RODNEY BROOKS: THE AI EXPERT WHO’S SICK OF THE HYPE
Meet Rodney Brooks, the robotics and AI expert who’s had enough of the industry’s over-the-top promises. As the Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus at MIT and co-founder of three major companies, Brooks has seen it all. And he’s not impressed with the latest trend in AI: generative AI.
THE TRUTH ABOUT GENERATIVE AI
Brooks thinks generative AI is impressive technology, but it’s not the game-changer everyone makes it out to be. In fact, he believes humans tend to overestimate its capabilities. "When a human sees an AI system perform a task, they immediately generalize it to things that are similar and make an estimate of the competence of the AI system," he says. "And they’re usually very over-optimistic, and that’s because they use a model of a person’s performance on a task."
AI ISN’T HUMAN, AND IT NEVER WILL BE
Brooks is tired of people trying to assign human capabilities to AI. "It’s not human or even human-like, and it’s flawed to try and assign human capabilities to it," he says. He believes people see AI as so capable they even want to use it for applications that don’t make sense. "When you have 10,000 orders that just came in that you have to ship in two hours, you have to optimize for that. Language is not gonna help; it’s just going to slow things down," he says.
THE PROBLEM WITH AI ISN’T THE TECHNOLOGY, IT’S THE PEOPLE
Brooks thinks the real problem with AI is that people don’t understand how to use it effectively. "We need to automate in places where things have already been cleaned up," he says. "We’re doing pretty well in warehouses, and warehouses are actually pretty constrained." He believes robots and humans should work together, rather than trying to build human-like robots.
MOORE’S LAW IS A MYTH
Brooks is also skeptical of the idea that technology will always grow exponentially, thanks to Moore’s law. He uses the example of the iPod, which didn’t continue to double in storage size as expected. "The models being sold in 2017 actually came with 256GB or 160GB because, as he pointed out, nobody actually needed more than that," he says.
AI ISN’T THE SOLUTION TO EVERY PROBLEM
Brooks believes AI has its place, but it’s not the solution to every problem. "There are always going to be hard-to-solve outlier cases when it comes to AI, that could take decades to solve," he says. He thinks people need to be more realistic about what AI can and can’t do.
RODNEY BROOKS: THE AI EXPERT WHO’S TELLING IT LIKE IT IS
In a world where AI is often hyped up to be more than it is, Rodney Brooks is a breath of fresh air. He’s not afraid to speak his mind and tell it like it is. And if you want to know the truth about AI, you should listen to what he has to say.
