Architects of Intelligence
by Martin Ford · 16 Nov 2018 · 586pp · 186,548 words
. DANIELA RUS 13. JAMES MANYIKA 14. GARY MARCUS 15. BARBARA J. GROSZ 16. JUDEA PEARL 17. JEFFREY DEAN 18. DAPHNE KOLLER 19. DAVID FERRUCCI 20. RODNEY BROOKS 21. CYNTHIA BREAZEAL 22. JOSHUA TENENBAUM 23. OREN ETZIONI 24. BRYAN JOHNSON 25. When Will Human-Level AI be Achieved? Survey Results 26. Acknowledgments Why
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. Beyond this very rough division defined by their attitude toward deep learning, several of the researchers I spoke to have focused on more specific areas. Rodney Brooks, Daniela Rus and Cynthia Breazeal are all recognized leaders in robotics. Breazeal along with Rana El Kaliouby are pioneers in building systems that understand and
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he has stated many times previously, that human-level AI will be achieved around 2029—or just eleven years from the time of this writing. Rodney Brooks, on the other hand, guessed the year 2200, or more than 180 years in the future. Suffice it to say that one of the most
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environments that they were in; and then they might be able to make predictions and decisions, much like intelligent systems would. So, eventually I met Rodney Brooks, who I’m still friends with today, during my visiting faculty fellowship at MIT, where I was working with the Robotics Group at MIT and
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won many awards for his work creating UIMA and Watson, including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s Innovation Award and the AAAI Feigenbaum Prize. Chapter 20. RODNEY BROOKS We don’t have anything anywhere near as good as an insect, so I’m not afraid of superintelligence showing up anytime soon. CHAIRMAN, RETHINK
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ROBOTICS Rodney Brooks is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost roboticists. Rodney co-founded iRobot Corporation, an industry leader in both consumer robotics (primarily the
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at MIT, you started the iRobot company, which is now one of the world’s biggest distributors of commercial robots. How did that come about? RODNEY BROOKS: I started iRobot back in 1990 with Colin Angle and Helen Greiner. At iRobot we had a run of 14 failed business models and didn
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robots currently in mass deployment. MARTIN FORD: How did you come to be at the forefront of robotics and AI? Where does your story begin? RODNEY BROOKS: I grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, and in 1962 my mother found two American How and Why Wonder Books. One was called Electricity and
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, still the largest lab at MIT. MARTIN FORD: Looking back, what would you say is the highlight of your career with either robots or AI? RODNEY BROOKS: The thing I’m proudest of was in March 2011 when the earthquake hit Japan and the tidal wave knocked out the Fukushima Nuclear Power
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Japan is generally perceived as being on the very leading edge of robotics, and yet they had to turn to you to get working robots. RODNEY BROOKS: I think there’s a real lesson there. The real lesson is that the press hyped up things about them being far more advanced than
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Accelerating Returns. The idea that everything is moving faster and faster. I get the feeling that you think things are moving at the same pace? RODNEY BROOKS: Deep learning has been fantastic, and people who are outside the field of it come in and say, wow. We’re used to exponentials because
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we cannot predict when they will pop. Whenever I see Kurzweil I remind him that he is going to die. MARTIN FORD: That’s mean. RODNEY BROOKS: I’m going to die too. I have no doubt about it, but he doesn’t like to have it pointed out because he’s
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just ask you specifically how fast you see that moving? Google supposedly has real cars with nobody inside them on the road now in Arizona. RODNEY BROOKS: I haven’t seen the details of that yet, but it has taken a lot longer than anyone thought. Both Mountain View (California) and Phoenix
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: The general thought is that since Uber loses money on every ride, if they can’t go autonomous it’s not a sustainable business model. RODNEY BROOKS: I just saw a story this morning, saying that the median hourly wage of an Uber driver is $3.37, so they’re still losing
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demonstrations and they will be cooked. We saw that with robots from Japan, those demonstrations were cooked, very, very cooked. MARTIN FORD: You mean faked? RODNEY BROOKS: Not faked, but there’s a lot behind the curtain that you don’t see. You infer, or you make generalizations about what’s going
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product where you could be in Manhattan or San Francisco and it will pick you up somewhere and take you to another place you specify? RODNEY BROOKS: It’s going to come in steps. The first step may be that you walk to a designated pick-up place and they’re there
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in the range of five years until something roughly the equivalent to Uber is ready. I take it that you think that’s totally unrealistic? RODNEY BROOKS: Yes, that’s totally unrealistic. We might get to see certain aspects of it, but not the equivalent. It’s going to be different, and
