Two soldiers. A group of talented and kind robot developers, and the golden age of Silicon Valley technology surges.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public number “Silicon Star” (ID: guixingren123), 文 | CJ Editor | VickyXiao.
In robotics and AI threat theory, don’t forget that they were originally born for the benefit of mankind.
It’s like fate suddenly took back all the gifts.
The vocal cords are stunned, you can’t say a word, you can’t move your body, you can’t look down on a finger, you can’t even make an expression – all expressions are cut off.
Henry Evans stares at the ceiling of the ward: How can I let others know that he can hear, see, feel pain, and think intact?
In 2002, he was only forty years old, from the chief financial officer of Silicon Valley companies to a dumb dumb.
The peak of the American dream is close at hand: Henry graduated from Stanford Business School and raised a family of his wife and four children, trying to buy a home on the hills of Los Altos in Silicon Valley. He is more than one meter tall and has a healthy body like an athlete. His dexterous hands cut the stump to be the cradle of the eldest son and are preparing to renovate the new home.
Henry and Jane
However, in the rescue room, Henry first lost control of his right hand forever. “I am scared,” he said to his wife, Jane, and the last sentence of the vocal cords.
It is a sudden illness like a stroke. The blood vessels leading to the brain are blocked. The brain cells that control the body’s motor function are all dead, and the whole body is paralyzed. Only the eyes can move.
But the horrible thing is that his perception and thinking are intact–He is trapped in his body.
He can even hear a doctor’s verdict: “Death is a better relief.”
The cruelty of the disease is that even if you have had a secular success, your immediate fate is only sent to the nursing home to wait for death.
Everything you have is instantly dissipated like smoke. Henry had many friends, many of whom regarded him as a living undead, mourning and condolences, and then never appeared. He lost his loved CFO job and began to drift away from home. He can only speak with a spelling board through his eyes, but no psychologist has enough patience to listen to his story.
Finally he also told his wife, Jane, “I don’t want to live.”
Thirteen years have passed.
In this midsummer dusk, the Silicon Stars saw Henry on Los Altos Hill. The medical miracle did not happen and his body was still in a wheelchair. But he should be the best flying drone, manipulating the robot to roam the farthest place, control the ball best, participate in the development of the most functional robots, and write the best whole body paralysis for country music.
Evans couples and robots
He regained control of the body with humans and robotic friends, as well as the freedom and dignity of being born.
He freed his soul.
Diving Bell
When Henry woke up, his wife Jane was singing “Phantom of the Opera” in his ear. She heard that many vegetative people were awakened like this. In order for Jane to believe that she was conscious, Henry tried to tell Jane that he still had a traffic violation ticket that was not processed.
In fact, when Jane saw her husband’s gaze reading the music, she had already believed that Henry’s brain thinking was no problem.
However, the mind is sensitive, and at the same time, the whole body can’t talk, it is more like a torture.
Henry can hear everything around him and see that he needs to use antibiotics to prevent the body from rot. He even began to experience hallucinations.
Itchy.
He reached out to scratch it, and he was free to move in his dreams. Suddenly, the mind woke up and tried to convince him: You are already paralyzed.
It’s like a drowning sound, and he’s worried that he’s going crazy.
That was just his nightmare, but Jane could walk away from the nightmare. The hospital repeatedly persuaded Jane to send Henry to the care center.Have the opportunity to start a new life.
But Jane refused. She always felt that for a year, Henry would die there.
The Evans family left Silicon Valley and went to Montana in the northwestern United States for rehabilitation. Disabled people seem to be no longer protected by the laws of human civilization. Henry saw a younger stroke patient than him. The condition was not as serious as him, but he was abandoned by his family and waited for death.
Few people can hold the throat of fate. The brain of physicist Stephen Hawking belongs to the wealth of all mankind. Intel built a sounding instrument for him to build a wheelchair worth nearly a million dollars. After falling into the same symptoms, Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of the French magazine Elle, licked millions of eyes and wrote a memoir, “Diving Bells and Butterflies.” The diving bell is his body that is not free, and the butterfly is his thinking that he can dance freely.
On the third day of the book’s publication, Bauby died of pneumonia.
