Rodney Brooks Predictions Scorecard
rodneybrooks.com
rodneybrooks.com
Right. As I've said on here a few times over the last few years, the big unsolved problem ahead is common sense, defined as getting through the next 30 seconds of life without screwing up. There's been too little progress on this. We need this more than ever, because we now have machine learning systems based on optimization which do the right thing most of the time and something badly wrong some of the time. (I used to speculate on something that made a sheaf of predictions and looked for good and bad outcomes, as an approach to dealing with locomotion over rough terrain. You want to pick moves which have some good outcomes and no really bad fall-off-cliff outcomes. But I was in that too early, in the 1990s, when we didn't have enough compute power for wasteful approaches like that.)
"Despite some impressive lab demonstrations we have not actually seen any improvement in widely deployed robotic hands or end effectors in the last 40 years"
Yes. Manipulation in unstructured environments is still very poor. Brooks' startup in that area, Rethink Robotics, failed on this problem. Mediocre bin picking robots were available in the 1980s, and slightly less mediocre bin picking robots are available today. Amazon has put considerable effort into this without getting good enough performance to deploy. I had hopes for Willow Garage, which got far enough to fold clothing, but they didn't get beyond that point. It's embarrassing to compare the 1960s video from the Stanford AI lab of a robot assembling some automotive parts with the videos of the DARPA manipulation challenge from a few years ago.
"An AI system with an ongoing existence (no day is the repeat of another day as it currently is for all AI systems) at the level of a mouse."
Yes. I've been arguing for mouse-level AI, or sometimes squirrel-level AI, for a long time. Small mammals have very good locomotion and manipulation, with brains 1000x smaller than human.[1] We're there on having enough compute power for that size of brain. That's an indication that this problem requires a different approach, not just bigger models. I had this argument with Brooks decades ago, when he was promoting Cog and trying for human-level AI in one jump. He said "I don't want to go down in history as the man who developed the world's greatest artificial mouse". Then he went on to develop the Roomba.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
If the heuristic is not to screw up badly then we would all be selfish.
(I worked at Rethink Robotics)
Rethink Robotics was not working on the problem that Brooks is complaining about here. Today’s robots are still using parallel electric fingers or vacuum suction cups, which are much poorer than even the most primitive claws in the animal kingdom. That’s the problem.
According to NASA's Inspector General [1], Artemis II can launch no sooner than 27 months after Artemis I, which would push the mission into 2025. Similarly, the Inspector General believes the first Moon landing can come no sooner than 2026. [2]
Note also that this Moon landing depends on a completely untested technology (in-orbit fuel transfer); the landing craft will require 4-8 additional launches to top off its tanks. [3]
Personally, I would be shocked to see a lunar landing before 2027. There are just too many things that would have to go right on the first try to make a 2026 deadline.
[1] https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/MC-2022.pdf
[2] https://www.space.com/artemis-moon-landing-likely-slip-to-20...
JWST started its science mission around July 2022. Researchers get a year of study time before their data are released. So we can expect to see an increase in research releases from JWST until at least that point. I suspect this will continue to remind the world space has more than mars in it.
There’s the psyche asteroid mission that I really wonder about long term.
There’s also this seemingly unexpected opening to discuss and research UAP and interstellar objects from the last several years. I think the count is at two objects that the Avi Loeb and his group will look to recover soon.
Then there’s the research RocketLab appears poised to open up. They’re planning to launch a probe to Venus in March, for instance. Lowered launch costs could make this sort of thing do-able by universities. While those projects won’t have NASA kind of funding, they also won’t have NASA/congressional kind of bureaucracy.
I could probably go on, but it’s an ok list if a little missing something.
Edit-on cars, it appears the news nowadays is all things electrifying. But his points are almost exclusively self driving. Where’s the discussion of battery tech? Charging infrastructure? Charging infrastructure is probably low-lying fruit for someone trying to describe the future as it’s a pretty straightforward engineering problem-with a known scale, for instance.
In 2018, "everyone" was saying perfect self-driving was only a few years away (I recall a highly-rated HN comment saying humans would likely be banned from roads by 2025), and nobody was interested in battery tech.
Some convergent infrastructure (sensors, warning network, etc) and route specific learning would have helped. Oh well.
I mean you could have a "dial a remote operator if uncertainty threshold reached" dropouts, better pull over spots or shoulders , etc.
