Forty Watts to Think With

Utterly begged question to compare robot power budget with human, as these devices couldn't be more different and cannot be brought to equivalence by having the robot balance on two "feet".

This is a pernicious rhetorical gesture by the author, because it serves to bolster the central claim, which is being cleverly side-loaded into credulous readers, that the device "thinks", as if a power scheme can establish an engineering equivalency between a robot, a human and a lightbulb.

The reader is led down a primrose path to an intellectual water feature with a plaque on it that reads "How do we fit the thinking into the budget?!" as the sound of the bubbling fountain hides the stark reality there's no meaning to the term "think" regardless of the budget.

What's notable about the robot's power budget is that it uses the entire capacity of 15 amp residential circuit, or about 100 of those "dim" bulbs, so whatever this robot does had better be a lot more useful than just standing around and thinking, because it's going to cost $20/day in California just to let it hang out with you and fold some clothes.

(BTW a "dim" 20W LED bulb is about 3x the power used for a conventional area light in a home, not the author's invocation has anything to do with the topic at hand, but it's an indicator for the quality of the rhetoric.)

If the author would make use his own power allocation in self-reflection maybe insights could be gained on this "thinking" thing, but instead fish will be given electric bicycles.