The Avatar Economy | MIT Technology Review - 0 views
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Progress toward the “avatarization” of the economy has been limited by two technical factors that don’t involve robotics at all. They are the speed of Internet connections and the latency involved in long-distance communication. Connecting a Thai worker to a robotic avatar in Japan with enough signal fidelity to carry out nonroutine work may be more difficult than engineering a cheap robotic chassis and related control systems.
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How much bandwidth is enough? A “perfect” (just like being there) connection to a robotic telepresence system must accommodate a signal of 160 megabits per second. Theoretically, too, the distance between robot and worker shouldn’t exceed 1,800 miles
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Telepresence means that in theory, 10, 100, or 1,000 times as many workers could compete (virtually) for the same work. No matter how bad things get in Madrid or Houston, an avatar worker somewhere else could sell his or her labor for less. The same outsourcing logic applies to many high-wage jobs that rely on physical presence and motor skills, including the work done by cardiologists and machinists.
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Article datant d'1 an, imaginant une économie de type Avatar (le héros est allongé et va sauvé la planète via une connexion sans fil à un corps à distance; il interagit avec les autres, apprend de nouvelles compétences, et même se marie-alors que son corps "réel" est couché sur une dalle à plusieurs km de là). I believe outsourcing of nonroutine labor via robotic telepresence could begin to occur on a mass scale within a decade. Let's take the time to manage the avatar economy thoughtfully while it is still young.