I agree that his breakdown into A/B/C is instructive. From the outside, one sometimes fails to appreciate that the "B" role (basically, building a robot that w

I agree that his breakdown into A/B/C is instructive. From the outside, one sometimes fails to appreciate that the "B" role (basically, building a robot that will encounter novel problems) is really critical. This "shower thought" within the report also caught my eye: Incidentally, it has sometimes been argued that part of the stimulus to laborious male activity in creative fields of work, including pure science, is the urge to compensate for lack of the female capability of giving birth to children. If this were true, then Building Robots might indeed be seen as the ideal compensation. There is one piece of evidence supporting that highly uncertain hypothesis: most robots are designed from the outset to operate in a world as like as possible to the conventional child's world as seen by a man: they play games, they do puzzles, they build towers of bricks, they recognise pictures in drawing books (bear on rug with ball) -- although the rich emotional character of the child's world is totally absent. It's somewhere in the Venn diagram between deeply perceptive and reductively essentialist, and I can't decide where.