If the tech industry worked like the music industry, continued.

“Hey, it’s my rock star devs! How’s it going, guys?” “It sucks. We busted our ass for months building this thing, and we can’t make enough money to pay rent. We’re all living in the same house.” “That sucks, but look: you’ll make your money on the next app. That’s how it works. Aren’t the […]

Refining the ideas.

I’ve been thinking about my little scheme, and I’ve talked to a couple of people who know far more about electronics than I do. I’m a software person, essentially, and so I think in those terms. Basically, one of the problems people have had with my idea is that every actuator requires different circuitry, because […]

Behavioral, autonomic, mechanical compared to Marr’s tri-level hypothesis

As I mentioned in my last post, my model for cybernetic systems bears a lot of resemblance to David Marr’s tri-level hypothesis, which he defines as computational, algorithmic and implementational. I’ll quote from the site linked above: The computational level is a description of what information processing problem is being solved by the system. The algorithmic level is […]

Behavioral, autonomic, mechanical: a model for building badass robots

[Update: since I started writing this, a Twitter friend helpfully pointed me at Marr’s levels of analysis, which upon quick study appears to be pretty much identical to this idea, so I’ll be framing this in his terminology at some point.] This rides on the tail of the previous post. I’m just trying to get […]

The world is a robot.

This afternoon, I attended an excellent talk by Ken Goldberg about “cloud robotics” — the idea of building robots that are essentially taught and controlled by the Internet “cloud”. As Ken was talking, I had a moment of pure epiphany about cloud robotics and the “Internet of things“. I realized that the underlying assumptions about […]