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building a robot or an intelligence that begins to approach what an insect is capable of, and how does that influence our steps toward superintelligence? RODNEY BROOKS: Simply put, we don’t have anything anywhere near as good as an insect, so I’m not afraid of superintelligence showing up anytime soon
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‘90s and the time you started iRobot, do you think since then robotics has met or even exceeded your expectations, or has it been disappointing? RODNEY BROOKS: When I came to the United States in 1977, I was really interested in robots and ended up working on computer vision. There were three
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creating robotic hands. There have been some amazing videos of robotic hands from various teams. Can you let me know how that field is progressing? RODNEY BROOKS: Yes, I wanted to differentiate that mobile commercial robot work that I was doing at iRobot from what I was doing with my students at
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. MARTIN FORD: Is that slow progress due to a hardware or a software problem, and is it the mechanics of it or just the control? RODNEY BROOKS: It’s everything. There are a whole bunch of things that you have to make progress on in parallel. You have to make progress on
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is being used to have robots learn to do things by practicing or even just by watching YouTube videos. What’s your view on this? RODNEY BROOKS: Remember they’re lab demos. DeepMind has a group using our robots and they’ve recently published some interesting force feedback work with robots attaching
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10 years ahead, what are we going to see in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence? What kinds of breakthroughs should we realistically expect? RODNEY BROOKS: You can never expect breakthroughs. I expect 10 years from now the hot thing will not be deep learning, there’ll be a new hot
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too, but something will come along to replace it. MARTIN FORD: When you say deep learning, do you mean by that neural networks using backpropagation? RODNEY BROOKS: Yes, but with lots of layers. MARTIN FORD: Maybe then the next thing will still be neural networks but with a different algorithm or Bayesian
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networks? RODNEY BROOKS: It might be, or it might be something very different, that’s what we don’t know. I guarantee, though, that within 10 years there
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, but it does seem very challenging in terms of the dexterity that’s required to really assist an elderly person in taking care of themselves. RODNEY BROOKS: It is not going to be a simple substitution of a robotic system for a person, but there is going to be a demand so
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little technological update in some of those. MARTIN FORD: Do you think that would be construction robots or would it be construction scale 3D printing? RODNEY BROOKS: 3D printing may come in for aspects of it. It’s not going to be printing the whole building, but certainly we might see printed
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robots? The example people always give is the robot that would bring you a beer. It sounds like that might still be some way off. RODNEY BROOKS: Colin Angle, the CEO of iRobot, who co-founded it with me in 1990, has been talking about that for 28 years now. I think
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think that there will ever be a genuinely ubiquitous consumer robot, one that saturates the consumer market by doing something that people find absolutely indispensable? RODNEY BROOKS: Is Roomba indispensable? No, but it does something of value at a low enough cost that people are willing to pay for it. It’s
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there for a robot that can do more than move around and vacuum floors? A robot that has sufficient dexterity to perform some basic tasks? RODNEY BROOKS: I wish I knew! I think no one knows. Everyone’s saying robots are coming to take over the world, yet we can’t even
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Muilenburg, saying that they’re going to have autonomous drone taxis flying people around within the next decade, what do you think of his projection? RODNEY BROOKS: I will compare that to saying that we’re going to have flying cars. Flying cars that you can drive around in and then just
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general intelligence? Do you think it is achievable and, if so, in what timeframe do you think we have a 50% chance of achieving it? RODNEY BROOKS: Yes, I think it is achievable. My guess on that is the year 2200, but it’s just a guess. MARTIN FORD: Tell me about
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the path to get there. What are the hurdles we’ll face? RODNEY BROOKS: We already talked about the hurdle of dexterity. The ability to navigate and manipulate the world is important in understanding the world, but there’s
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as strict privacy concerns to hold back what they can do in AI. Do you think that we are entering a new AI arms race? RODNEY BROOKS: You’re correct, there is going to be a race. There’s been a race between companies, and there will be a race between countries
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. MARTIN FORD: Do you view it as a big danger for the West if a country like China gets a substantial lead in AI? RODNEY BROOKS: I don’t think it’s as simple as that. We will see uneven deployment of AI technologies. I think we are seeing this already
