Conversation

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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