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

Kinect is able to sense. It immediately becomes clear that if the Kinect is not completely solving the SLAM problem for the room, it’s coming close. In real time, Kinect draws a three-dimensional map of the room and all the objects in it, including a coworker. It picks up the word DELL pressed into the plastic on the back of the computer monitor, even though the letters are not colored and only one millimeter deeper that the rest of the monitor’s surface. The device knows where it is in the room at all times, and even knows how virtual ping-pong balls would bounce around if they were dropped into the scene. As the technology blog Engadget put it in a post-SIGGRAPH entry, “The Kinect took 3D sensing to the mainstream, and moreover, allowed researchers to pick up a commodity product and go absolutely nuts.” 22
    In June of 2011, shortly before SIGGRAPH, Microsoft had made available a Kinect software development kit (SDK) giving programmers everything they needed to start writing PC software that made use of the device. After the conference there was a great deal of interest in using the Kinect for SLAM, and many teams in robotics and AI research downloaded the SDK and went to work.
    In less than a year, a team of Irish and American researchers led by our colleague John Leonard of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab announced Kintinuous, a “spatially extended” version of KinectFusion. With Kintinuous, users could use a Kinect to scan large indoor volumes like apartment buildings and even outdoor environments (which the team scanned by holding a Kinect outside a car window during a nighttime drive). At the end of the paper describing their work, the Kintinuous researchers wrote, “In the future we will extend the system to implement a full SLAM approach.” 23 We don’t think it will be long until they announce success. When given to capable technologists, the exponential power of Moore’s Law eventually makes even the toughest problems tractable.
    Cheap and powerful digital sensors are essential components of some of the science-fiction technologies discussed in the previous chapter. The Baxter robot has multiple digital cameras and an array of force and position detectors. All of these would have been unworkably expensive, clunky, and imprecise just a short time ago. A Google autonomous car incorporates several sensing technologies, but its most important ‘eye’ is a Cyclopean LIDAR (a combination of “LIght” and “raDAR”) assembly mounted on the roof. This rig, manufactured by Velodyne, contains sixty-four separate laser beams and an equal number of detectors, all mounted in a housing that rotates ten times a second. It generates about 1.3 million data points per second, which can be assembled by onboard computers into a real-time 3D picture extending one hundred meters in all directions. Some early commercial LIDAR systems available around the year 2000 cost up to $35 million, but in mid-2013 Velodyne’s assembly for self-navigating vehicles was priced at approximately $80,000, a figure that will fall much further in the future. David Hall, the company’s founder and CEO, estimates that mass production would allow his product’s price to “drop to the level of a camera, a few hundred dollars.” 24
    All these examples illustrate the first element of our three-part explanation of why we’re now in the second machine age: steady exponential improvement has brought us into the second half of the chessboard—into a time when what’s come before is no longer a particularly reliable guide to what will happen next. The accumulated doubling of Moore’s Law, and the ample doubling still to come, gives us a world where supercomputer power becomes available to toys in just a few years, where ever-cheaper sensors enable inexpensive solutions to previously intractable problems, and where science fiction keeps becoming reality.
    Sometimes a difference in degree (in other words, more of the