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of a new Industrial Revolution. Do you buy into that? Is there going to be a big impact on the job market and the economy? RODNEY BROOKS: Yes, but not in the way people talk about. I don’t think it’s AI per se. I think it’s the digitalization of
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not a simple one-for-one replacement. MARTIN FORD: Do you think those digital chains will disrupt a lot of those grass roots service jobs? RODNEY BROOKS: Digital chains can do a lot of things but they can’t do everything. What they leave behind are things that we typically don’t
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go to college to get and that job is going to be threatened, but the maid cleaning the hotel room is going to be safe. RODNEY BROOKS: I don’t deny that, but what I do deny is when people say, oh that’s AI and robots doing that. As I say
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. MARTIN FORD: I agree, but it’s also true that AI is going to be deployed on that platform, so things may move even faster. RODNEY BROOKS: Yes, it certainly makes it easier to deploy AI given that platform. The other worry, of course, is that the platform is built on totally
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, aside from the economic disruption? What are the real risks, such as security, that you think are legitimate and that we should be concerned with? RODNEY BROOKS: Security is the big one. I worry about the security of these digital chains and the privacy that we have all given up willingly in
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literal weaponization of robots and drones? Stuart Russell, one of the interviewees in this book, made a quite terrifying film called Slaughterbots about those concerns. RODNEY BROOKS: I think that kind of thing is very possible today because it doesn’t rely on AI. Slaughterbots was a knee-jerk reaction saying that
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AGI control problem and Elon Musk’s comments about summoning the demon? Is that something that we should be having conversations about at this point? RODNEY BROOKS: In 1789 when the people of Paris saw hot-air balloons for the first time, they were worried about those people’s souls getting sucked
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will look like before they arrive. MARTIN FORD: When these technology breakthroughs do arrive, do you think there’s a place for regulation of them? RODNEY BROOKS: As I said earlier, the place where regulation is required is on what these systems are and are not allowed to do, not on the
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an optimist overall? You continue to work on this so you must believe that the benefits of all this are going to outweigh any risks. RODNEY BROOKS: Yes, absolutely. We have overpopulated the world, so we have to go this way to survive. I’m very worried about the standard of living
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clue even how to think about that. We should be worried about the real dangers and the real risks that we are facing right now. RODNEY BROOKS is a robotics entrepreneur who holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. He’s currently the Chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics. For
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this attitude that robots could be like that and I think that’s shaped a lot of what my research has been about. MARTIN FORD: Rodney Brooks, who is also interviewed in this book, was your doctoral adviser at MIT. How did that influence your career path? CYNTHIA BREAZEAL: At the time
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one of the schools I was admitted to was MIT. I went to a visit week at MIT and I remember my first experience in Rodney Brooks’ mobile robot lab. I remember walking into his lab and seeing all these insect-inspired robots that were completely autonomous going around doing a variety
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decided I had to be there and that’s really what clinched the deal for me. So, I went to MIT for graduate school, where Rodney Brooks was my academic adviser. Back then, Rod’s philosophy was always a very biologically inspired philosophy to intelligence, which was not typical for the overall
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learn from ethology and other forms of intelligence and machine intelligence has always been a thread and a theme of my work. At that time, Rodney Brooks was working on small-legged robots and he wrote a paper, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System, where
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actually make those things. So, that’s what led to Boston Dynamics. At this point, whether it’s Boston Dynamics or other robots, such as Rodney Brooks’ work with the Baxter Robots, we’ve seen these robots do impressive things with their bodies, like pick up objects and open doors, yet their
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I noted in the introduction, the guesses are neatly bracketed by two people willing to provide dates on the record: Ray Kurzweil at 2029 and Rodney Brooks at 2200. Here are the 18 guesses: 2029 11 years from 2018 2036 18 years 2038 20 years 2040 22 years 2068 (3) 50 years
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by P. W. Singer · 1 Jan 2010 · 797pp · 227,399 words
crossed with Asimov. iRobot was founded in 1990 by three MIT computer geeks, Colin Angle, the CEO, Helen Greiner, the chairman of the board, and Rodney Brooks, their former professor, who doubled as chief technical officer. Brooks was already considered one of the world’s leading experts on robotics and artificial intelligence
