Is a Cambrian Explosion Coming for Robotics?

This article originally appeared in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Summer 2015). We thank the American Economic Association for giving us permission to reproduce it here. About half a billion years ago, life on earth experienced a short period of very rapid diversification called the "Cambrian Explosion." Many theories have been proposed for the cause of the Cambrian Explosion, with one of the most provocative being the evolution of vision, which allowed animals to dramatically increase their ability to hunt and find mates (for discussion, see Parker 2003). Today, technological developments on several fronts are fomenting a similar explosion in the diversification and applicability of robotics. Many of the base hardware technologies on which robots depend--particularly computing, data storage, and communications--have been improving at exponential growth rates. Two newly blossoming technologies--"Cloud Robotics" and "Deep Learning"--could leverage these base technologies in a virtuous cycle of explosive growth. In Cloud Robotics--a term coined by James Kuffner (2010)--every robot learns from the experiences of all robots, which leads to rapid growth of robot competence, particularly as the number of robots grows.