@zachwill

Most of my projects are on GitHub. I'm currently with the Portland Trail Blazers.

Washing Machines

Washing machines are robots, but they’re not intelligent. They don’t know what water or clothes are. Moreover, they’re not general purpose even in the narrow domain of washing - you can’t put dishes in a washing machine, nor clothes in a dishwasher (or rather, you can, but you won’t get the result you want).

They’re just another kind of automation, no different conceptually to a conveyor belt or a pick-and-place machine.

Equally, machine learning lets us solve classes of problem that computers could not usefully address before, but each of those problems will require a different implementation, and different data, a different route to market, and often a different company.

Each of them is a piece of automation. Each of them is a washing machine.

Benedict Evans