The Computational Universe

Professor Arora’s lectures presented how it has been the dream of man to “breathe life into matter.” The existence of Golem, Automata, Frankenstein, and R2D2 have all come to prove this disposition of mankind.

But with new breakthroughs in technology, robots – the manifestation of our dream to ‘breathe life into matter’ – have constantly made progress. HAL or R2D2 may not be a future too far away. Right now, robots are digging up valuable information on Mars (it must be noted that it is much more efficient to have a robot on Mars rather than manually controlling a machine), aiding surgeons, and acting as pets – like Sony’s robot dog AIBO. There are also, of course, cleaning robots in our homes, and our very own Scribbler, which my roommate mistook for a cleaning robot and jumped in joy at the prospect of not having to clean the room anymore. (He did, of course, release a series of rather harsh verbal comments on the Scribbler after he found out its true identity.)

Thus, robots are not everywhere in our culture/society yet, but they are continually increasing in utility and importance. We are beginning to see more of cleaning robots and robot pets like AIBO, and they will become cheaper as time goes by. More sophisticated robots like the ones in a “Da Vinci” robotic surgery system, will continually aid us in implementing more precise operations.

Where are we going with all this? As Brooks says in “Flesh and Machines,” “if the early parallels between computers and robots hold up,” we can expect them to play a pivotal part in our society in terms of economy, culture, and everything else.

Robots will not just be cleaning in our rooms and on our windowsills, but be actively taking part in the economy. Brooks predicts, however, it will take a while for robots to fulfill man’s lazy fantasies, such as bringing all sorts of things like beer, shoes, or underwear at verbal commands. Each can be done, but separately, and for a robot to be able to carry out all these kinds of things, we will have to wait decades.

Hi, I’m Rudy and I’m from Seoul, South Korea. I used to live in Texas, but managed to escape acquiring Bush’s adorable accent. I am a huge, huge, huge fan of Man United. (Enough said Leeds, Chelsea or Liverpool fans. I’m not even going to mention Wenger’s French squad) I have been following their games for years, and I still watch them at Princeton. Unfortunately, though, there are less games to watch this season as they are out of the Champions League…

I don’t know what I’ll major, and right now I’m just feeling things out. I’m a freshman living in Walker and I’ve taken/am taking classes in archaeology (well, sorta. It was my writing seminar), filmmaking, economics, politics, philosophy, film theory, and religion/lit. So I’m just taking different classes and getting a taste of various disciplines.

My reason for taking this class…Well, I need an ST class and my advisor was not letting me leave until I chose an ST course in the advisory meeting for spring courses, so I thought I’ll just take this class. It looked interesting, and the lectures have been pretty good so far. I hope to learn the basics in understanding computation through this course.

 Update 6:15PM on 2/13/06: I use PCs, almost only PCs, but because of my film class, I’ve used Macs - as they are used in the workstations at the vis arts center for editing.