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) are really quite badly situated, create bad periphery, give us multiple blind spots, can’t see in multiple spectrums, and are blind in the dark. Rodney Brooks at iRobot even goes so far as to describe human eyes as “badly designed,” and cites octopus eyes as far more elegant and efficient. The
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barriers to entry for robots to be used across the marketplace, further dropping costs for robots as a whole, as more people could buy them. Rodney Brooks at iRobot calls this kind of cross-transfer “riding someone else’s exponentials.” AN EXPONENTIAL WORLD Historic data shows exponential patterns beyond just Moore’s
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was even the subject of a 2007 U.S. Congress study by the Joint Economic Committee, entitled “The Future Is Coming Sooner Than You Think.” Rodney Brooks at iRobot acknowledges that the idea of the Singularity seems too futuristic to be true, but then describes a pattern he has noticed again and
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are becoming quite common. One woman even found out she was dying of heart disease and included her Wakamura robot in her will. By contrast, Rodney Brooks of iRobot says that the mass-marketing robots as friends for elderly shut-ins is yet to be tried in the United States because most
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soldiers in the field and scientists back in the labs talk about what is now revolutionary in technology, today they point to something else. As Rodney Brooks says, what is far more important is a robotics revolution, now at its “nascent stage, set to burst over us in the early part of
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, for example, is what comes after you buy the midlife crisis convertible, but before you move into an “active living” retirement community. Describes iRobot’s Rodney Brooks, “As us baby boomers get older and older, we’re going to be looking for all sorts of replacement parts. We’re going to become
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follow the laws, but still carry out genocide. The second problem is that no technology can yet replicate Asimov’s laws inside a machine. As Rodney Brooks puts it, “People ask me about whether our robots follow Asimov’s laws. There is a simple reason [they don’t]. I can’t build
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to carry “A Brief History of Robotics,” Megagiant.com (cited November 25, 2005); available at http://robotics.megagiant.com/history.html. 45 they were automated Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002). 45 von Kempelen had hidden a dwarf This is much like the fighting
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Science, produced by Paul Sen and Rosie Kingham, Sci Fi Channel, broadcast on July 18, 2006. 73 you can squeeze it into tight parking spaces Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 227. 73 “is going to be my mental prosthesis” Schwartz, Taylor, and Koselka
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, we can’t know” “Interview with Lynne E. Parker,” International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems 2, no. 2 (2004). 78 Starting with the acclaimed battles Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 103. 78 the size of the AI market Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is
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: Malignant Machines or the Path to Peace?” 90 describe human eyes as “badly designed” Brooks, Flesh and Machines. 90 “In the next 10-20 years” Rodney Brooks, “Technology Impacts on Military Robotics over the Coming Decades,” paper presented at the Military Robotics Conference, Institute for Defense and Government Advancement, Washington, DC, April
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: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 121. 100 each plane was destroying 4.07 targets Edwards, “Swarming and the Future of Warfare,” 137. 100 the agricultural revolution Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002). 100 launching the Industrial Age Richard R. Nelson, Technology, Institutions, and Economic Growth
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Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005), 177. 131 our “emotional intelligence” Ibid., 191. 131 Rod Brooks of MIT and iRobot predicts Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 22. 131 “My job will be eliminated” As quoted by David Bruemmer, “Intelligent
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Unmanned Vehicles,” paper presented at the Military Robotics Conference, Institute for Defense and Government Advancement, Washington, DC, April 10-12, 2006. 131 “Asking whether robots” Rodney Brooks, interview, Peter W. Singer, Washington, DC, October 30, 2006. 132 Haile, a robot musician Gil Weinberg and Scott Driscoll, “Haile,” 2006 (cited July 7, 2007
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: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (New York: Gotham Books, 2006), 6. 181 revolutionized by the world of online file sharing Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 100. 182 “must prepare to abandon everything” David Rejeski, “The Next Small Thing
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, August 8, 2007. 294 “It goes to the last frontier” Tom Erhard, interview, Peter W. Singer, January 31, 2007. 294 “will be a moral battlefield” Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002), x. 295 neo-Luddites will also see Antón, Silberglitt, and Schneider, The Global
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-12, 2006. 404 “Will we ever get to the point” Marc Garlasco, interview, Peter W.Singer, January 30, 2007. 404 whether we endow the robot Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002). 404 psychologists are finding that people Betya Friedman, Peter H. Kahn, and Jennifer
