The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

by Richard Hamming

Setting aside the child’s view of a robot as a machine resembling a human, but rather thinking of it as a device for handling and controlling things in the material world, robots used in manufacturing do the following: Produce a better product under tighter control limits. Produce usually a cheaper product. Produce a different product. This last point needs careful emphasis. When we first passed from hand accounting to machine accounting we found it necessary, for economical reasons if no other, to somewhat alter the accounting system. Similarly, when we passed from strict hand fabrication to machine fabrication we passed from mainly screws and bolts to rivets and welding. It has rarely proved practical to produce exactly the same product by machines as we produced by hand. Indeed, one of the major items in the conversion from hand to machine production is the imaginative redesign of an equivalent product. Thus in thinking of mechanizing a large organization, it won’t work if you try to keep things in detail exactly the same, rather there must be a larger give and take if there is to be a significant success. You must get the essentials of the job in mind and then design the mechanization to do that job rather than trying to mechanize the current version—if you want a significant success in the long run.