Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

best experience of the world’s doctors. Robodoc will also analyze the data from your bathroom, your clothes, and furniture, which have been continually monitoring your health via DNA chips. And it might ask you to examine your body with a portable MRI scanner, which is then analyzed by supercomputers. (Some primitive versions of these heuristic programs already exist, such as WebMD, but they lack the nuances and full power of heuristics.)
    The majority of visits to the doctor’s office can be eliminated in this way, greatly relieving the stress on our health care system. If the problem is serious, the robodoc will recommend that you go to a hospital, where human doctors can provide intensive care. But even there, you will see AI programs, in the form of robot nurses, like ASIMO. These robot nurses are not truly intelligent but can move from one hospital room to another, administer the proper medicines to patients, and attend to their other needs. They can move on rails in the floor, or move independently like ASIMO.
    One robot nurse that already exists is the RP-6 mobile robot, which is being deployed in hospitals such as the UCLA Medical Center. It is basically a TV screen sitting on top of a mobile computer that moves on rollers. In the TV screen, you see the video face of a real physician who may be miles away. There is a camera on the robot that allows the doctor to see what the robot is looking at. There is also a microphone so that the doctor can speak to the patient. The doctor can remotely control the robot via a joystick, interact with patients, monitor drugs, etc. Since annually 5 million patients in the United States are admitted to intensive care units, but only 6,000 physicians are qualified to handle critically ill patients, robots such as this could help to alleviate this crisis in emergency care, with one doctor attending to many patients. In the future, robots like this may become more autonomous, able to navigate on their own and interact with patients.
    Japan is one of the world’s leaders in this technology. Japan is spending so much money on robots to alleviate the coming crisis in medical care. In retrospect, it is not surprising that Japan is one of the leading nations in robotics, for several reasons. First, in the Shinto religion, inanimate objects are believed to have spirits in them. Even mechanical ones. In the West, children may scream in terror at robots, especially after seeing so many movies about rampaging killing machines. But to Japanese children, robots are seen as kindred spirits, playful and helpful. In Japan, it is not uncommon to see robot receptionists greet you when you enter department stores. In fact, 30 percent of all commercial robots in the world are in Japan.
    Second, Japan is facing a demographic nightmare. Japan has the fastest-aging population. The birthrate has fallen to an astonishing 1.2 children per family, and immigration is negligible. Some demographers have stated that we are watching a train wreck in slow motion: one demographic train (aging population and falling birthrate) will soon collide with another (low immigration rate) in the coming years. (This same train wreck might eventually happen in Europe as well.) This will be felt most acutely in the medical field, where an ASIMO-like nurse may be quite useful. Robots like ASIMO would be ideal for hospital tasks, such as fetching medicines, administering drugs, and monitoring patients twenty-four hours a day.

MIDCENTURY (2030 TO 2070)
    MODULAR ROBOTS
    By midcentury, our world may be full of robots, but we might not even notice them. That is because most robots probably won’t have human form. They might be hidden from view, disguised as snakes, insects, and spiders, performing unpleasant but crucial tasks. These will be modular robots that can change shape depending on the task.
    I had a chance to meet one of the pioneers in modular robots, Weimin Shen of the University of Southern California. His idea is to create small cubical modules that you can interchange like Lego blocks and reassemble at will. He calls them polymorphic robots since they can change shape, geometry, and function. In his laboratory, I could instantly see the difference between his approach and that of Stanford and MIT. On thesurface, both those labs resembled a kid’s dream playhouse, with walking, talking robots everywhere you looked. When I visited Stanford’s and MIT’s AI laboratories, I saw a wide variety of robotic