Sci-fi Fridays #3: General-purpose Telerobotics
Reminder: For the next several Fridays, we are going to provide a writing prompt based on a technology we think is ripe for a coordinated research program. In the comments, we want you to create a piece of flash fiction that includes the prompt technology in some way! At the end of the eight weeks, we’ll pick a first, second, and third place winner through a combination of likes on posts and program manager discretion. These people will receive one of Spectech’s “core books” that we send to people who join.
General Purpose Telerobotics. Robotic autonomy is shockingly hard. The ability to seamlessly act in the world through a robot anywhere in the world could enable so many things: space manufacturing, vastly better utilized labs, improved eldercare, and so much more. Teleoperated robots don’t need to be human-size or shaped either — they could be as big as a building or as small as a cell.
Imagine a world where anyone can put on some gear and then see what a robot sees, feel what the robot feels, and can seamlessly contro what it does.
# Recursion
"You'll soon feel better ... " Dr Stoneheart croned to the patient exposed skull on the 3D monitor. As a top-notch tele-neuro-surgeon, he'd forgotten the number of teleops so far this year. 5,000? 6,000? Whatever, the Firm provided the entire infrastructure, from remote surgical table to his personalised haptic auto-corrective feedback apparatus to control the delicate instruments halfway across the world. 30min of intense concentration, then a 15min break to chill before next prep. Time-slicing multiple specialists allowed the Firm to deliver affordable care whilst allowing him to work from his lake-side retreat. Stoneheart focused, conscious of his age as younger colleagues joked about the Old Man in the background spatial audio. Sheesh ... he could still out-micromanipulate any two of them on a good day. Unfortunately today wasn't a good day, the headache from yesterday had gotten worse, his fingers felt heavy though the dashboard reported no deviations, and that back-support harness seemed off. And that headache seemed to be treating him as congo-drum. He couldn't afford to quit for a break just yet, it was getting to the delicate stage of splicing the biopolymer electrodes to the nerve graft. The Firm prided itself on 6-nine reliability on prosthetics and he was their star surgeon, irreplaceable, and their face for advertising. Stoneheart breathed carefully, his subtle twitches weaving the micro-manipulators in a ballet of beauty, though the headache was turning into a timpanni chorus.
Suddenly the screen flooded red ... "What ..." he wanted to snap to assistant to fix but the words stuck in his mouth. The headache had gone but at same time he couldn't feel his fingers ... the red flood was chased by a black sea as vision faded away to ... to ... as the black receded, .... the sound ... of .... assistant's voice, "You'll soon feel better ... "
Heinlein already covered this better than I ever could in his short story "Waldo" written in 1942:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_(short_story)