I wonder what people who built this with dozens of transistors would make of the fact that we can't really do a lot better with billions of them, a radio link to trillions more and 60 years of work.
I think they would marvel at the scale of industrial automation, assembly lines in factories, robots packing and moving boxes in Amazon warehouses, Roombas in people's homes, autonomous cars on the roads and drones in the sky, all the stuff Boston Dynamics comes up with.
This thing probably cost 1000x a roomba to build. Current supply chain issues aside this ‘future’ tech is now accessible to most of the population now.
They would chuckle when they realized how instead of seeking to replace $8/hr labor to do simple tasks with fancy robots, we instead decided to focus on telecommunications and mobile computing, and now anyone can buy a smartphone for $800 that has a 120 fps HD+ screen (inconceivable to someone in the 60's) that can download 100mbps (inconceivable) almost anywhere in the world (inconceivable), record 4k/60FPS HDR video(inconceivable), store 1TB data (inconceivable) buy anything in the world and have it delivered tomorrow (inconceivable). We've built far more interesting and useful things.
Furthermore, It's not that we can't, we just don't want to. We like interacting with the world around us. Most people enjoy cooking, cleaning our living spaces, etc. As it ties us to the world. If we outsourced this to robots, we would maybe save some time, but then have to deal with robot repairs and troubleshooting.
Which would you rather do: Make dinner on a lovely Le Creuset pan or troubleshoot your Super Cook-a-tron 3000 because it broke down again?
> Furthermore, It's not that we can't, we just don't want to. We like interacting with the world around us. Most people enjoy cooking, cleaning our living spaces, etc.
I'm not sure. From what I've seen, cooking and cleaning are usually considered to be inconvenient. I'd wager that most people do these things themselves because the alternatives are expensive in the long run, in more than one way.
We have amazing industrial robotics now. We also have bots that can navigate real world organic spaces, they're just expensive and nobody knows what to do with them in any consumer appplicationn.
Are you sure? My roomba can self navigate the house, and go back to a charging station as needed - including if the room geometry changes around it or if it's dropped in an unknown area.
I'd say the Internet is a good example of a cybernetic model that is a step up in scale from this. That's pretty impressive!
We actually do a lot of things much better than this lil guy, that just don't take the form of robots the way the futurists and scifi authors of the 60s predicted. I can order food online to be delivered to me on a device the size of my hand, that also connects me to most of the earth's population, and gives me a direct line to all of humanity's knowledge, art, and perspectives. We really do live in the future, it just doesn't look like the Jetsons!
Dunno - did you see that Waymo is operating autonomously in SF now? I think that the revelation of the complexity of the real world is the most interesting part of the story.
