Conversation

Too many people fail to see the huge design space between uninspired poles of “a dishwasher is a robot” and “humanoid imagined by a narcissistic anthropocentric humanist” The trick to robotics is to be loosely inspired by biology without being constrained/limited by it
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Replying to @vgr and @s_r_constantin
“Sufficiently complex loosely biomorphic machine with a domain adapted universal computing capability” is a better definition. Feedback loops and computing element are necessary but not sufficient.
I’m sure this stuff is all very dated, as I myself am, but it was formative back then, and along with Asimov as a teenager, established “want my own proper robots” as a life goal 😎
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The seed idea, in case you’re curious, was the passing observation that schools of fish can pass right through each other, which led me to a whole class of hierarchical robot motion planning algorithms where you can kinda ignore obstacles at higher levels
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The hard stuff was actually done by 3 undergrads I was supervising for the papers above... one is now a prof, and I think the other 2 are also active robotics/controls researchers. I saved the easy parts of the problem for myself 😎 Students are almost as good as robots
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Robotics proper often gets uninterestingly sucked into either AI or automation as an afterthought. I think it's actually richer and more interesting than either. Robotics is open-world situated intelligence. AI has a disembodiment degeneracy, automation has a design degeneracy.
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ie, in AI you enjoy the advantages and simplifications of not having a body. In automation you enjoy the advantages and simplifications of being able to design the environment to overcome the limitations of the machine.
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A superficial view would conclude that being constrained to a specific "body" makes intelligence weaker. Actually it makes it stronger. It takes a smarter AI to live in a particular body than in no-body. Incarnations are smarter than gods.
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