You could also just build trains, like much of the rest of the world.
Plenty of people drive cars in Europe too.
Yes. Having been involved in the DARPA Grand Challenge 20 years ago, I didn't think it would take this long. I thought we'd at least have automated rental car pick-up and return at airports by now. At least lots of automated shuttle buses on campuses and at airports.
Waymo is getting close.[1] It's worth looking at the accident reports and news stories with complaints about Waymo. People complain about Waymo cars clogging their street, which is happening because SF marked a few nearby streets as "slow streets", and Waymo's planner is optimizing routes around them. There's a recent news story where a Waymo car reached a construction trench in a street and stopped. Didn't go into the trench. Someone had to intervene remotely to back it out of the construction area. There was a collision on Geary Boulevard where a Waymo vehicle detected a speeding car during a left turn and stopped, rather than accelerating to escape. That's their worse accident so far, and the other driver was at fault. There are not stories about Waymo cars making sudden lane changes and causing multi-car collisions. [1] https://waymo.com/sf/
[2] https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/self-driving-car-stops-a...
> There was a collision on Geary Boulevard where a Waymo vehicle detected a speeding car during a left turn and stopped, rather than accelerating to escape. That's their worse accident so far, and the other driver was at fault.
You're thinking of Cruise.
The most common single problem with serious autonomous vehicles right now is being rear-ended by human vehicles while cautiously entering intersections. The usual sequence of events is, autonomous vehicle approaches intersection where the view of the cross street is obstructed, autonomous vehicle starts to enter intersection, detects cross traffic, stops, and is rear-ended. There are dozens of those in the California DMV reports.
This will probably get better as more vehicles get automatic radar-controlled braking, which is good at preventing low-speed rear-ending.
In a research lab I used to work in, my colleagues publishing papers could explain to me the core idea in 2 minutes and probably an undergrad freshman could also understand it. However, if you then read the paper covering the same idea, it would take hours to decipher a fuzzier version of the idea and a freshman undergrad probably wouldn’t bother reading it.
This is just question of money.
All necessary technologies already exist, just very expensive, so even military avoid them.
For example, imagine, we decide to use first stage of F-9 to suborbital transport to ~12000-14000km.
It will have payload capacity ~ 10 metric tonnes.
Cost per launch could be be approx half of space launch (because second stage costs comparable to first), so ~$33mln, so 3.3mln per metric tonne, or 3300$ per kg.
I know, Iphone cost more than 3300$ per kg, but even planes cost less then 100$ per kg, and cars ~10-20$ per kg, and current commercial shipping by plane costs ~50$ per kg from China to Europe (other continents not much more).
In most imminent accident scenarios the optimum solution is probably going to be to apply brakes with maximum force. Once you get into calculating odds for complex scenarios involving lane departures, etc., there's a good chance you'll just make things worse.
That and the fact that no one is buying a car from a manufacturer that is optimizing outcomes for people who don't own the car.
The one time in my life I've ended up doing a high speed swerve (onto the shoulder) to avoid a collision, the only reason I had to do so was some clown who wasn't paying attention ended up swerving to avoid the car they were about to rear-end. Somewhat miraculously for all the vehicles threatening to play pinball at 65 miles per hour, no one actually collided.
But must say, this is complex problem, not just car safety systems involved.
- Standard current EU practice, they constantly analyze incidents statistics, and looking for places, with much worse statistics than middle, and trying to make some changes, to make those places safer.
For example, in EU normal practice, to rebuild shape of road intersection, so there will not exist blind zones, where you don't see vehicles, approaching from other directions.
Other example, they trying to make road transparent, so you will see far, when appear transport congestion, and you have more time to slow down.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15344706/self-driving-mer...
Predictions Scorecard, 2021 January 01 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706436 - Jan 2021 (12 comments)
Predictions Scorecard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18889719 - Jan 2019 (4 comments)
Maybe it’s because he doesn’t stand to inherit the future others seek to build
Personally, I would be happy if there were fewer people moving into overheated areas. Every person working on crypto, quantum computing, AI, self-driving cars, virtual reality (among other things!) is a person who isn't doing something tangibly and immediately useful for society. And it's clear most of those people are in it for purely venal reasons: they want a big payday. It's not good to have so many bull shit artists in a society.
It's one thing to work towards ambitious goals. It's another to mislead people about what is realistically possible.