Every so often, we find ourselves in the middle of a massive technological wave that starts to upend our presumptions and our ideas about the past, present, and future. These waves come with excess—optimism, excitement, hype, and speculation. Since non-believers don’t invent the future and speculators are always on a hustle, I often turn to practitioners to get a fix on the coordinates of reality. It has always helped me maintain a sense of pragmatic optimism when the rest of the world around me seems either overtly hyperbolic or depressingly pessimistic.
We are in the middle of another massive technological wave, thanks to generative artificial intelligence and its offshoot, robotics. A tanker load of money is being poured into these two areas, and it has come with increasingly breathless promotional activity. It warrants a reality check. For that, I turned to Rodney Brooks, who has spent decades in both arenas. The Australian-born Brooks was a Professor of Robotics at MIT and former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has founded three companies: iRobot (maker of the Roomba), Rethink Robotics, and now Robust.AI, which now builds warehouse automation robots. He is an academic who entered the startup arena and hasn’t left it since.
We recently connected for a conversation about robotics, artificial intelligence, and the future. 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. “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 said. He painted a more pragmatic yet optimistic vision ahead. He warned that humanoid hype is creating a lot of false expectations. Excerpts from our conversation.
Om: You have a rare quality as a science person to write about tech in an understandable fashion. I think it’s always helpful to think beyond the tech directly and consider what the consequences are. When I hear people talk about AGI taking over, I point out that we have already become machine-idiots. We just follow the machine blindly.
You wrote something about Waymo recently, where you said there is not really full self-driving because there is human intervention. I would argue it’s not even the best human intervention. Waymo dropped me off at a completely different location, even though on the map it showed the right location.
Rodney: At MIT, I taught big classes with lots of students, so maybe that helped. I came here in an Uber this morning and asked the guy what street we were on. He had no clue. He said, “I just follow it.” (‘It’ being the GPS—Ed.) And that’s the issue—there’s human intervention, but people can’t figure out how to help when things go wrong.
Om: We are now Machine Idiots. So what are you working on now?
Rodney: My new company is putting smart carts in fulfillment warehouses. It doesn’t sound like much, but in fulfillment, many people work picking orders and shipping them out. There are enormous warehouses everywhere full of human workers because human hands are just so much better than anything else. They’re picking, putting orders in totes in these carts, and pushing the carts around.
We’ve got this cart called Carta that has cameras. It knows where it is, goes to the right place, and helps people figure out where the item they want is. It doesn’t do the grasping—people do the picking.
The big thing we do is reduce the amount of walking people have to do. In these warehouses, a typical number of steps per day for a person is 30,000. Now we all know what 10,000 steps feels like (it’s about 5 miles), so imagine doing 30,000 steps a day. It’s really hard on people’s bodies.
... continue reading