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: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix, ed. Glenn Yeffeth and David Gerrold (Chicago: BenBella Books, 2003), 24. 417 a robot takeover “will never happen” Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002), ix. 417 They would have to have lost Ibid., 199-204. 418 a
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’s Ronald Arkin,” 2005, http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/091205/View_Ronald_Arkin_091205.html. 420 “I am sure there will be new dilemmas” Rodney Brooks, interview, Peter W. Singer, Washington, DC, October 30, 2006. 420 “fifteen minutes of privacy” As quoted in Garreau, Radical Evolution, 100. 420 “scares the shit
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Bostrom, “Nanotechnology Perceptions: A Review of Ultraprecision,” Nanotechnology Perceptions: A Review of Ultraprecision Engineering and Nanotechnology 2, no. 2 (2006). 423 “People ask me about” Rodney Brooks, interview, Peter W. Singer, October 30, 2006. 423 “Asimov’s rules are neat” Daniel Wilson, interview, Peter W. Singer, October 19, 2006. 423 “realized during
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presented at the Military Robotics Conference, Institute for Defense and Government Advancement, Washington, DC, April 10-12, 2006. 423 “There is a lot of push” Rodney Brooks, interview, Peter W. Singer, October 30, 2006. 424 “Businesses are notoriously uninterested” Robert Sawyer, “On Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics,” 1994 (cited November 1
Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff · 24 Aug 2015 · 413pp · 119,587 words
sociological parallels between singularity thinking and a variety of messianic religious traditions.39 The singularity hypothesis also builds on the emergent AI research pioneered by Rodney Brooks, who first developed a robotics approach based on building complex systems out of collections of simpler parts. Both Kurzweil in How to Create a Mind
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,” a term popularized by John Diebold in his 1952 book Automation: The Advent of the Automatic Factory. Shockley’s prescience was so striking that when Rodney Brooks, himself a pioneering roboticist at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s, read Brock’s article in IEEE Spectrum in 2013, he passed Shockley
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seminal researcher in the field. Mobile robots, paralleling Shakey at Stanford Research Institute, would be pursued at SAIL by researchers like Hans Moravec and later Rodney Brooks, both of whom became pioneering robotics researchers at Carnegie Mellon and MIT, respectively. It proved to be the first golden era of AI, with research
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the first golden age of AI was in full swing—graduate students like Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid; Rodney Brooks; and David Shaw, who would later take AI techniques and transform them into a multibillion-dollar hedge fund on Wall Street, were all still around
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examples of Andy Rubin’s credo that personal computers are sprouting legs and beginning to move around in the environment. Baxter is the progeny of Rodney Brooks, whose path to building helper robots traces directly from the founders of artificial intelligence. McCarthy and Minsky went their separate ways in 1962, but the
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to placing the laboratory near an obscure star somewhere out on the arm of an average-sized spiral galaxy. It provided a captivating welcome for Rodney Brooks, another new Stanford graduate student. A math prodigy from Adelaide, Australia, raised by working-class parents, Brooks had grown up far from the can-do
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argues that the system will develop a library of capabilities over time and will increase its speed as new versions of its software become available. Rodney Brooks rejected early artificial intelligence in favor of a new approach he described as “fast, cheap, and out of control.” Later he designed Baxter, an inexpensive
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possible for humans to work close to the machines without fear of being injured. They were working with Cog, an early humanoid robot designed by Rodney Brooks’s robot laboratory during the 1990s. A graduate student, Matt Williamson, was testing the robot’s arm. A bug in the code caused the arm
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acquired Industrial Perception, Meka Robotics, and Redwood Robotics, a group of developers of humanoid robots and robot arms in San Francisco led by one of Rodney Brooks’s star students, and Bot & Dolly, a developer of robotic camera systems that had been used to create special effects in the movie Gravity. Boston
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students to reach into their pocket, feel a coin, and identify that coin as a nickel. Build a robot that could do that! Decades later, Rodney Brooks was still beginning his lectures and talks with the same scenario. It was something that a human could do effortlessly. Despite machines that could play
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://ritter.ist.psu.edu/misc/dirk-files/Papers/HRI-papers/User%20interface%20design%20issues/Direct%20manipulation%20vs.%20interface%20agents.pdf. 27.Ibid. 6|COLLABORATION 1.Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 28. 2.Ibid., 29. 3.Ibid., 31. 4
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.Rodney Brooks, “Elephants Don’t Play Chess,” Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6 (1990): 3–15, people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.ps.Z. 5.Ibid. 6.
