Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

Fast, Cheap amp Out of Control is a 1997 film by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. It profiles four subjects with extraordinary careers Dave Hoover, who is a lion tamer George Mendona, who created topiaries at Green Animals Topiary Garden in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, including giraffes made out of boxwood Ray Mendez, a hairless molerats expert and Rodney Brooks, an M.I.T. scientist who has designed buglike robots.

The title of the film is a play on the old engineers adage that out of fast, cheap, and reliable, you can only produce an end consumer product that is two of those three the classic example is a car. Rodney Brooks, the robot scientist from MIT, wrote a paper in which he speculates that it might be more effective to send one hundred onekilogram robots into space, instead of a single hundredkilogram robot, replacing the need for reliability with chance and sheer numbers, as systems in nature have learned to do. The advantage would be that if a single robot malfunctioned or got destroyed, there would still be plenty of other working robots to do the exploring. The paper was fully titled Fast, Cheap and Out of Control A Robot Invasion of the Solar System, and published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1989.

Source: Wikipedia