Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI
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Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI
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Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI
#2Amara's law -- "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI
#3Let’s call it machine learning, the AI term is just so far from what it actually is
Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI
#4Let’s call it machine learning, the AI term is just so far from what it actually is
He's talking about control theory, and other kinds of optimisation systems too. I think AI is a fine blanket term for all of that stuff.
Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI
#5> Brooks explains that this could eventually lead to robots with useful language interfaces for people in care situations.
I've been thinking, in Star Trek terms, what if it's not Lt. Cdr. Data, but just the Ship's Computer?
Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI
#6Let’s call it machine learning, the AI term is just so far from what it actually is
He's talking about control theory, and other kinds of optimisation systems too. I think AI is a fine blanket term for all of that stuff.
Rodney Brooks is the Godfather of Out of Control Theory.
FAST, CHEAP AND OUT OF CONTROL: A ROBOT INVASION OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM:
Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI
#7> Brooks explains that this could eventually lead to robots with useful language interfaces for people in care situations. I've been thinking, in Star Trek terms, what if it's not Lt. Cdr. Data, but just the Ship's Computer?
Or Bomb 20.
Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI
#8That makes sense from Brooks' perspective. He's done his best work when he didn't try to overreach. The six-legged insect thing was great, but very dumb. Cog was supposed to reach human-level AI and was an embarrassing dud. The Roomba was simple, dumb, and useful. The military iRobot machines were good little remote-controlled tanks. The Rethink Robotics machines were supposed to be intelligent and learn manipulation tasks by imitation. They were not too useful and far too expensive. His new mobile carts are just light-duty AGVs, and compete in an established market.
Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI
#9> He uses the iPod as an example. For a few iterations, it did in fact double in storage size from 10 all the way to 160GB. If it had continued on that trajectory, he figured out we would have an iPod with 160TB of storage by 2017, but of course we didn’t.
I think Brooks' opinions will age poorly, but if anyone doesn't already know all the arguments for that they aren't interested in learning them now. This quote seems more interesting to me.
Didn't the iPod switch from HDD to SSD at some point, and they focused on shrinking them rather than upping storage size? I think the quality of iPods have been growing exponentially, we've just seen some tech upgrades on other axises that Apple thinks are more important. AFAIK, looking at Wikipedia, they're discontinuing iPods in favour of iPhones where we can get a 1TB model and the disk size trend is still exponential.
The original criticism of the iPod was that it had less disk space than its competitors and it turned out to be because consumers were paying for other things. Overall I don't think this is a fair argument against exponential growth.
Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's talking about control theory, and other kinds of optimisation systems too. I think AI is a fine blanket term for all of that stuff.
Rodney Brooks is the Godfather of Out of Control Theory. FAST, CHEAP AND OUT OF CONTROL: A ROBOT INVASION OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM: https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/fast-cheap.pdf
"Out-of-Control Theory" is a great name, love it =) thanks for the link, although I guess the idea never really took off.