Artificial Whiteness
by Yarden Katz
right programming language) and tactical ones (like whether the use of AI would achieve the military’s aims in a cost-effective way). For example, Rodney Brooks, a prominent AI researcher from MIT, considered the advantages of scaling up the program so that soldiers may “experience some of the large scale aspects
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pragmatism leads them to search for examples of successful “applied” embodied AI. For VTR, the field of situated robotics—and the work of AI practitioner Rodney Brooks, in particular—provides such an example. Other critics of AI’s orthodoxy have also looked to situated robotics as a viable alternative. In the next
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, critics of AI’s dominant, disembodied epistemology often overlook the militarized character of situated approaches. To contextualize situated robotics, I turn to the work of Rodney Brooks, an AI practitioner and entrepreneur who has spent much of his career at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Brooks’s work has captivated many AI
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of AI in the 2010s, Brooks switched back into critic mode, writing articles with titles such as “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions.” See Rodney Brooks, “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions,” MIT Technology Review, October 6, 2017. 53. The Roomba does not have a stable, centralized internal representation of
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two events inside the robot in any way, whether physically or in software. No adaptation of behavior based on past experience.” Rodney Brooks, “What Is It Like to Be a Robot?,” Rodney Brooks Blog: Robots, AI, and Other Stuff, 2017. 54. Lucy Suchman, “Situational Awareness: Deadly Bioconvergence at the Boundaries of Bodies and Machines
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by fields like physics). He argues for the inclusion of courses on decentralized computing and robotics (e.g., cellular automata and robotics as practiced by Rodney Brooks). He writes that he “would be prepared to argue for one such course as a requirement [at universities] for all freshmen, whatever their field.” Pickering
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Education, 1995. Brooks, Rodney. “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions.” MIT Technology Review, October 6, 2017. ________. “What Is It Like to Be a Robot?” Rodney Brooks Blog: Robots, AI, and Other Stuff. March 18, 2017. Brooks, Rodney A., Bruce G. Buchanan, Douglas B. Lenat, David M. McKeown, and J. D. Fletcher
Alone Together
by Sherry Turkle · 11 Jan 2011 · 542pp · 161,731 words
. I have profited from their support and good ideas. Collegial relationships across MIT have enriched my thinking and been sources of much appreciated practical assistance. Rodney Brooks provided me with an office at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to help me get the lay of the land. He gave me the best
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a real baby might feel pain. This was in contrast to its prototype, a robot called “IT,” developed by a team led by MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks. “IT” evolved into “BIT” (for Baby IT), a doll with “states of mind” and facial musculature under its synthetic skin to give it expression.13
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robots as toys is to miss the point—and even the children know it. CHAPTER 5 Complicities I first met Cog in July 1994, in Rodney Brooks’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. The institute was hostin g an artificial-life workshop, a conference that buzzed with optimism about science on its
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When roboticists argue that robots can develop emotions, they begin by asserting the material basis of all thought and take things from there. For example, Rodney Brooks says that a robot could be given a feeling like “sadness” by setting “a number in its computer code.” This sadness, for Brooks, would be
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,” in Computation for Metaphors, Analogy and Agents, vol. 1562 of Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence , ed. C. Nehaniv (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998), and Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002). Brian Scassellati did his dissertation work on Cog. See Brian Scassellati, Foundations for
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, brick?’ And brick says to you, ‘I’d like an arch.’” See Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect: A Son’s Journey (New Yorker Films, 2003). 17 Rodney Brooks, cited in “MIT: ‘Creating a Robot So Alive You Feel Bad About Switching It Off’—a Galaxy Classic,” The Daily Galaxy, December 24, 2009, www
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-about-what-constitutes-life-synthetic-bacteria-for-example-are-created-by-man-and-yet-also-alive. html (accessed June 4, 2010). 18 Cynthia Breazeal and Rodney Brooks both make the point that robot emotions do not have to be like human ones. They should be judged on their own merits. See Cynthia
