Thread: Robots
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Old 01-26-2013, 03:31 PM   #6
lbb
Location: Massachusetts
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 3,202
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Re: Robots

I'm no robotics expert, but one thing that fascinates me about modern robots (as opposed to sci-fi robot images from mid-20th century popular culture) is how much they're not like human beings. Maybe once upon a time the idea was to create anthropomorphic robots and make them move and act like humans to do a function that humans did. Then they chucked the idea of human shape and movement and just made robots that perform the same function -- so the robot has no legs and one arm, perhaps, because that's all it needs for its function. I expect that the function gets rethought too, so that when robots are added to an assembly line, you don't just look at the function of each human being and design a robot to do that function, but you rethink the whole problem and subdivide the tasks differently, without the constraints of the human form.

Robots aren't artificial intelligence, they don't get "taught", really. They're designed to perform a function. I don't know if you could design a robot to do aikido in any meaningful sense. Aikido is a human thing that expresses itself within the human form. Robots don't have the constraint of that form.
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