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

“toys” that have chips in them and some intelligence. The workbenches are full of robot airplanes, helicopters, trucks, and insect-shaped robots with chips inside, all moving autonomously. Each robot is a self-contained unit.
    Various types of robots: LAGR (top), STAIR (bottom left), and ASIMO (bottom right). In spite of vast increases in computer power, these robots have the intelligence of a cockroach.
    But when you enter the USC lab, you see something quite different. You see boxes of cubical modules, each about 2 inches square, that can join or separate, allowing you to create a variety of animal-like creatures. You can create snakes that slither in a line. Or rings that can roll like a hoop. But then you can twist these cubes or hook them up with Y-shaped joints, so you can create an entirely new set of devices resembling octopi, spiders, dogs, or cats. Think of a smart Lego set, with each block being intelligent and capable of arranging itself in any configuration imaginable.
    This would be useful for going past barriers. If a spider-shaped robot was crawling in the sewer system and encountered a wall, it would first find a tiny hole in the wall and then disassemble itself. Each piece would go through the hole, and then the pieces would reassemble themselves on the other side of the wall. In this way, these modular robots would be nearly unstoppable, able to negotiate most obstacles.
    These modular robots might be crucial in repairing our decaying infrastructure. In 2007, for example, the Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis collapsed, killing 13 people and injuring 145, probably because the bridge was aging, overloaded, and had design flaws. There are perhaps hundreds of similar accidents waiting to happen across the country, but it simply costs too much money to monitor every decaying bridge and make repairs. This is where modular robots may come to the rescue, silently checking our bridges, roads, tunnels, pipes, and power stations, and making repairs when necessary. (For example, the bridges into lower Manhattan have suffered greatly due to corrosion, neglect, and lack of repairs. One worker found a 1950s Coke bottle left over from when the bridges were last painted. In fact, one section of the aging Manhattan Bridge came dangerously close to collapse recently and had to be shut down for repairs.)
    ROBOT SURGEONS AND COOKS
    Robots may be used as surgeons as well as cooks and musicians. For example, one important limitation of surgery is the dexterity and accuracy of the human hand. Surgeons, like all people, become fatigued after many hours and their efficiency drops. Fingers begin to tremble. Robots may solve these problems.
    For example, traditional surgery for a heart bypass operation involvesopening a foot-long gash in the middle of the chest, which requires general anesthesia. Opening the chest cavity increases the possibility of infection and the length of time for recovery, creates intense pain and discomfort during the healing process, and leaves a disfiguring scar. But the da Vinci robotic system can vastly decrease all these. The da Vinci robot has four robotic arms, one for manipulating a video camera and three for precision surgery. Instead of making a long incision in the chest, it makes only several tiny incisions in the side of the body. There are 800 hospitals in Europe and North and South America that use this system; 48,000 operations were performed in 2006 alone with this robot. Surgery can also be done by remote control over the Internet, so a world-class surgeon in a major city can perform surgery on a patient in an isolated rural area on another continent.
    In the future, more advanced versions will be able to perform surgery on microscopic blood vessels, nerve fibers, and tissues by manipulating microscopic scalpels, tweezers, and needles, which is impossible today. In fact, in the future, only rarely will the surgeon slice the skin at all. Noninvasive surgery will become the norm.
    Endoscopes (long tubes inserted into the body that can illuminate and cut tissue) will be thinner than thread. Micromachines smaller than the period at the end of this sentence will do much of the mechanical work. (In one episode of the original
Star Trek,
Doctor McCoy was totally revolted that doctors in the twentieth century had to cut skin.) The day when this is a reality is coming soon.
    Medical students in the future will learn to slice up 3-D virtual images of the human body, where each