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Breazeal and Rodney Brooks (2005). “Robot Emotion: A Functional Perspective,” in J.-M. Fellous and M. Arbib (eds.) Who Needs Emotions: The Brain Meets the Robot, MIT Press. 271
The Road to Conscious Machines
by Michael Wooldridge · 2 Nov 2018 · 346pp · 97,890 words
not outsiders, but came from within the field itself. The most eloquent and influential critic of the prevailing AI paradigm was the Australian-born roboticist Rodney Brooks. Born in 1954, Brooks seemed like an unlikely candidate to be a vocal critic of AI. He had studied and worked at the three leading
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remarkable abilities are still actually very narrow. And of course, board games are highly abstract – they are a long way from the real world, as Rodney Brooks would be quick to remind us. But whatever niggles and caveats one might have, I believe the simple truth is that DeepMind’s work, starting
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for CaptionBot, because CaptionBot has no such grounding (and nor, of course, does it purport to). CaptionBot is completely disembodied from the world, and as Rodney Brooks reminded us, intelligence is embodied. I emphasize that this is not an argument that AI systems cannot demonstrate understanding, but rather that understanding means more
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highly unlikely to me that, if the Singularity occurs, it will take us by surprise, as in the Terminator narrative. To use an analogy by Rodney Brooks, think of human-level intelligence as a Boeing 747. Is it likely that we would invent a Boeing 747 by accident? Or that we would
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with anything that goes outside the scope of their training. Similarly, the human hand remains far more dexterous than the best robot hand – in 2018, Rodney Brooks predicted it would be 20 years before a viable robot hand was available that was as dexterous as a human hand.2 Until then, at
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within a decade, it remains a beautifully written account of one of the most influential strands of AI research – and an excellent introduction to logic. Rodney Brooks’ own Cambrian Intelligence (MIT Press, 1999) collects together his main papers on behavioural AI and the subsumption architecture. I will immodestly recommend my own Introduction
Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
by Michio Kaku · 15 Mar 2011 · 523pp · 148,929 words
, University of Oxford Lt. Col. Robert Bowman, Institute for Space and Security Studies Lawrence Brody, chief of the Genome Technology Branch, National Institutes of Health Rodney Brooks, former director, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Lester Brown, founder of Earth Policy Institute Michael Brown, professor of astronomy, Caltech James Canton, founder of Institute for
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will proceed with a combination of these two goals, i.e., building friendly AI and also enhancing ourselves. This is an option being explored by Rodney Brooks, former director of the famed MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has been a maverick, overturning cherished but ossified ideas and injecting innovation into the field
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this the “society of minds”: that consciousness is actually the sum of many separate algorithms and techniques that nature stumbled upon over millions of years. Rodney Brooks was also looking for a similar paradigm, but one that had never been fully explored before. He soon realized that Mother Nature and evolution had
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a neural network of some sort that makes new connections and neural pathways each time it learns a new task, whatever that task might be. Rodney Brooks writes, “Over the next ten to twenty years, there will be a cultural shift, in which we will adopt robotic technology, silicon, and steel into
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and adjust to this new reality so that society does not disintegrate. More than likely, the first replicators will be expensive. As MIT robotics expert Rodney Brooks says, “Nanotechnology will thrive, much as photolithography thrives—in very expensive, controlled situations rather than as a freestanding mass-market technology.” The problem of unlimited
The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press)
by Terrence J. Sejnowski · 27 Sep 2018
you can’t do that for a digital computer, where the hardware by itself needs software to specify what problem is being solved. I recognized Rodney Brooks smiling in the back of the crowd, someone I had once invited to a workshop on computational neuroscience in Woods Hole on Cape Cod, Massachusetts
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over. And, indeed, it takes about twelve months before a baby biped human starts walking without falling over. Rodney Brooks (figure 12.3), who made a brief appearance in chapter 2, Figure 12.3 Rodney Brooks oversees Baxter, who is preparing to place a plug into a hole on the table. Brooks is a
