How Robots are Born
Via Ezra, then Matt, I’m reminded of Max Dean and Raffaello D’Andrea’s self-healing chair:
Really though, I find their earlier work, The Table: Childhood, to be the superior piece of autonomous furniture artwork (though less impressive technically).
On a more pragmatic note, Matt seems to have quelled his typical worries over an imminent robot uprising. Instead he expresses concern that most robotics work is being funded by DARPA, and thus conducted with military applications in mind.
My impression, as a CS graduate student, is that DARPA (as oppose to NSF or NIH) funded research has access to much more money, but also more demands/pressure. This wasn’t always the case, and I do get the sense that attitudes toward DARPA funding has soured some in the past decade.
Getting an NSF grant is quite competitive, and hence professors tend to devote a lot of their time to grant writing. Also, a typical grant is not that large (say enough to support one or two graduate students for a few years), but once you have a grant, you need only submit annual progress updates, which are typically brief. The main “accountability factor” for such grants is one’s reputation. If you don’t publish valuable results, you’ll have a hard time getting future funding.
In contrast, DARPA grants can provide much larger sums of money for large projects of military interest (for example, bionic arms). Grant recipients, however, are likely required to produce quarterly progress updates, travel to progress reviews, and be available for meetings/presentations. As such, DARPA funded research is more susceptible to external pressure. Obviously this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s enough to make some academics reluctant.
In the case of robotics, I do think a lot of fundamental tools (for example, better object recognition, automatic path planning, object manipulation) could be developed in the context of a DARPA grant. The primary difference would be that the military provides access to fancier hardware. For example, iRobot makes small, inexpensive vacuums for consumers, and rugged but pricey PackBots for the military (they’re built Ford tough).