Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

Your responses indicate (at least to me) that you are, philosophically, a Materialist or a Physicalist. That's fine; I accept that's a philosophy of existence that one can hold (even though I personally find it sterile and nihilistic). However many, like me, do not subscribe to such a philosophy. We can avoid any argument between ppl who hold different philosophies but still want to discuss machine learning productively by using that term, one that we can all agree on. But if materialists insist on using 'artificial intelligence' then they are pushing their unproven theories and I would say fantasies on the rest of us and they then expose a divergent agenda, where one does not exist when we all just talk about what we all agree we already have, which is machine learning.

Exponentials have a bad habit of turning into sigmoids due to fundamental physical and geometric, and also practical, constraints. There’s the thing called diminishing returns. Every proven technology reaches maturity; it happened to iPods, it happened to smartphones, it happened to digital cameras and so on. There’s still growth and improvement, but it’s greatly slowed down from the early days. But that’s not to say that there won’t be other sigmoids to come.

If you haven’t noticed how growth in storage capacity of HDDs in general screeched to a relative halt around fifteen years ago? The doubling period used to be about 12-14 months; every three or four years the unit cost of capacity would decrease 90%. This continued through the 90s and early 2000s, and then it started slowing down. A lot. In 2005 I bought a 250 GB HDD; at the same price I’d now get something like a 15 EB drive if the time constant had stayed, well, constant.

There is, of course, always a multitude of interdependent variables to optimize, and you can always say that growth of X slowed down because priorities changed to optimize Y instead. But why did the priorities change? Almost certainly at least partislly because further optimization of X was becoming expensive or impractical.

> quality has been growing exponentially

That’s an entirely meaningless and nonsensical statement unless you have some rigorous way to quantify quality.

The teams discussion was 3 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40786640

I am happy with my comments there, including "MS could devote resources to making MS Teams more useful, but they don't have to, so they don't."

Cheers, I should have been more precise in my wording there. I should have referred to some (Idealist) schools of thought in Buddhism & Hinduism, such as the Yogachara school in Buddhism.

Particularly with Hinduism, its embrace of various philosophies is very broad and includes strains of Materialism, which appears to be the other person's viewpoint, so again, I should have been more careful with my wording.

About four years before Rodney Brooks proposed Subsumption Architecture, some Terrapin Logo hackers from the MIT-AI Lab wrote a proposal for the military to use totally out-of-control Logo Turtles in combat, in this article they published on October 1, 1982 in ACM SIGART Bulletin Issue 82, pp 23–25:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1056602.1056608

https://donhopkins.com/home/TurtlesAndDefense.pdf

>TURTLES AND DEFENSE

>Introduction

>At Terrapin, we feel that our two main products, the Terrapin Turtle ®, and the Terrapin Logo Language for the Apple II, bring together the fields of robotics and AI to provide hours of entertainment for the whole family. We are sure that an enlightened application of our products can uniquely impact the electronic battlefield of the future. [...]

>Guidance

>The Terrapin Turtle ®, like many missile systems in use today, is wire-guided. It has the wire-guided missile's robustness with respect to ECM, and, unlike beam-riding missiles, or most active-homing systems, it has no radar signature to invite enemy missiles to home in on it or its launch platform. However, the Turtle does not suffer from that bugaboo of wire-guided missiles, i.e., the lack of a fire-and-forget capability.

>Often ground troops are reluctant to use wire-guided antitank weapons because of the need for line-of-sight contact with the target until interception is accomplished. The Turtle requires no such human guidance; once the computer controlling it has been programmed, the Turtle performs its mission without the need of human intervention. Ground troops are left free to scramble for cover. [...]

>Because the Terrapin Turtle ® is computer-controlled, military data processing technicians can write arbitrarily baroque programs that will cause it to do pretty much unpredictable things. Even if an enemy had access to the programs that guided a Turtle Task Team ® , it is quite likely that they would find them impossible to understand, especially if they were written in ADA. In addition, with judicious use of the Turtle's touch sensors, one could, theoretically, program a large group of turtles to simulate Brownian motion. The enemy would hardly attempt to predict the paths of some 10,000 turtles bumping into each other more or less randomly on their way to performing their mission. Furthermore, we believe that the spectacle would have a demoralizing effect on enemy ground troops. [...]

>Munitions

>The Terrapin Turtle ® does not currently incorporate any munitions, but even civilian versions have a downward-defense capability. The Turtle can be programmed to attempt to run over enemy forces on recognizing them, and by raising and lowering its pen at about 10 cycles per second, puncture them to death.

>Turtles can easily be programmed to push objects in a preferred direction. Given this capability, one can easily envision a Turtle discreetly nudging a hand grenade into an enemy camp, and then accelerating quickly away. With the development of ever smaller fission devices, it does not seem unlikely that the Turtle could be used for delivery of tactical nuclear weapons. [...]