I believe a general mechatronic platform (i.e. personal robots) will be the next technology platform that will move humanity to the next phase. We already had the personal computer revolution, where pioneers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs brought affordable computing to the masses. IBM had failed to acknowledge this market.
The personal robot is a mechanical platform, powered by actuators, sensors, control systems and the internet. Routines (or programs) will be able to be installed onto these machines that will help automate a previously manual/laborious task.
Instead of having task specific robots like robot vacuum cleaners, lawn movers etc… I believe we will see an affordable mechanical platform that can be programmed to do a wide variety of general-purpose tasks.
The programmable interface will abstract away key components of the robot and allow developers to write “cross-platform” (in this case it might be different configurations of actuators, sensors, controllers etc) applications. Programmers with limited knowledge about control systems, scheduling, computer vision etc will be able to develop for this platform. Developers can monetise their applications by charging a subscription. A re-enforcement learning layer can help the machine learn from failures when failing to make certain movements.
If general intelligence comes before the mass consumer grade personal robot, then it will be very hard to monetise this platform. I should clarify. The leaders in the personal robot space will extract most of the value from this… with the personal computing platform, app developers were able to capture most of the value as they added the most value. With robots, closed platforms powered by general intelligence will not need developers to build apps for….