Comment by thatsnotright1

There is a hierarchy. Do robots need software or does software need robots?

There are lots of fields with easily verifiable outputs but that doesn’t make them valuable targets.

Eventually you’re going to need robotics to kick off the singularity, sure, but I would start with programming and math (and compute) which is exactly what they are doing.

Let’s say you start with robots, like we did, but we lack compute, we lack dev tools, we lack the ability to generate vast training environments, we cannot automate mathematical research of any kind in any way shape or form not even trivially, in general we are bottlenecked by math, code and compute. “Doing robotics” first without tackling the others is taking an astronomical detour which we as humanity are fond of.

I find the notion we automate cognition itself first and then tackle the secondary problems quite rational.