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Those robots, compared to biology, are utterly unimpressive. You aren't going to get a robot butler before you have a robot honeybee, but where is the robot hon

• tlb 11y ago
  It's true that robot honeybees will require super-advanced hardware, because the job of a honeybee is stupendously difficult. Long range, weather, precision landings, surviving collisions, etc. That's a long way off. Robot butlers won't need very advanced hardware, because we've designed homes to be comfortable and benign. Comfortable temperatures, power available, utensils and appliances designed for ease of use. Same with logistics. So yes, we're a long way from humanoid hardware that could compete in a rodeo, or win a soccer match, or survive in the wild. But butlering is physically not too demanding.
• nostrademons 11y ago
  The wing of a plane is incredibly simple compared to the wing of a bird. No muscles, no bones, no feathers - it doesn't even flap. And yet it gets the job done. Nature has a lot of path-dependence that can be avoided with design. Think of how much cruft accumulates in a software program after 15 years of continuous evolution, and then multiply that by a million. It's not unreasonable to think that whatever hardware we use to emulate various human tasks might be a lot simpler than the wetware that makes up an actual human.