The NYT’s Norimitsu Onishi looks at how the world’s most wired nation is trying to make the robot just another household appliance by 2020:
South Korea, the world’s most wired country, is rushing to turn what sounds like science fiction into everyday life. The government, which succeeded in getting broadband Internet into 72 percent of all households in the last half decade, has marshaled an army of scientists and business leaders to make robots full members of society.
By 2007, networked robots that, say, relay messages to parents, teach children English and sing and dance for them when they are bored, are scheduled to enter mass production. Outside the home, they are expected to guide customers at post offices or patrol public areas, searching for intruders and transmitting images to monitoring centers.
If all goes according to plan, robots will be in every South Korean household between 2015 and 2020. That is the prediction, at least, of the Ministry of Information and Communication, which has grouped more than 30 companies, as well as 1,000 scientists from universities and research institutes, under its wing. Some want to move even faster.
Exciting stuff. Read the rest on your own.
22 Comments
Mind you, no one really knows why a robot would be useful yet since there is no real application for such. Perhaps we should elect a robot for president since the real flesh-and-blood version is so dissapointing.
Actually, I chuckle when I considering how robots unleashed in the public would probably spawn a whole new game called “robot murder” wherein people find new and wicked ways of destroying said robots, i.e., drive-by mash-up, dropping them off buildings, baseball bat death, etc., just like a real game of Duke Nukem . . . Korean Dialecks must die!
You beat me to it, Marmot.
I wanna meet the writer of that article. Is he a freelancer or does the Gray Lady have an “office” in Seoul?
You beat me to it, Marmot.
And I beat Marmot.
It’s like baseball; even the winningest team sometimes has an off day or two.
not very interesting. so they’ve done some testbed work on basic robotics and the government “says” there’ll be on in every household by 2020. perhaps they’d be useful for exploring seabeds for petroleum products or such. that’ll be much more pressing in 2015.
Well, robots will be like computers. At first, people really did not see the use for computers. Everybody looked for “killer application”(killer-ap) for this overgrown calculator and found none. Wordprocessing, Database and Spreadsheet(remember Lotus?) became useful applications but computers were not very popular. Only jerks like me played with Atari machines and ogled at PDP-11s. People were saying the computers will die out.
That was twenty years ago. Things have changed. Computers are being the fabric of business. Computers and internet are delivering contents, albeit some of them are illegal. some people like me spend more time on computers thant TV.
Robots are already practical. The vacuum-cleaning robots has been selling well and Korean companies are going into developing better vacuuming robots that can recognize the room furnitures.
However, I suspect the biggest killer-ap for robot will be in X-rated business. Lonely bacheolers will order a “mail order robot” that can talk and produce right amount of bump and gyration to give maximum pleasure. Some may even love these robots better than their bitchy girlfriends. Prisons may order these gadgets, refitted for industrial strength insertion, for inmates.
Soon, robots will talk and behave like a deaf but very pliant female who will be programmed to deliver maximum pleasure for men. That is a Killer-Ap! Some rudimentary models are already out on the market.
Baduk, computers are a huge corporate scam perpetrated by Microsoft, IBM, and Apple. They’re just pocket calculators housed in really heavy plastic casings designed to make them feel heavy and substantial, to justify the high cost, with a TV attached.
Some day I will be proven right about this.
Since speech recognition is still a problem area, a pre-written scenario book will be delivered together with a robot. In this way, the robot has no need to hear and understand your speech.
It may go like this;
You turn on page 11 of the manual and dress up your Sexy Model 11ADJackie with a cowgirl costume and say “eleven”,
Robot: “you come here often?” (Robot stops here).
You: “Would you believe me it is the first time?”
Robot: (after sensing something was said)”How come I have not noticed you before?”
You: “You were always with that gbevers fellow. You did not give me any chance to move on you.”
Robot: “Gbevers? He turned out to be such a loser. I said goodbye to him today. Why am I talking about him? (Tears flow)”
You: “I guess I said a wrong thing.”
Robot: (after cleaning her eyes) “Tell me about yourself, Hansome.”
