![]() to emerge gradually and symbiotically with our society” even as “a wide range of advanced sensory devices and prosthetics” emerge to enhance and augment our own bodies: “As our machines become more like us, we will become more like them. He expects “robots that will roam our homes and workplaces. None of this means that Brooks doubts the eventual creation of “truly artificial intelligences, with cognition and consciousness recognizably similar to our own,” he wrote in 2008. It hasn’t.”ĬhatGPT, he writes, is replicating patterns in a human prompt, rather than showing any new level of intelligence. “People are making the same mistake that they have made again and again and again,” he writes in his scorecard, “completely misjudging some new AI demo as the sign that everything in the world has changed. “What is easy for humans is still very, very hard for robots,” he writes.Īs for ChatGPT, the AI prose generator that has garnered inordinate interest by high-tech enthusiasts, along with warnings that it may launch a new era of machine-driven plagiarism and academic fakery, Brooks argues for caution. That’s also true of autonomous navigation around any home with its clutter, furniture and moving objects. Robot hands with true human-like dexterity have not advanced much in 40 years, Brooks says. Robots today are common in industry and even around the home, but their capabilities are very narrow. When IRobots were deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq to disable improvised explosive devices, however, “failures there could kill someone, so there was always a human in the loop giving supervisory commands.” The Roomba, he wrote, functions autonomously, but its most dire failure might involve “missing a patch of floor and failing to pick up a dustball.” ![]() In reality, Brooks wrote, almost every successful deployment of AI in the real world had either a human “somewhere in the loop” or a very low cost of failure. In an article titled “An Inconvenient Truth about AI” in September 2021, for instance, he noted how every wave of new developments in AI was accompanied by “breathless predictions about the end of human dominance in intelligence” amid “a tsunami of promise, hype and profitable applications.” The self-driving car era, such as it is, has not gotten off to an auspicious start. He has been a frequent contributor to IEEE Spectrum, the house organ for the leading professional society of electronics engineers.īusiness Column: Self-driving car deaths raise the question: Is society ready for us to take our hands off the wheel? The annual scorecard is one of many outlets Brooks relies on to temper “irrational exuberance” about technology in general and AI specifically. In his annual scorecard this year, he predicted that “there will be human drivers on our roads for decades to come.” “That might work for select geographies, but it is not going to compete with human operated systems for quite a while.” It’s also “decades away from profitability,” he judged. “The result is that it was slower by a factor of two over any human operated ride hailing service,” Brooks wrote. On his three Cruise trips, Brooks found that the vehicles avoided left-hand turns, preferring to make three right turns around a block instead, drove painstakingly slowly and once tried to pick him up in front of a construction site that would have exposed him to oncoming traffic. that is, when traffic is lightest - and only in limited parts of the city and in good weather. In San Francisco, Cruise operates only between 10 p.m. One example is driverless cars, a technology with limitations that laypersons seldom recognize.īrooks has written about his experience with Cruise, a service using self-driving taxis (no one in the front seat at all) in parts of San Francisco, Phoenix and Austin, Texas. “They don’t understand how hard it might have been to get there,” he told me, “so they assume that it will keep getting better and better.” That tempts people, even experts, to underestimate how difficult it may be to reach a chosen goal, whether self-aware robots or living on Mars.
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