Delta Robots

I’ve been seeing these around for a while now… uber-fast inverted pyramid robots… Delta Robots.

as commented upon by hacked gadgets, who have found a home-made variant:

Which is pretty cool – there seem to be a few of these on youtube etc… and it looks like servos are producing some pretty fast reaction-times. I wonder how strong they are.

Anyway – I saw this short by Neill Blomkamp, the guy who directed District 9… and it looks like Bladerunner maybe… escaped androids…

And it kindof occurred to me, when I saw them doing kung-fu… why would they want to? I think by the time we’ve managed to make robots that can pass as humans, they’ll be so much better at doing everything that humans can do that it will be kindof moot.

I keep getting these little corner-of-my-eye prophetic glimpses of an ecosystem of robotic innovation that’s totally out of control.

The point we’re at now is similar to how it may have been back in the early days of computing – where it was actually possible for someone to have a pretty good overview of the whole field of programming – not just of the few languages there were, but of the actual people doing the work… and maybe the programs. I think that that is the point we’re at (or slightly past it) with robotics at the moment.

But look at programming now. It’s exploded. It is literally out of control – there are thousands of different programming languages (each with different variants, and generations), and the ecosystem of programs has spawned botnets and viruses and self-generating, code… genetic algorithms, and a million different programs, all humming away.

If you’re using a PC, hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE and click on the ‘processes’ tab.

Those are all the little (or big) programs running on your machine right now – I’m betting you only know what a tiny fraction of them are.

So anyway, I have a feeling that robotics might go this way – and this human-fixation is vanity. A total red-herring. The least useful thing that we can do with the technology.

We’re en-route to making something that is much bigger than us, and has capabilities way beyond ours, and the thing that interests us most, is being able to see ourselves reflected in it’s shiny surface.