Flood Fill vs. The Magic Circle

Like Rodney Brooks says, "No one has managed to get articulated fingers (i.e., fingers with joints in them) that are robust enough, have enough force, nor enough lifetime, for real industrial applications."

Here, I'll link to that piece directly, it's long and detailed and illustrated, and it also counters the idea of just throwing AI at the problem until robot dexterity emerges from whatever physical parts.

https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...

"there have now been fifteen different families of neurons discovered that are involved in touch sensing and that are found in the human hand" ... "a human hand has about 17,000 low-threshold mechanoreceptors" ... "These receptors come in four varieties (slow vs fast adapting, and a very localized area of sensitivity vs a much larger area)"

You might ask, do robots that interact with the real world need such complicated bio-mimicking physical tech, or can they cut corners? But they can't cut all the corners, anyway. Somebody has to make a high-bandwidth robot hand with flexible strength and a self-repair ability. Or, hey, cyborgs maybe? Reanimate cadavers with AI, that could do the trick.

Even if the assertion is correct, what would life be like with computers incomprehensibly smarter and faster thinking than humans?

All management decisions from the top down to individual manual workers handled by an AI (LLM or otherwise)?

Owner has a company-wide AI, instructs it to maximize profit and lets it run. It handles hiring and firing, marker research, advertisement, ordering supplies, ... It generates individualized instructions for each worker what to do throughout the day. Any communication between humans would be redundant, the AI would have microphones and cameras everywhere, humans would only be needed for physical interaction with the world. Even communication with other companies, suppliers and clients, would by done between AIs, they would be better and faster at negotiating.

1) It sounds like a dystopian nightmare - constant surveillance and taking orders from a machine which only cares your productivity.

2) Would it lead to a devolution of the human race? What makes us different from other animals is intelligence. If all humans are good at (= economical to use for) is manual labor, would intelligence stop being a sexually attractive trait?

3) It would completely remove any social mobility. If those who own companies continue owning them after an AI revolution and there's little economic value in human labor except the most menial, then there would be a 2 class society with almost no way for non-owners to become owners.

Does anyone know how this works?

I wanted a way to track letters sent via First Class mail. USPS doesn’t provide this directly, a la parcel tracking, but it does scan those letters — all of them — and the data is available, but you have to wire everything up yourself, jumping through a few hoops along the way.

it just me or are all these arguments in this essay sort of not convincing?

It doesn't work now, and it's hard so it can't be don't.

Printers don't perfectly connect digital and physical with no issues?

"So what?" Better than doing it by hand or any other solution we have.

That's the only thing that matters, relative value.

Maybe I'm just not getting how they connect with the current reality? Or how they even make an argument against it?

The world can exist without humanity, but humanity cannot exist without the world.

"Ok, so what?"

Well, applying a new tool to an intractable problem is certainly something that will take skill. Someone who finds a general purpose way to do it will become very rich. For my part, I was sufficiently thrilled when Claude Code could self-iterate on a simple device to hold board game cards for me. The more sophisticated modeling isn't so easy with it, but the fact that I could use a machine intelligence to construct surfaces for me is amazing to me. 5 years ago if you had told me this I would have called you a bullshitter.

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-11/Modeling_Wit...