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The "civilization" of an environment is in your mind. The striated vs. smooth characteristics are mainly projections of your habitual behaviors and blindnesses, not so much physics (though there's a lot of that, IF you're adapted to the design of a built environment)
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For eg. a paved highway is a civilized built environment for cars, but not for deer or monkeys. A jungle is actually much more "civilized" from a monkey's point of view than a highway. A highway might as well be Mars to a monkey.
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Thinking about this because I'm trying to think through a design for a domestic *rover* that can get around and do things, not a domestic service robot like a vacuum cleaner or smart kitchen.
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Arguably, rovers are the true robots. Robots that are perfectly designed to fit an application are more like automation machinery. The reason we are reluctant to call a CNC milling machine a "robot" is that outside it's narrowly designed application regime, it has no abilities
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Ignoring for a moment the fact that the word "robot" comes from servant/slave worker, the modern connotation is more autonomy in less curated environments. If you put aligned smarts in the environment, you're automating rather than roboticizing.
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It is a robot only to the degree the environment is unmanaged, or managed for a purpose that does not comprehend the presence of the robot. A rover is the purest kind of robot.
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“My Umwelt is pure Gestalt,” mused the Roomba as it tidied up, for the 400th time, the books scattered on the floor of Jakob von Uexküll’s bedroom. “My pal DallE keeps insisting words mean things, and a picture is worth a thousand of them…”
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