Henry can also write a “Diving Bell and Butterfly” and spend his life in memory. He did start blogging:
What kind of life will a patient like him face?
Henry and four children after illness
People think he is selfish. When he speaks with a spelling board, he omits the words “please” and “thank you” for politeness but troubles others’ spelling. The short language style is like giving orders. When he feels his legs are getting cold, he wants a blanket to avoid more trouble for others after freezing. But people think he asks too much.
He also gradually lost his human dignity. He needs caregivers to feed. When the caregiver turns around and talks to others, the food hangs in front of his eyes, as if he is tormenting a hungry person.
But he can’t speak, can’t justify, can’t protest. He habitually yawns, only to think that he can’t even open his mouth.
Henry also received numerous promises of goodwill but not fulfilled. Because of his disability, people promised to take his child’s tuition and pay him, but those promises are often not below.
He gradually understood this, politely thanked, and then tried to forget what people promised, and would not be too disappointed.
After two years of drifting home, the landlord drove them out of the rented house, and the Evans returned to the mountain homes of Silicon Valley. The yard is fullThe wild grass, the tenant made a claim to repaint the interior walls, the magical color of lime green and orange made Jane want to cry.
But as they returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, some sleepy thoughts were awakened.
If he can still control his body, it will be fine.
CTO partner of the former company Chris Tacklind came to visit and was shocked to see that old friends lost everything. Henry struggled to draw a PPT to express his “laser finger” idea, launching a laser through a remote control on the glasses, and controlling the circuit switch.
Tacklind served as a tutor at Palo Alto High School. He took the tool with 13 students in his spare time and received funding from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When Henry used the “laser finger” to instantly turn on the lights of the MIT classroom, the audience applauded.
This is his first small victory against destiny. After 9 years, Henry waited for a turn of fate.
In 2011, Henry saw CNN show a robot called PR2 on TV, and sparks in his mind. He told Jane through the spelling board:
“PR2 robot can replace my body.”
Willow Garage
Steve Cousins ran a 6-mile winding mountain road in a truck and went to Henry’s yard to grill squid, rice balls and vegetables. He received an email from Henry when he was the CEO of Willow Garage.
Cousins realized after years of cooperation that being able to control his body is extremely important to Henry.
Cousins communicates with Henry with a spelling board: Silicon Stars
Henry has a sense of humor that makes people laugh in three minutes. When he speaks, he will say: If you have to have a stroke, the Silicon Valley in the 2000s is a place where people can be nice.
In 2006, a robot company was born in Silicon Valley and named the Willow Garage, founded by Google’s first architect, Scott Hassan. Hassan wrote the code for the predecessor of the Google search engine during Stanford University. He left with a lot of stocks donated by Google and started a new adventure.
Like science fiction, Hassan dreams that robots can realize the dexterity of human hands, perform complex tasks, and wash clothes on the table. Just like every family has a computer, every family can also have a robot assistant. Industrial robots have been widely used at the time, but because the technical difficulty is too high, the robot field for personal service is still blank.
Silicon Valley is just a place where miracles are alive. If there is nothing, create one yourself.
Hassan convinced Cousins to be the CEO of the Willow Garage, leading the organization that brought together think tanks, research laboratories, and incubators.
This was one of the most amazing forces in the Silicon Valley robotics field. As early as the 2000s, Liushu Garage took the lead in establishing computer vision and automation operations to lay the foundation for the industry. They developed a PR2 robot costing $400,000 and organized a “graduation show” in 2010. 11 PR2 robots held flags and danced with the classic disco music “Mr. Robot” in the 1980s.
In the night when the whole stadium was ignited by robots, Hassan made his “Robot Declaration”: “I want to make the robot come true in my life. This is the vision of the Willow Garage, making the robot a reality! Let this Become an industry!”
“This will change the world”
When the Willow Garage did not pursue wealth, the slogan was: “Influence first, capital return second.”
11 robots were given free to researchers, enabling people to develop robot functions, share code, and jointly promote the development of robot functions on the same open source platform.
Henry tells Silicon Stars, “After experiencing huge losses, you can’t always be immersed in sorrow, you have to decide how to go in the future, or make the most of what you have.”
PR2 reveals the potential to complete complex human actions, and if Henry can control PR2, then he can master his daily life.
