from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/1jRi9Ze
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