This week finds me even more surprised that it’s already Friday again than usual. My, how the time flies when you are bone idle and spend all your time inside your own skull.

First up, let’s deal with the cool new wave of robotics innovation : zoobotics.

No, it’s not a brand of antibiotics for zookeepers, it’s a new wave of an old idea : making robots that attempt to mimic animal life, in whole or in part.

It’s an idea that has been around for a long time, from the clockwork beasts of the Age of the Clockmaker to the more modern era where, for instance, the inventor of Velcro based his design on observing how burrs stick to your clothing.

And people have attempted to make robotic animals that mimic the real thing many times before, but the technological and behavioral barriers were just too high.

The technological barriers largely had to do with scale. Nature can pack an enormous degree of complexity into a very small space. Compared to nature, even the very best miniaturized parts and printed circuits of the previous era are clunky, slow, complicated, and incredibly hungry for energy.

But now that we have the beginnings of nanotechnology, the first glimmers of the post-silicon computing world, and a brand new wave of extremely attractively priced and user friendly robotics parts for the amateur roboticist to tinker with, the idea is back, and we can concentrate on the more interesing (to me) part : behaviour.

The thing is, we don’t really get what makes, say, an ant tick ^[1]. They seem like simple creatures and yet they exhibit complex behaviours without even having something you could call a brain. So obviously, they must be operating on an extremely simple set of instructions. But what are those instructions?

We haven’t the faintest idea. We try building virtual ants in simulation, and they don’t behave like the real ants at all.

The only solution is to build robotic programmable ants and tinker with them a while.

I look forward to the results of such tinkering!

Next up : if you are looking for a more domestic version of the virtual restaurant, why not try some virtual shopping while you wait for your train in South Korea?

I mean, check this shit out :

While you wait for your commuter train, you can wander the photorealistic virtual aisle, shopping by pointing your cell phone’s camera at the QR code at the product, and that adds it to your virtual shopping cart. Then you check out when you are getting on the train, the money is deducted from your online account, and you pick a time for the groceries to be delivered that evening.

Imagine that : coming home from a long day at work, and your groceries just arrive like magic. The idea holds much appeal to me.

In fact, if they have an efficient business model for home grocery delivery, that in and of itself is revolutionary, and could quite easily extend to online.

People have been trying to do internet grocery shopping for years, but nobody has been able to put it together and make it work. Maybe it will take a giant like Tesco (think Wal-mart but from the UK) to do it.

Last up : in another of my favorite fields, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, there has been another breakthrough : they created an artificial but fully functional and entirely organic small intestine in mice.

It is just like the real thing. They built it up layer by later with lab grown cells, and were able to reproduce what before only nature could make : a small intestine.

This is yet another small step towards a world where all parts of a human being are replaceable, and nobody has to suffer and die simply because a part stopped working.

We are a long ways from that future now, but who knows what the next decade will bring? There are already a few people walking around with vat grown organs in them right now. And the speed of innovation increases every year.

Perhaps some day having major organs replaced will be a routine surgery, and smaller replacements like a finger or a toe would be done on an outpatient basis.

And imagine being able to get rid of the need for organ banks and their attendant waiting lists? No more waiting and hoping someone gets in a horrible accident, with all the attendant guilt and karma.

Instead, you would just have to wait long enough for them to grow a new organ for you, or possibly just get one “out of the box” that is guaranteed to be rejection-proof.

I hope I live long enough to see this come true.