Conversation

Replying to
So a refrigerator that turns a compressor and light on and off using simple sensors isn’t a robot. A rice cooker with fuzzy logic is probably where the spectrum starts.
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I think there should be at least one fairly general sensor-actuator pair adapted to an open environment rather than a closed event set. Like camera and mobility. Roomba has IR obstacle detection and mobility.
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Interesting that many near-robots control a contained environment (fridge, bread machine, rice cooker). And temperature, moisture are intensive property scalar measures where a point measure will characterize extensive state of a whole contained, well-mixed space.
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A real robot sees an unbounded containing environment in full 4d: 3 space plus time. Kitchen appliances are really 1.5 d in a bounded space they contain: time and a set of point measures like temperature. Roomba is 3d (2d plus time). Flatland robot.
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The robotics phase shift in factories is a good dividing line. Even high end CNC machines seem qualitatively different from general robotic manipulators. The philosophy of movement is more open-ended and general.
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Trying to think of something that’s obviously a robot but also obviously not anthropomorphic or biomorphic. Projection resistant. Like perseverance and ingenuity seem like a camel and a dragonfly to me. Can’t help projecting.
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Replying to
It’s really weird that in the 80s robots were at the heart of sci-fi excitement but then went into a kind of recession. Boston dynamics stunts seem oddly detached from the mainstream. Disembodied cloud AIs hog all the attention.
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Cloud computing isn’t AI gods. It’s just the robot back office for low latency compute needs. Bangalore for robots.
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It’s ridiculous that typed or spoken human natural language is still how computers see most of reality. And presenting media streams on screens is how they mainly affect reality. Robots are the real endgame.
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Boston Dynamics is to personal robotics what Xerox Star was to personal computing. Time for the Macs and PCs of robotics. Roomba is like graphing calculators or Wang word processors
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The magic threshold. 0.1s.
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Replying to @educationpalmer
I think situated collocation of sensing, compute, and actuation matters far more than people realize. Magical things happen when the closed loop latency goes under 0.1s.
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Interestingly Asimov’s *very* early robotics stories feature a variety of form factors around positronic brains like cars and animals. In later stories things go default humanoid with some specious justification about space colonization with proxy humans. Need to reread.
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During the software revolution robots were so eclipsed we used the term for software bots. And put robots.txt files on websites to direct their traffic around. Even form factor terms like worm, spider, crawler got appropriated. It’s outrageous. Gonna become an RJW.
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Robot conversion kit: 2 gimballed cameras, one speaker, one microphone, a bunch of servos on tethers with universal clamping adaptors to actuate joints of anything you attach it to. RPi loaded with Wisecracking Conversation AI DSL.
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