At the beginning of Henry’s being beaten by the disease, he had only one pair of eyes left.The eye can move. Through rehabilitation, he can swallow, move his head and a finger.
There are only the remaining body movements that allow Henry to use the head tracker. Henry’s glasses have a white dot on the laptop, which can be used to track the infrared rays reflected by the dots. The algorithm calculates the trajectory of the head movement and converts the head motion into cursor movement. With this instrument, Henry can control the computer.
Everything starts here.
When the Evans parked their car at the door of the Palo Alto Willow Garage, Henry spelled Jane: This is my former office.
Jane can’t believe this coincidence. “I thought he was joking again. He always looked like that until he wanted to take me inside.”
Henry tells Silicon Stars that there are many highlights in his life, but the most crucial moment is that Willow Garage promises to work with him.
After Henry contacted the Willow Garage, Professor Charlie Kemp of the Georgia Institute of Technology formed a graduate team, and Cousins formed a team of researchers and engineers who worked together to write a large amount of software for the PR2 robot to implement Henry. Thoughts.
The PR2 robot became a family member of Henry and Jane, and life became sci-fi. The Willow Garage took two years to design a robotic control system for Henry that required only a web browser and a mouse to control the robot.
Henry designed the computer’s control interface and became the robot’s tester. He can control the PR2 robot to open the refrigerator door, take the drink, and control the PR2 to give the children sugar on Halloween.
After ten years, Henry also shaved himself with PR2 for the first time. Cousins told the Silicon Stars that in order to make Henry shave more smoothly, they created a facial model for Henry that allowed Henry to scratch the beard of the corresponding part by clicking on the part of the model.
Henry also used a handy control of the PR2 to shave a professor at Kemp, Atlanta, a thousand miles away.
Butterfly
Henry never regained the ability to walk, but he was more than a full sense of the two common words: “Beam me in” (I fired the past), which is the American science fiction “Star Trek” in the classic lines, Let the character move instantly to the destination.
Sistars: We would like to invite you to SYNC Assembly , in mountain View computer History Museum Henry: Beam me in
This is still a pun. In 2011, Hassan founded Beam Robot Company outside the Willow Garage.
At that time, Hassan employees were dispersed in different regions, and there were always misunderstandings and obstacles in communication and cooperation. To solve this problem, they designed a robot consisting of a mobile base, a display, a camera, and a call voice system. A distant colleague can manipulate the robot to turn around in the office, find local colleagues to communicate face to face, and even a group of Beam robots can be held together for a remote meeting.
When the Beam robot wanders around the San Francisco Art Museum with Henry’s face,His amazing visitors didn’t even care about painting, and he twisted his neck and stared at Henry. After many years, Henry even walked back to the Stanford University campus with the Beam robot, and self-tune: “It feels good to go back to college, if I can afford such a expensive tuition.”
Henry also served as a wedding flower girl in her fifties, driving a pair of new couples with a Beam robot.
Henry brain hole is clear. If you look at it differently, everyone has a disability, can’t fly like a bird, and can’t sneak into the deep sea like a fish. Henry said, “If humans want to reach 60 mph, they need a tool – that is the car.”
Beam is the robot that gives Henry maximum freedom of movement. He will open the Beam to greet the guests, summon the nurses, go to the East Coast lab to participate in research, and even play football. This brought him a great sense of well-being. After all, in the cold reality, he was full of body and could not do without a wheelchair.
Henry has always been a fun person. He likes to open a party, likes whisky spirits, likes to eat chocolate, and walks through a T-shirt with the words “Put me in chocolate sauce.” He likes to drive in the snow, and when his classmates run out of the 125-mph speed, he will happily record in his blog: “I may be the fastest patient in the car.”
When Jane met Henry in high school, he was a quiet and shy teenager. Later, they studied in Austria and France, and Jane never met a person as interesting as him. They were even born in the same hospital, as if the story was doomed from the beginning.
Henry still likes to open Party. When all the guests are present, he will smile and squint and spell out a sentence: “Let the party begin”.
For the love of fine wine, Henry collaborated with a graduate student at New York University to create a “whiskey robot” controlled by blinking. Henry blinked his eyes and started the machine to turn the straw and put the wine
