The remote controlled economy

An article written by Marvin Minsky in 1980 called Telepresence: a manifesto shows how forward thinking he was about telerobotics, or perhaps how slowly technology has progressed. At that time computing and communications technology were still in a relatively primitive state - for example, home computing was only just beginning - and I'd say that it's only really within the previous five years that telerobotics has become a really practical prospect.

For telerobotics you really need:

• Video cameras. It was really only from the late 1990s onwards that capture and transmission if images digitally became something which could be done cost effectively with consumer hardware, and only by the mid 2000s that enough internet bandwidth existed to do this well (broadband) without a lot of jerkyness. The transition of camera technology from analog to digital within the previous decade has been a largely unnoticed revolution.

• The internet, or some comparable system for high speed bidirectional communication capable of transmitting streaming video. Even though the internet existed in some form in 1980, computing speed and bandwidth would have been far below the minimum requirements.

• Wireless communications. It took at least another decade for wireless telecommunications to become possible via mobile phones, and another 10-15 years on top of that for the infrastructure to become ubiquitous and have enough bandwidth to support video.

• Small low cost computers which can act as telepresence relays. Embedded computer hardware fast enough to stream video and audio has only come into the price range of a few hundred dollars within the last five years.

• Low enough communications cost. It seems like a distant memory now, but 5-10 years ago being connected to the internet or making extensive use of mobile phones could be quite a pricey business. It was only around 2000 that flat rate internet subscription was introduced, prior to which communication would be paid for by the minute and costs could quickly mount up. Over a decade ago not many people could afford to be connected to the internet full time, without being cut off by their ISP or running up massive telephone bills.

Minsky identifies some of the main areas where telerobotics will be useful, and he also talks about the "men in suits" problem with regard to space based construction. The development of the International Space Station within the last decade has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that having (mostly) men in space suits bolting things together is not a scalable way to carry out construction work in space. To reduce risk and cost and apply economies of scale it would be far better to use telerobots operated from the ground, with the construction sites being in geostationary orbits. If the robots were semi-autonomous it might be possible for one operator to work on more than one construction task at a time, and the work could be done by anyone with minimal training, as opposed to the extensive training which astronauts must currently go through.

But the bulk of the telerobot revolution won't take place in space or even in nuclear power stations (which presumably was a fashionable topic in 1980) but instead in the more mundane settings of homes, office spaces, streets, hospitals and ground based construction sites where there is far more potential for economic and social transformations to occur. Some of this could be controversial, since the ingrained tribalism of human psychology is often opposed to "foreign" workers and I'd guess that the legal and taxation frameworks of most countries are not geared towards a situation where potentially anyone can telerobotically do physical work at any location within a few seconds of logging in, although there may be benefits in terms of a much reduced need for migration and essentially perfect automatically policed immigration control. Telerobotic working also enables an expanded workforce which includes people who previously would have been considered to be economically inactive, such as the disabled and elderly.

Also telerobotics makes no assumptions about the progress, or otherwise, of research in AI. Even if you take a very pessimistic view in which AI remains a near intractable problem taking decades or centuries to solve with no major breakthroughs along the way this doesn't prevent the rise of a telerobotics industry in the near future. Many of the services for which telerobotics is a facilitator may also be fundamentally human-to-human in nature, such as health care or holidaying, so this isn't necessarily a robot takeover situation even if AI does make significant progress. For many such scenarios you can just think of the robot as another kind of communications channel.