Perhaps gov contractor speak would be more accurate. I'd think a corp with an org sufficiently aligned to their business value and profit motive wouldn't stand for the fancy speak either
> I don't want something with the arm strength of a forklift taking care of my parents or kids.
Robots in such an environment are designed with the appropriate affordances so that they cannot use too much force... but the concern about weight I suppose is quite salient.
> A chance for real connection and healing that isn't vulnerable to the whim of a tech giant and its compulsion for profit.
That "chance" had years to materialize that did not. Perhaps the worst thing that happened here was that the chatbot did not steer her to resilient human connection when she was in a self-reported better state after the help of the chatbot
I agree, and I think that your claim is compatible with the comment that you are responding to. Indeed, perhaps it's turtles all the way down and there is systematic complexity upon systematic complexity governing our universe that humanity has been just too limited to experience.
For a historical analogy, classical physics was and is sufficient for most practical purposes, and we didn't need relativity or quantum mechanics until we had instruments that could manipulate them, or that at least experienced them. While I guess that there were still macroscopic quantum phenomena, perhaps they could have just been treated as empirical material properties without a systematic universal theory accounting for them, when instruments would not have been precise enough to explore and exploit predictions of a systematic theory.
The experiments that lead to the invention of quantum theory are relatively simple and involve objects you can touch with your bare hands without damaging them. Some are done in high school, eg the photoelectric effect.
Whereas I did hedge my point regarding macroscopic quantum phenomena, I think that the quantum nature of the photoelectric effect would have been harder to discern without modern access to pure wavelength lighting. But you could still rely on precise optics to purify mixed light I suppose. But without even optics it should be even harder.
All the 19th century experiments that desired monochromatic light, including those that have characterized the photoelectric effect, used dispersive prisms, which separated the light from the Sun or from a candle into its monochromatic components. These are simple components, easily available.
This allowed experiments where the frequency of light was varied continuously, by rotating the prism.
Moreover, already during the first half of the 19th century, it became known that using gas-discharge lamps with various gases or by heating certain substances in a flame you can obtain monochromatic light corresponding to certain spectral lines specific to each substance. This allowed experiments where the wavelength of the light used in them was known with high accuracy.
Already in 1827, Jacques Babinet proposed the replacement of the platinum meter standard with the wavelength of some spectral line, as the base for the unit of length. This proposal has been developed and refined later by Maxwell, in 1870, who proposed to use both the wavelength and the period of some spectral line for the units of length and time. The proposal of Babinet has been adopted in SI in 1960, 133 years later, while the proposal of Maxwell has been adopted in SI in 1983, 113 years later.
So there were no serious difficulties in the 19th century for using monochromatic light. The most important difficulty was that their sources of monochromatic light had very low intensities, in comparison with the lasers that are available today. The low intensity problem was aggravated when coherent light was needed, as that could be obtained only by splitting the already weak light beam that was available. Lasers also provide coherent light, not only light with high intensity, thus they greatly simplify experiments.
