The Mechanical Dream
From Leonardo’s sketches to Japan’s robot factories—why industrial robots succeeded by avoiding intelligence altogether.
Chapter 1 of A Brief History of Embodied Intelligence
“It has no eyes. It doesn’t know if the part is there or not. It just assumes the part is there.” — Joseph Engelberger, watching Unimate
On a September morning in 1961, a two-ton machine made history by doing something utterly mundane: it picked up a piece of hot metal and put it down somewhere else.
Th…
