The most effective way to nerd snipe a roboticist is to present them with a controversial definition of a “robot”. When I served on an industrial safety standards development committee, we once spent a memorable two full days trying to define “robot” sufficiently broadly so as to ensure the standard would apply to all reasonably forseeable uses of industrial robotic arms in industrial automation, but sufficiently narrowly so as to ensure we did not accidentally force newly developed types of industrial robots into a standard that would wrongly constrain them. This was, I say with all honesty, was an immensely enjoyable two days.
I love this kind of thing. I will be pedantic all day long. So of course, my esteemed colleague Tina decided to lob a grenade at me by asserting that a dishwasher is a robot.
There are two ways I could womansplain to her just how wrong she is. One is to meet her at her level by debating the technical definition. My primary technical issue with her explanation is that I do not agree with how she describes the “manipulation” capabilities of a dishwasher.
The spray arms and soap release mechanisms are just that, mechanisms – they do not handle objects, and manipulation is about handling objects. Dishwashers are absolutely _automated_ systems, and increasingly smart ones (though I side-eye the manufacturer that makes my dishwasher calling it “fully autonomous” because it cracks it open on completion to let everything cool). But they’re not robots.
They fall short of the technical definition Tina used. But the alternative I prefer is to inform Tina that she is wrong because robots are not actually defined by their technology, so arguing that way is meaningless. The word, and how we choose to apply it, is entirely a social construct.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing