I long made the same mistake of assuming history. The answer is no, that kind of interaction wasn't transactional in a robotic way, it was highly trust-and-relationship building. Which is exactly what we are missing today.
Go to a farmers market week after week, buying and talking to people. It is completely different from a vending machine. I know the people at my market, if they asked for help I'd help them for nothing in return. And I have no doubt at all they would do the same for me.
The vending machine owner would get no such help from me, nor would I expect them to help me if I asked.
Correct. The rapid urbanization of society has crippled us - we are pack animals suddenly thrust into an environment with a constant nascent undertone of hostility.
The feeling of constantly being surrounded by people you can't trust is a foreign and debilitating one.
It made me reflect quite a bit and there is something really strange and somewhat spooky about America…
For example, how does the government and administrative apparatus even function since they are staffed by a cross section of the very same society?
By all theory Washington given the much higher density of deceivers, intriguers, scoundrels, etc., than even a typical American city… should pretty much immediately grind to a halt.
This is really cool stuff. I've always wanted fuel-based work with a high level programming languages. Having a language compile to wasm with wasmi now seems like a nice way to achieve that.
Fastmail is fantastic, has a standards compliant calendar, a notes space, webdav, and a pretty decent mobile app
I still have a Gmail address because getting a bazillion people to update their address books is a monster problem but otherwise I'm glad I at least halfway won't lose my digital life if some Google bot decided it doesn't like me
I think they leave out a lot of evidence, like rates of bullying-and getting bullied, being dramatically higher with cell phones. I'm not convinced that one correlation being murky == teen social media and smartphones are not a problem at all.
I don't find this particularly impressive for DeepMind, mostly because it seems like a ballistics/physics problem rather than a machine learning problem.
If DeepMind wanted to emphasize the learning aspect of it (and they should) then it should be in the title. E.g. "Novel learning algorithm leads to competitive robotic table tennis"
The paper addresses this. Part of the goal was to let the world model be learned rather than modeled explicitly by the programmer.
> To date, the Omron Forpheus robot [73], [62] has the closest capabilities to the agent presented in this work, demonstrating sustained rallies on a variety of stroke styles with skilled human players. A key point of difference is that our agent learns the control policies and perception system, whereas the Forpheus agent uses a model-based approach. More specifically, Forpheus leverages rebound and aerodynamics models in order to identify the optimal configuration of the robot so as to return the ball to a target position. The Omron system represents a highly engineered system that cannot easily be customized to new players, environments, or paddles.
> While there have been many demonstrations of robots playing table tennis against human players in the past, we believe this research is one of the first human-robot interaction studies to be conducted with full competitive matches against such a wide range of player skill levels.
Go to a farmers market week after week, buying and talking to people. It is completely different from a vending machine. I know the people at my market, if they asked for help I'd help them for nothing in return. And I have no doubt at all they would do the same for me.
The vending machine owner would get no such help from me, nor would I expect them to help me if I asked.