
The Future of Robotics
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read
Excellent chat with Rodney Brooks today. Take a look at the video:
Points made:
- We should focus on practical problems, not “makes a great story” problems. Driving down one way lanes sometimes happens, and sometimes needs to happen. We gotta put in place the rules for, or allow the robotics systems to be able to determine themselves, when this should happen, and who should be allowed to override or control it.
- Robotics startups of today should think about a starting with investment but an IPO might not be the right eventual path — a DeepMind/Alphabet acquisition but stay independent style synergy might be the right way to go, to step up and to get the resources needed for growth and scale.
- People mis-assume and mis-extrapolate what the current state of the art is. The example is that an image labelling program can now do a better job than humans; show a computer a picture, and it can write a sentence that describes the image, even in a language other than English. If you saw a human being able to write down what is in a photo, in Chinese, you’d naturally assume they can read Chinese and speak in Chinese. Of course, they most likely would be able to. But absolutely not for an image labelling program. And so people assume the program understands Chinese. Most likely it doesn’t even understand its own output.
- On putting in place regulation for AI: We need to think this through a little more. What behaviour would we regulate today? No connecting machine learning systems to hiring/firing decisions? That’s already happening.
- Smartphones are now almost a basic human right. Homeless people have smartphones. Evidently, they’re as useful, needed, or at least more accessible vs useful than housing.
- Oh, there will be jobs lost. But the upside is: Think about how currently, no one reads the manual to be able to use your smartphone. Yet we all use them just fine. So, robots will become much more usable by the untrained, and “robot supervisor” will be a big new class of job, which can be done by anybody. The robots will still need parenting.
“In consumer electronics, we have made the machines that we use teach the people how to use them. And I think we have to change our attitude in industrial equipment [as well].”

