From Butler Lampson's 2004 talk The Ongoing Computer Revolution
"Looking at the history of computing from 50,000 feet, you can see that computers are good for three things: simulation, communication, and embodiment. We started with simulation, of nuclear weapons and payrolls. Twenty-five years later communication started to blossom, with e-mail, the Internet, and the web. Today, after another twenty-five years, we’re in the earliest stages of embodiment: computers interacting with the physical world. The Mars rovers and the Roomba vacuum cleaner are just the beginning. For twenty years I’ve been predicting that the next decade would be the decade of household robots. Well, now we have one, so I was only twenty years too early.
Comments