> You've made a list of a half-dozen fields that need to be advanced. Which one are you working in? Either as your day job, or your hobby? Or are you just sitting on the sidelines going "it's all been done before"?

Let's be careful not to engage in shooting the messenger, which does nothing towards addressing the validity of the argument.

That said, I am playing in a couple of areas, for example, applying AI to learning. The huge difference is that I am doing it in the context of a private enterprise. I am not asking taxpayers to shovel money at my toy projects. There are companies out there that exist solely because of hundreds of millions of dollars of tax money being thrown at projects that produce very little of real value.

What would you say if DARPA threw tens or hundreds of millions of dollars at a company that set out to rebuild an operating system virtually identical to Linux? I would hope you'd come forward and say that we need to work on other things. This has been done, multiple times, and does not need to be reinvented until advances in other technologies warrant it.

If you read what I said carefully you should see that my primary argument is that we are throwing money at the wrong problems. Tax money.

If you have a private company and want to iterate through a dozen expensive mechanical design exercises for whatever reason and YOU fund it. Fine. Your money. Your decision. You get to do whatever you want.

My problem is with tax money that is repeatedly thrown at the wrong problems. We don't need to push for advances in mechanical design. We need to push for advances in the areas I mentioned and more. Sensors, for example.

Have you seen iCub?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcTwO2dpX8A&list=UUXBFWo4IQFk...

It's open source. You can download the entire design and build one yourself. I have it on my machine. I can open every single part in Solidworks, look at it and modify it.

Tell me what this platform is lacking and why we have to spend so much money reinventing the wheel? Hundreds of millions of dollars.

We and others have already thrown lots of time and money into the mechanical design of a myriad of platforms that are fantastic for the development of the really tough areas that need attention. We somehow choose not to build on top of that but rather throw money at doing the same thing over and over again and producing little usable tech out of it.

Do you realize that Boston Dynamics got nearly TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS of US government money [0]? For what? To build otherwise useless platforms that make the government guys go "ooh" and "ahh" because they really don't know what they are looking at. It's magic! Let's throw more money at it. While, in the meantime, the money should have gone into some of the areas I highlighted and others.

This is not the best analogy, but I'll try. This would be similar to throwing $200 million dollars to repeatedly build MRI machines that do little towards addressing the needs of, say, Cancer research. In reality you need to throw the money at specific areas of Cancer research (not a biologist, so I can't list them) rather than at making MRI machines. We know how to make MRI machines. That's a done deal. What we need to improve is everything else.

We know how to build robots like these. These are academic exercises. Take a small team of engineers covering the required fields and they'll build you these robots. It's an exercise in IMPLEMENTATION. We know how to do it. It's just a matter of doing the work.

How many HN members could build a little galloping robot in, say, five years, if I threw five or ten million dollars at them and there was not requirement to build something that was commercially viable in any way. Lots. Same results as BD with 5% --or less-- of the money BD got. That's a sign that this requires no more R&D money until we improve everything else.

What we need to invest money on are the things we don't know how to do well enough. They are not very sexy. I get it. Who wants to be the guy to throw money at AI for ten years and have to explain to a General why all you got are some graphs and numbers on a screen. Significant as the results might be, it's a lot easier and more exiting to show a bunch of ignorant gate-keepers a ridiculous machine galloping along or bouncing around. It's a sexy supermodel in a bikini. Very soon everyone forgot what the hell they were there for and throw more money at it so they can see another one.

[0] http://usaspending.gov/search?form_fields=%7B%22search_term%...