Here’s the thing.
All the previous posts have been about the motion of the robot and the math it takes to achieve that motion. And most of that motion is anchored solidly to the ground.The machine tools and robots and etc, I mean, some of them work on moving objects, like robots painting cars or robots welding, but in reality, it’s all bolted down.
Lets take a look at positions, for a moment. You have a position in space, and so do I. We can look at our positions several ways, most commonly by distance and direction. This generally only works if there’s a road between us, which generally, there is not. We can sort of imagine that, though, as an airplane flight.
Once the airplane takes off, it is no longer connected to the planet. We have to give it’s location as a group of numbers. Imagining for a moment that the earth is flat, we can give that group of numbers as lat, long, and H above G. (Actual pilots have different ways of dealing with this, I’m just trying to simplify) Those three numbers would correspond to x,y, and z. If you know the origin and the destination and the location of the plane and it’s speed, it’s simple enough to calculate the time since departure and the time until arrival.
But this all treats the plane, the departure, and the arrival as dots. They arent, they have mass and occupy space. So there are three other important dimensions- they’re important to the passengers of the plane and damned important to the pilot. Pilots call them “Roll, Pitch, and Yaw”, and they correspond to the robot/machine tool A, B, and C.
The plane has it’s own six axis coordinates. The destination and departure places do as well. So do all of the people on the plane. So do all the parts of the people on the plane; as you move around your left foot has it’s own location in relation to your right, and it becomes fractally complex very quickly.
Now, I don’t know anything about football, but I know a powerful lot about motion. If you watch a football game, you will regularly see a man running, throwing a football at another man running, who catches it.
Think about this for a moment. This is of course a skill learned with some practice, but the sheer computing power required for the thrower to judge the distance he has to throw, compensating for the speed he is moving, all the while controlling his muscles to increase/decrease the speed, while watching for and examining obstacles, actually throw the ball, to another player who must also watch for and avoid obstacles, and intercept the ball, which has it’s own speed and direction and location, being simultaneously slowed by air friction and sped up by gravity in minute increments. And yes, there are incomplete passes but the fact that anyone catches a ball ever is downright astounding. And NFL players do it without ever thinking about it.
So now, do you still fear robots will be taking over soon? No, none of the things i have discussed are impossible to do with a robot, given resources, time, and money, but what would the point be?
I was thinking about that the other day. I was driving, and decided when it was safe to make a left turn.
In that moment, I evaluated the distance to the other vehicle, its approximate speed, and an estimate of how long it would take me to clear his path. The answer that came back was “GO” so I did, and no collision occurred.
If I had had to sit down and do equations to figure all that out, it would have taken me a good half-hour. But our brains can process the differential equations of motion in milliseconds. The least math-savvy among us do it hundreds of times a day.
More worried about Meteor of Death than I am about Robot Apocalypse.
True that. although there will be less need of NFL players and pilots once out robotic overlords crash the system.
Course I could be dead then so in the mean time I will do the mass/velocity conversion on the fly, like I do now.
My question about the robot apocalypse is “where do all the robots come from?” I hear pundits talking about nobody being able to work by 2030. Where do a billion robots to do everything come from? How much raw ore has to be produced and made into metal? How much silicon refined into how many platter made into how many processors and sensors? How much oil turned into plastics? And that’s just getting started.
We can make billions of FETs in a year because they’re about 400 square nanometers and we make millions at a time. They’re less substantial than a bug fart. A billion of anything macroscopic ain’t gonna happen in 13 years.
Precisely correct.
I don’t know that your hypothetical football player actually runs the differential equations in his head, so much as he’s caught so many footballs in his life that when he sees one take off at a given angle, at a given speed, he knows about where it’s going to come down. Likewise at the other end, he’s made that throw so many times he knows just where to aim it so the paths intersect.
Even more so,so many of the plays are “set” plays, meaning they run it during a game the same way they worked out in practice, QB throws the ball to the spot he knows the receiver can get to, most of the time the receiver isn’t even looking for the ball until the last moment (otherwise he’d tip off the defender that the ball was in-bound).
As far as the robot apocalypse, I’m more concerned about the self-driving cars everyone has vapors over. I’ve had too many computers crap out too many times when I needed them to work, I don’t wish to trust my safety to them over my Mark 1.0 (pun intended) eyeballs. I don’t much mind them handling things like my fuel/air mix, or monitoring things to let me know there’s a potential problem, or even watching for wheel slip and applying the ABS to make it stop. Kindly leave the steering, speed, and braking decisions to me, kthanxbye.
Mark D
We do make those calculations but we do so intuitively. Stroke victims sometimes lose the abilities we take for granted.
I havent been in a driverless uber yet, but its coming. And it will be a cluster, as you predict.
Happy Easter, Brother Og!
He IS Risen!
Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX
And to you,amigo. Indeed, he is risen!
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