Yes of course the thing will have to be programmed to some degree. The point is that it's within the realm of possibility to use AI to do computer vision and ro

Yes of course the thing will have to be programmed to some degree. The point is that it's within the realm of possibility to use AI to do computer vision and robot control, rather than having some programmer trying to figure out every possible edge case of a messy real world problem. Instead the programmer designs the reward function and collects data and sets the hyper parameters, then the AI figures out how to solve the hard parts of the task itself.