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Plato vs Aristotle in robotics

Maybe the most important robotics debate we're not talking about?

John Koetsier's avatar
John Koetsier
Jan 23, 2026
∙ Paid

One of the biggest open questions in robotics today isn’t about humanoids, batteries, or GPUs.

It’s about how machines should think about the physical world.

Do we brute-force reality with more and more data, or do we give machines structured ways to reason about space, time, and action? That’s the tension of Plato vs. Aristotle, and I recently had a supe…

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