Essays by James Schuback

Intelligence meets
the real world.

Field notes on robotics, embodied AI, AI safety, and useful automation. An engineering perspective on investigating and building AI systems that improve economic productivity while maintaining clear safety boundaries.

Articles / 2025–202604 essays
Conceptual diagram separating a robot's language-model proposals from action authorization and independent safety controls.

Latest / Robotics / AI safety

Evaluating Safety Boundaries for LLM-Controlled Robotic Systems

A practical framework for evaluating task proposals, action authority, state freshness, containment, and recovery in language-controlled robot systems.

Read article →

Embodied AI / Engineering

From Pixels to Physical Actions: The Interfaces That Make Embodied AI Work

What a plywood repair task reveals about calibration, uncertainty, perception, and the interfaces that connect a useful model to a dependable physical system.

Research robot arm with a gripper and depth camera from the portfolio

AI productivity / AI safety

AI Productivity Needs a Verification Loop

A source-backed look at AI productivity, with a worked engineering research workflow and a concrete way to account for verification, rework, and controlled release.

VLM Tuner software showing inference results, source images, and model output

AI safety / Autonomous agents

Adversarial Robustness & AI Control

Robustness, cybersecurity, loss of control, and human misuse are different problems. A broader look at how to bound autonomous agents and preserve meaningful human authority.

Conceptual illustration of a drone inside a control boundary with a human operator outside

These essays draw on my work across robotics, computer vision, and AI software. Worked examples are identified as illustrative, and research claims link to their sources. Follow new writing with RSS.