I have a dream that everyone has a robot for him/her on the Internet.
What is Robot?
Currently, your are being benefited by the technologies of “Robot”. I do believe that you use search engines, like Google, Live Search, Baidu, to find something you want at least one time a day. And these search engines are built up by Robots. Maybe these robots are not called “Robot” directly but in other names like “Googlebot“, “msnbot“, “Baiduspider“. These robots crawl over the Internet, fetching web pages back to the search engine data-stores. And search engine will index the pages ( Indexing is a very complicate procedure. Maybe, I will talk about indexing later. ). So any search query coming from you will get a sorted list of web page titles, descriptions and links. And you may be happy with a result and click on what you are looking for.
That is concept about robot. Robots help us a lot.
More Robot Categories
You already learn about search engine robots. But what about other kinds of robots? Sure, there are other robots.
For example, IM (instant messenger) robot, let’s call it IMbot. IMbot should know how to make some simple conversations. For example, when a friend say hi to me, IMbot will say hello to him/her, so I don’t have to reply that “hi”. If my friend is just being kind to say hi, and no further conversation, then I may not be interrupted. And later, IMbot reports me all “hi” from my friends. And IMbot should also work on “goodbye” or “good night” under same principle. Maybe in the future IMbot will become more intelligent, response in a smarter way to all kinds of conversations.
Another example of robot: reading robots. Let’s call Readingbot. Readingbot may help me to find out new words, may help to highlight the main paragraphs from maybe-badly-designed layout, may find some related articles on same topic that I am reading or may help me to categorize the topic to my knowledge-store. And Readingbot may help me make some comments. For making comments, Readingbot may get noticed that I am selecting some texts, which I want to make comments on, then it searches my knowledge store and construct sentences, then I may be ready for my comments.
Robots can help us in lots of other Internet activities.
How to Build a Robot for Myself?
Robots do helps. But how to build a robot for yourself only? It’s a tough question for AI (artificial intelligence) world. The first thing we could do before an enough-intelligent robot is ready is that to collect enough personal information for robot. Robot should also mature itself along with the frequently usage by its owner.
About Privacy of Robot
To build up an intelligent robot, everyone has to feed its robot with enough information. The information should include what you are reading, thinking, writing, chatting or anything. This “anything” includes a lot of private information. So robot should be designed not to leak its owner’s private information. Privacy is important but there is also an old saying, “no giving, no gaining”. Robot helps us only when we give robots a lot of our information.
PS: It’s a long time since my last post “Hello Internet”.