Robots having an Explosion, but not Cambrian

In my pursuit to eradicate bad analogies, the latest is in a paper "Is a Cambrian Explosion Coming for Robotics?" by Gill A. Pratt in Journal of Economic Perspectives. It's a great paper, outlining reasons for an accelerating increase in the use of robots of all kinds and the technologies responsible for the acceleration, lots of enabling mechanisms (like energy storage improvements, combining learning in the cloud, wireless availability).

                      

But to the metaphor. The Cambrian Explosion is first an explosion of varieties  and then a very secondary implication an increase in incidences in the fossil records (lots more fossils). The usual explanation of the increase in fossils is that the newer life forms are more fossilizable, not that there are more individual lives.

Pratt's description of the explosion is not about varieties but about the technologies that will enable existing robots to be better.

I know this is a bit of a cavil because there were more fossils created during the Cambrian than before and could be called an explosion, but the usual provocative point about the Cambrian Explosion was that it was the great new variety that didn't exist before. Before the Cambrian, there were multicellular organisms (and fossil evidence of them), but during the Cambrian, lots of new anatomical structures seemed to appear for the first time (shells, tubes, etc).

The point is that when someone evokes 'Cambrian Evolution' it should be a metaphor for diversity not volume.

Otherwise, excellent article.