There are a lot of people out there who learn Latin to make themselves better English speakers – and it sounds silly, but it does work. Latin’s complexities require you to change the way you think about language itself, and so you get to look at English from a new perspective too.

It goes the same way with robotics – if you don’t work with electronics, then you’ve got a whole world of learning experiences ahead of you, and any amount of scientific education tends to give a person a new perspective.

If you already work with electronics, you stop thinking of the machine in terms of, “How do I get this machine to do what I want it to do?” and start slowly, unconsciously until it takes hold, thinking of the machine in terms of, “How do I get this machine to want to do what I want it to do?”

There comes a point, especially if you work with BEAM bots, where it’s just EASIER to think of the bot as having its own perspective on things, a machine-spirit, even when you don’t believe it “really” does. So you start thinking from the perspective of what stimuli it needs to motivate itself to do a certain thing, and before long you realize you’re using a kind of mental short-hand where this circuitry has a thought-process of its own.

Anyway, I guess I make it sound like it takes a lot more work and insight than it actually does. It really happens a lot faster than you think.