After the draft, a body

Lesson 4 was a program that drafts and suggests: help made of bits. This lesson is help made of atoms, a machine that moves in the world of stuff. Tomas’s night aisle has one such machine folding boxes for a camera. It is one body. It is not the only body.

Engineers call a machine’s physical layout its form factor: the joints, the base, how far it can reach. A form factor is a bet about the workspace. The person-shaped bet says: the building was made for people, so one machine can use the stairs, the doors, and the tool handles as they are.

A rolling specialist makes a different bet: the floor is flat, the boxes are here, and nobody needs to climb anything.

Rookery has both kinds of job. A carton on flat concrete is the specialist’s. The mezzanine stairs are the person-shaped bet, and they still have no plan.

The tempting mistake is to treat the camera demo as the whole of what machines with bodies can do. Tomas’s crushed carton is already arguing.

That is what lets you ask when the human shape is the honest bet.