More Dancing Robots — Thoughts and Some Responses

The buzz over the dancing* robots hasn’t abated over the last few days, which shows just how many people either loved the video or, like me, didn’t. What’s even more interesting is that so many people have taken to writing about what they saw, rather than simply moving on to the next big meme. Good conversation is all about dialogue, rather than monologue, and so answering some of those responses to my original post seems fair. Doing so, of course, requires that I dive into the comments section — what could possibly go wrong?

We Interrupt this Programming…

Quite a few people pointed out that I wasn’t accurate about the nature of the programming and engineering feat in the video. They have a point — I need to clarify that when I say that the intricacy of the movement is a result of programming and engineering, I don’t mean that the movements themselves were expressly set out for performance. Although it’s possible that a team of programmers would take the time to code, line by line, every sequence of the routine, ML systems allow for a far more hands-off approach to this kind of robotic activity. In other words, the engineers and programmers set out the broad strokes of what needs to be done as packages to be executed, but the processors and algorithms that drive the movements do the rest. And there’s no denying, it’s a technical marvel.

But while I can, and should, be more precise in the language I use here, the “programming v. ML system” point is a distinction without a…