Harry Veeder wrote:
People know exist inside factories or research labs, but most people don't have daily encounters with robots. This could be the first robot which is widely experienced.
That's true. But this is the minister of economic affairs who is gushing on about a minor, incremental improvement. I suppose she has been inside factories.
On the other hand, sometimes the mundane incremental improvements have the biggest impact. The Internet is a good example. It was designed to work with off-the-shelf telcom equipment. Sometimes, a true genius designer is one who inhibits or suppresses the urge to innovate, and finds a way to do things with existing equipment. The heart of the Internet is packet switching. When this was developed in the 1970s at ARPA, it probably would have worked better if they had designed new telephone switches from scratch. I suppose it would have been easier for them, too. But instead, they designed a less-effective, less optimized system that could be implemented quickly at a low cost. (Practically no cost, in some cases.) This was a brilliant decision.
Another example of this was the U.S. military's decision to mass produce DC-3 aircraft during WWII, even though the design was obsolescent by 1940. IBM made a famous decision to use prosaic 8088 processors and off-the-shelf software for the first IBM Personal Computer. This turned out to be a stroke of genius at first. No other plan would have survived IBMs internal politics and glacial in-house development process. But later, this decision came back to bite them on the butt and nearly bankrupt the company, by giving rise to Microsoft and compatible PCs.
- Jed
