The Best Thing I Read This Week: iRobot Founder: Don’t Believe The (AI & Robotics) Hype!

The best thing I read this week was a Q&A between iRobot founder Rodney Brooks and Om Malik: iRobot Founder: Don’t Believe The (AI & Robotics) Hype!.

Om is one of my favorite tech writers, and his conversation with Brooks is long but well worth it. Brooks comes across as evidently intelligent in both robotics and AI. Rodney calls himself an AI “realist”, he’s optimistic but sees potentially immovable obstacles between where we are today and general machine intelligence.

Om: Contrary to many, he believes humans will do just fine in a world filled with robots and AI. He poured cold water on the humanoid robot hype. He also said that if you look at the computer and internet revolutions, the AI revolution is going to take a lot longer than most think.

Brooks questions the notion that we’ll reach AGI simply by scaling what we already do today.

Rodney: Or are we trying to build a rocket by writing a program, which is doomed to failure? In the same way, Newton was doomed to failure with alchemy because it’s not chemical—it’s nuclear, and no one knew about the nucleus. So that’s my bigger picture. AGI could be 300 years away because we’re dealing in the wrong kind of stuff.

On autonomous cars and robotics, he articulates something I’ve long felt: even as demos get more exciting, there’s still a long tail of unsolved, messy real-world problems.

Rodney: There’s a tendency to go for the flashy demo, but the flashy demo doesn’t deal with the real environment. It’s going to have to operate in the messy reality. That’s why it takes so long for these technologies.

He also makes the case the looks do matter, especially for robots:

Rodney: I always say about a physical robot, the physical appearance makes a promise about what it can do. The Roomba was this little disc on the floor. It didn’t promise much—you saw it and thought, that’s not going to clean the windows. But you can imagine it cleaning the floor. But the human form sort of promises it can do anything a human can. And that’s why it’s so attractive to people—it’s selling a promise that is amazing.