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millions of images that sample a wide range of poses and lighting conditions, and computers are millions of times more powerful. In “Intelligence and Bodies,” Rodney Brooks (from MIT) spoke about his experience with building robots that crawl and meander. Intelligence evolved in brains to control movements, and bodies evolved to interact
An Optimist's Tour of the Future
by Mark Stevenson · 4 Dec 2010 · 379pp · 108,129 words
purposes, an intelligent, social, multipurpose machine. This scares the hell out of a lot of people. As Breazeal’s former mentor, the restive, maverick genius Rodney Brooks, opens his book Robot: The Future of Flesh and Machines: ‘As these robots get smarter, some people worry about what will happen when they get
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to get machines to replicate highly intellectual ‘symbolic’ reasoning (the sort you need to master algebra, for instance, and the kind of tasks revered, says Rodney Brooks, by ‘highly educated male scientists’). It’s no coincidence that the frontiers of AI research seem to have been populated with computers that get ever
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that man and machine merge. As I found out during my chat with Nick Bostrom, this is already happening. In the opening pages of Robot, Rodney Brooks writes, ‘Recently, I was confronted with a researcher in our lab, a double-leg amputee, stepping off the elevator that I was waiting for. From
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.’ The AInimals don’t leave us behind or exterminate us, because we are the AInimals. ‘We will become a merger between flesh and machines,’ predicts Rodney Brooks. ‘We will have the best that machineness has to offer, but we will also have our bioheritage to augment whatever level of machine technology we
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be genetically engineered, or is it going to be electrically engineered? Or, is it going to be some hybrid?’ My bet is on the hybrid, Rodney Brooks’s merger of flesh and machines, which we’re already seeing in medicine and will surely, slowly, continue. It sounds weird now, but the pace
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3,000 pages – knowledge he spent six years condensing into less than an evening’s read, after which you’ll see the world differently. MACHINE Rodney Brooks, Robot: The Future of Flesh and Machines Allen Lane, New York, 2002 The history and the future of robots from one of the discipline’s
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get your frames re-jigged. As my final interviewee I couldn’t have hoped for a better meeting. Beyond my interviewees thanks go also to Rodney Brooks and Stewart Brand for allowing me to quote from their work. Do read Robot: The Future of Flesh and Machines and Whole Earth Discipline. I
Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman · 19 Feb 2019 · 339pp · 94,769 words
complicated to understand. CHAPTER 5. Daniel C. Dennett: What Can We Do? We don’t need artificial conscious agents. We need intelligent tools. CHAPTER 6. Rodney Brooks: The Inhuman Mess Our Machines Have Gotten Us Into We are in a much more complex situation today than Wiener foresaw, and I am worried
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!” But it didn’t come; it went. From that point on I’ve worked with researchers in nearly every variety of AI and complexity, including Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec, John Archibald Wheeler, Benoit Mandelbrot, John Henry Holland, Danny Hillis, Freeman Dyson, Chris Langton, J. Doyne Farmer, Geoffrey West, Stuart Russell, and Judea
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age of AI. Possible Minds is not my book, rather it is our book: Seth Lloyd, Judea Pearl, Stuart Russell, George Dyson, Daniel C. Dennett, Rodney Brooks, Frank Wilczek, Max Tegmark, Jaan Tallinn, Steven Pinker, David Deutsch, Tom Griffiths, Anca Dragan, Chris Anderson, David Kaiser, Neil Gershenfeld, W. Daniel Hillis, Venki Ramakrishnan
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and steer between some of the hazards if we take responsibility for our trajectory. Chapter 6 THE INHUMAN MESS OUR MACHINES HAVE GOTTEN US INTO RODNEY BROOKS Rodney Brooks is a computer scientist; Panasonic Professor of Robotics, emeritus, MIT; former director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence
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Laboratory (CSAIL). He is the author of Flesh and Machines. The roboticist Rodney Brooks, featured in Errol Morris’s 1997 documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control along with a lion tamer, a topiarist, and an expert on the naked
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Award from the Information Technology Innovation Foundation, https://itif.org/publications/2016/01/19/artificial-intelligence-alarmists-win-itif%E2%80%99s-annual-luddite-award. * Rodney Brooks, for example, asserts that it’s impossible for a program to be “smart enough that it would be able to invent ways to subvert human
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