Robots > automation btw
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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.
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A brief but huge influence n my career was a workshop I took at the 2000 ACC…
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An even bigger influence was a talk on biomimicry for controls by Kevin Passino of OSU towards the end of my phd, which provided the seed idea for my next 2.5y of postdoc work. He later wrote a book about biomimicry based controls in 2005. eeob.osu.edu/people/passino
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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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Good times
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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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And so it begins
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Amazon announces its first household robot
bbc.in/2XT9XH9
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Replying to
This is not true. The only metric you can think of, because you yourself are constrained, is "stronger" which is subjective for you. You have no idea what the "strength" of a god is by definition. The most we could do as mostly just humans was build pathetic pyramids.
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