You: “Well, I am just a plain cowboy looking for a broken heart to mend.”
Robot: “What a sweetheart. I am already falling in love.”
You: “Let me show you how much I love and respect you.”
Robot: “Baby, shut up and give me all your loving.”
The Sexy Model 11ADJackie undresses in the most sexy way.
I guess talking is important. Phone sex industry is big both in the US and in Korea.
If the New York Times makes it policy to base their stories on predictions from Korean government agencies, they’re in for a world of embarrassment.
In fact, if they really want to play the gullible rube hell-bent on swallowing ridiculous predictions, they should have started with a front-page article about how “If all goes to plan, South Korea will become the hub of the galaxy by 2015, composed of 137 mini-hubs encompassing every sector of economics, politics, athletics, culture, science, technology, and academia.”
미트 조지 젵선!
> I wanna meet the writer of that article. Is he a freelancer
> or does the Gray Lady have an “office” in Seoul?
Sigh. Onishi has been a long-time employee of the New York Times, with stints in Africa and Iraq. NYT has an office in the Hankook Ilbo building.
Haisan–I’ll ask you because I figure you’d know, but Onishi’s Canadian, right?
The Marmot, Norimitsu is an evil zainichi.
Onishi is Japanese-Canadian, I do believe. Left for Canada when he was 4.
One of the stranger bits of Internet bitching/rumor-mongering I have come across is all the people who try to discredit Nori by calling him “zainichi”. Like that (regarless of its accuracy) has anything to do with his stories. It’s like the Japanese equivalent of the John Birch Society.
It can’t be that many people as I’ve hardly heard that superstition outside of Chewiestan.
Regarding robotics in Korea, the only time I’ve ever seen consumer robots here was in the housewares section of a department store showing the American Irobot vacuum cleaners sold at a hefty 100% -150% markup over the U.S. price (I still can’t figure out if the gross price differentials on imported products originate from foreign suppliers pricing their products as “luxury goods,” Korean importers doing the same, or high tarrifs). I have never seen domestic robot vacuum cleaners being sold at brick and mortar retailers anywhere in Korea, and even on the Internet these also seem overpriced and rare so if they’re selling well here it’s news to me.
K-pop singers and their back-up dancers strike me as robotic, as do many campus protesters.
North Korea has had robots in every home for decades. Catch up, South Korea.
Honda makes a robot, Korea has to make one too, but stick a replica of Einstein’s head on it, so Korea wins….
the latest predictions by the government of the petration rate of robots in korea in the future seemed pretty far out there, but maybe not. in an interesting interview with one of the founders of irobot, we can glean a little extra info that may point more accurately to korea’s plans than norimitsu did.
surprisingly, irobot has sold more house cleaning robots than i had imagined and their penetration rate in the ROK is surprising as well.
as far as the costs of such machines,
with the penetration rate so high and the price reasonable it only makes sense to make these things yourself inside the country. i assume there’s a whole bunch of reverse engineering going on with cleaning robots. the other examples of robots in the article are all engineering feats accomplished. the one fly in the ointment, which i think baduk brought up, is speech. perhaps with the devotion to language in korea some serious work can be done on this. god knows microsoft has had a dedicated department for this for years and has progressed but gotten nowhere near their ambitions 15 years ago.
link to above interview
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.....e/1435.cfm
But the price is not reasonable, it’s practically double the USD price. I would like an Irobot vacuum myself, but the extremely large markup, even considering localization, voltage adjustments, and additional freight expenses, is vexatious.
not clear-i meant that with koreans looking at the retail price of the roombas in the US ($150 and up as compared to $500 in korea) it’s easy to see that production inside korea via reverse engineering would save them a lot of money-not to mention no IP royalties. the market already exists, they’re simply focusing on robot design and production within korea (or more likely china).
Judge judy,
Thank you for the iRobot article. I enjoyed it.
Some electronic items are expensive in Korea because of luxury tax(50-100%). The Roomba, together with foreign golf clubs and foreign cars, is under the tax.