WHY ROBACUS
Actions speak louder than words. Today's
computers must be made to act, rather than
just re-act. That is the only way they
can make full use of their ever increasing
power. They must take over
all the labors of their users. Then
the limit of man's mental capacity can be
extended to keep in pace with the
runaway growth in computer.
We have come a long way in abacus, slide
rule, calculator and computer. Such
passive tools must be made robotic in order
to be active. Our first task is to
make a robotic abacus, or ROBACUS.
What
makes ROBACUS an action-oriented
tool is an entity called software robot.
Recording all the steps of tasks
normally performed by computer users and
playing them back much like the emulation
of the user's action by a robot, the
software robots can replace the users in
the future as the doers of tasks.
This feature of recording/playback would
not make much sense if we are still
dealing with computer
hackerishes. We need
to facilitate all dialogues between
users and
computers to be either
in natural language or in terms of
clickings of menus or graphics.
ROBACUS is therefore
interfaced to users by a natural-language
programming program and clickable
menus with English labels. Both the
natural languages and menus being clicked
are recorded and played back verbatim.
The software robots are very useful not
only to their creators, but also to
others who have the related problems to
solve. We need a way to pool all the
software robots so they would be
accessible to everyone.
Toward this end, ROBACUS is also made into
a wakeable personal
server. In this way it
can be connected to the outside
world to form a network of
personal servers of
home PC's called OUTERNET. We can leave
the surfing, dotcom'ing(and -go'ing)
and e-commerce to
the Internet. On OUTERNET, we'll do
knowledge farming.
ROBACUS will quickly evolve into an effort
to autmate all the manual labors and
intellectual tasks. The fast expanding
power of computers allows, as well as
requires, us to do that.
