Is robotics hard? Moravec's paradox suggests that it is. Moravec's paradox says that the things we expected to be hard, like playing champion-level chess, turned out to be easy. And the things we expected to be easy, like moving the chess pieces, turned out to be hard. This seems to be born out in recent experience — after 50 years of work our robots still cannot move chess pieces as well as any eight-year-old child. One explanation is that manipulation is fundamentally hard. But there is another explanation: roboticists are dense. This talk will explore both possibilities.