Read Online The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee - Free Book Online

allows them to do things that previously seemed out of reach.
    Researchers in artificial intelligence have long been fascinated (some would say obsessed) with the problem of simultaneous localization and mapping, which they refer to as SLAM. SLAM is the process of building up a map of an unfamiliar building as you’re navigating through it—where are the doors? where are stairs? what are all the things I might trip over?—and also keeping track of where you are within it (so you can find your way back downstairs and out the front door). For the great majority of humans, SLAM happens with minimal conscious thought. But teaching machines to do it has been a huge challenge.
    Researchers thought a great deal about which sensors to give a robot (cameras? lasers? sonar?) and how to interpret the reams of data they provide, but progress was slow. As a 2008 review of the topic summarized, SLAM “is one of the fundamental challenges of robotics . . . [but it] seems that almost all the current approaches can not perform consistent maps for large areas, mainly due to the increase of the computational cost and due to the uncertainties that become prohibitive when the scenario becomes larger.” 16 In short, sensing a sizable area and immediately crunching all the resulting data were thorny problems preventing real progress with SLAM. Until, that is, a $150 video-game accessory came along just two years after the sentences above were published.
    In November 2010 Microsoft first offered the Kinect sensing device as an addition to its Xbox gaming platform. The Kinect could keep track of two active players, monitoring as many as twenty joints on each. If one player moved in front of the other, the device made a best guess about the obscured person’s movements, then seamlessly picked up all joints once he or she came back into view. Kinect could also recognize players’ faces, voices, and gestures and do so across a wide range of lighting and noise conditions. It accomplished this with digital sensors including a microphone array (which pinpointed the source of sound better than a single microphone could), a standard video camera, and a depth perception system that both projected and detected infrared light. Several onboard processors and a great deal of proprietary software converted the output of these sensors into information that game designers could use. 17 At launch, all of this capability was packed into a four-inch-tall device less than a foot wide that retailed for $149.99.
    The Kinect sold more than eight million units in the sixty days after its release (more than either the iPhone or iPad) and currently holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling consumer electronics device of all time. 18 The initial family of Kinect-specific games let players play darts, exercise, brawl in the streets, and cast spells à la Harry Potter. 19 These, however, did not come close to exhausting the system’s possibilities. In August of 2011 at the SIGGRAPH (short for the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques) conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, a team of Microsoft employees and academics used Kinect to “SLAM” the door shut on a long-standing challenge in robotics.
    SIGGRAPH is the largest and most prestigious gathering devoted to research and practice on digital graphics, attended by researchers, game designers, journalists, entrepreneurs, and most others interested in the field. This made it an appropriate place for Microsoft to unveil what the Creators Project website called “The Self-Hack That Could Change Everything.” * 20 This was the KinectFusion, a project that used the Kinect to tackle the SLAM problem.
    In a video shown at SIGGRAPH 2011, a person picks up a Kinect and points it around a typical office containing chairs, a potted plant, and a desktop computer and monitor. 21 As he does, the video splits into multiple screens that show what the