Honda has published a history of their Asimo robot series, very interesting and a nice background on research: boys, it takes time to make something good.
that inspired me te brushup the image by them and compare it to current semantic desktop proceedings. If we compare the state of ASIMO with semantic desktop, it would look like this:
robotics is sometimes as ambitious as semantic web. It hink the current Semantic Desktops look like early ASIMO prototypes while end-users expect them to look like Microsoft Software, like people expect robots to look like Enterprise’s ‘Data’ and robots look like metal with motors.
there is hope though, that we will be faster with semantic desktop than with humanoid robots
Ahhh..you rate Haystack as Big Borther to Gnowsis, I wonder if they even belong to the same family (metaphorically) ;-),
The Comparison of SemWeb with Robotics is interesting, one belongs to the web of ontology and meaning.the other is the result of doing common sense on silicon.The combined effort could be enlightening to overcome any of today’s challenges and vision to make the world more sensible.