Flutterby™! : Tilden talk

So Friday Charlene and I took Zack and his friend Joey to a talk by Mark Tilden, of BEAM robotics fame. His philosophy is building lots of small autonomous self-powered robots that we can build fast enough to evolve by throwing away the ones that don't work well, and making them fairly specialized so that they work together rather than one for all the steps in the process. It occurred to me today that Tilden's philosophy of robotics is much the same as the vision that created the Unix design that took (some of) us away from the huge monolithic application model and on to lightweight apps which communicate. Something to think about: When his jar-lid sized floor and window cleaning robots become ubiquitous, what's the GUI model of robotics going to be?