Abstract

Open peer commentary on the article “Applying Radical Constructivism to Machine Learning: A Pilot Study in Assistive Robotics” by Markus Nowak, Claudio Castellini & Carlo Massironi. Upshot: The stripped-down experimental setup may be missing important sensory proprioceptive and tactile observables that may well be crucial for designing useful, effective, and flexible general-purpose motor prosthetic devices. Because trainable machines cannot by themselves add new observables, designers must foresee which ones are needed.