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That’s it. The summer Olympics are over for another four years.
Whether you’re in to sport or not, it’s hard to avoid getting caught up in the drama at some point or other. The Olympics are a celebration, not just of the best athletes in the world, but of what we can achieve as humans: how fast we can run, ride or swim, how strong we are, how much pain we can endure, how accurate or brave we are.
In that sense, the Olympics are a showcase of our physical prowess.
But there’s another “sporting” event – another showcase of what we can achieve – coming up on the horizon that may have much more profound implications for the world – and for your investment portfolio.
I’m talking about the “Cybathlon”.
Let’s deal with the obvious question right away. The Cybathlon will be held in Zurich, on Saturday, 8 October this year. It’s a celebration of what humans and technology can achieve in combination together. There will be races involving mechanical arm and leg prostheses, brain-computer interfaces, high-tech wheelchairs, powered exoskeletons and more.
The event is billed as giving you the chance to “watch the athletes as they tackle flights of stairs in the new wheel chairs and prove their speed and skill using the most up-to-date modern prostheses. The various races test how the competitors cope with specific challenges and activities from everyday life. There are races for athletes with powered arm and leg prostheses, for those wearing a robotic exoskeleton and for powered wheelchairs. There’s also a race for cyclists using electrical muscle stimulation and even a brain-computer interface race.”
It promises to be a fascinating event. And it’s all part of a very important tech trend that has huge potential in the coming years: “assistive” technology. As Frontier Tech Investor investment director Eoin Treacy put it:
“Human and machine collaboration is something we’ve taken for granted since we first discovered how to make fire. For instance, a computer can beat a grand master at chess. But pair a machine and human together on the same team and they’ll beat a computer operating alone.
“The same principle is true across the board. It’s known loosely as assistive technology – using robotics to work with us – to integrate with our lives and help us do things that are impossible for us alone.
“Assistive technology helps us to do things we might not otherwise be able to do. In that regard it might be a robot, but it is not that different than a vacuum cleaner or car. It is simply a tool that allows us to be more productive. In much the same way that a car can be used to run people over it is primarily used as an indispensable mode of transport. The vast majority of robots will be the same. They’ll do things that are too dangerous for people to do, they’ll help us be more productive in our jobs and they’ll pick up some of the mundane tasks we’ll be too busy to do.”
The central idea here is that robotics isn’t just this branch of technology that will ultimately put millions out of work as every job on the planet gets automated. It’s something that will actually improve our lives in a huge number of different ways.
Loosely speaking, I try to think of things in two categories. Robotics that will assist us: to help us do things our bodies just can’t or won’t do. For instance, helping paraplegic people walk again.
There’s been a steady stream of incidents of this over the past couple of years (expect it to become commonplace as the technology improves), but I’ll just give you the latest example. Earlier in the month, researchers at the Walk Again Project in Brazil announced that they’d helped eight paraplegic people to walk again using a combination of virtual reality, robotic exoskeletons and brain-computer interfaces.
Let’s not get bogged down in the details today. The key is this is a great example of technology assisting people, giving them the ability to do something they otherwise wouldn’t.
The second category is technology that enhances our abilities. This is where we get into the realm of super-human ability – using technology to help us do something we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do.
Robots are already in our factories, increasingly in our homes and providing us with entertainment. However, while the vast majority of uses are peacefully mundane and incredibly useful, there is no getting around the fact robots have potential as military tools.
The USA’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) likes the look of Iron Man and wants to have suits that might not be able to fly, but would allow soldiers to walk further, carry more equipment, offer protection from the elements and allow them to arrive less fatigued.
It’s not just the military that has an interest in creating more efficient personnel. Daewoo is experimenting with a powered suit for its shipyard workers that allows them to lift a 30kg piece of iron with ease. In a shipyard where that kind of activity is mundane, there are obvious advantages to pairing the sensitivity of a human with the brawn of a robot.
Then you have something like disaster recovery – in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster several Japanese robotics firms developed special exoskeleton suits to enable people to reach places they couldn’t alone.
Assistive, enhancive or both, these kinds of things are what technology is really about at its core: helping us achieve things we couldn’t do alone.
As I said yesterday, following stories like this in detail – and showing you how to invest directly in them – is why Eoin Treacy and I launched Frontier Tech Investor. If you’re interested in understanding how technology will impact your future (your life and your wealth), it’s a must read publication. You can find out more here.
