SoylentNews

AnonTechie [soylentnews.org] writes:

A very interesting article about programming Robots, written by BENJIE HOLSON:

I worked on this idea for months before I decided it was a mistake. The second time I heard someone mention it, I thought, “That's strange, these two groups had the same idea. Maybe I should tell them it didn’t work for us.” The third and fourth time I rolled my eyes and ignored it. The fifth time I heard about a group struggling with this mistake I decided it was worth a blog post all on its own. I call this idea “The Mythical Non-Roboticist”.

The idea goes something like this: Programming robots is hard. And there are some people with really arcane skills and PhDs who are really expensive and seem to be required for some reason. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do robotics without them?1 What if everyone could do robotics? That would be great, right? We should make a software framework so that non-roboticists can program robots.

This idea is so close to a correct idea that it's hard to tell why it doesn’t work out. On the surface, it's not wrong: all else being equal, it would be good if programming robots was more accessible. The problem is that we don’t have a good recipe for making working robots. So we don’t know how to make that recipe easier to follow. In order to make things simple, people end up removing things that folks might need, because no one knows for sure what's absolutely required. It's like saying you want to invent an invisibility cloak and want to be able to make it from materials you can buy from Home Depot. Sure, that would be nice, but if you invented an invisibility cloak that required some mercury and neodymium to manufacture would you toss the recipe?

In robotics, this mistake is based on a very true and very real observation: programming robots is super hard. Famously hard. It would be super-great if programming robots was easier. The issue is this: programming robots has two different kinds of hard parts.

Source: General Robots [substack.com]

Original Submission