Item — HN Reader

>> Personally, though, I would bet on dedicated, single-purpose robots, working together through wireless communication.

Robonix Philosophy at play here, inspired from Unix philosophy [1]

- Make each robot do one thing well

- Expect the output of every robot to become the input to another

- Design and build robots to be tried early, ideally within weeks

- Use robots in preference to unskilled help to lighten a chore task

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Origin

2 comments

Difference is : robots take up a lot more space. Having multiple simple robots leads to traffic in the real world and taking away space that humans could use. If robots could be like bosons that would be better

I'm not actually sure that's a difference. On the old systems where that philosophy was developed, disk space was at a premium. In fact, IIRC, the lack of space precipitated the need for a modular system of the sort described by the Unix philosophy.

For a hundred robots, sure. For inner city apartments, sure. But I could put 10 of these things in the corner of this room right now and mostly not notice.

Meanwhile, someone somewhere is probably working on robot-mode for emacs!