EXCERPTS FROM MARTIN FORD’S ARCHITECTS OF INTELLIGENCE
Rodney Brooks: AI’s Near Future … What Really Lies Ahead MARTIN FORD: Looking back, what would you say is the highlight of your career with either robots or AI?
RODNEY BROOKS: The thing I’m proudest of was in March 2011 when the earthquake hit Japan and the tidal wave knocked out the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. About a week after it happened, we got word that the Japanese authorities were really having problems in that they couldn’t get any robots into the plant to figure out what was going on. I was still on the board of iRobot at that time, and we shipped six robots in 48 hours to the Fukushima site and trained
the power company tech team. As a result, they acknowledged that the shutdown of the reactors relied on our robots being able to do things for them that they on their own were unable to do. I remember that story about Japan. It was a bit surprising because Japan is generally perceived as being on the very leading edge of robotics, and yet they had to turn to you to get working robots.
I think there’s a real lesson there. The real lesson is that the press hyped up things about them being far more advanced than they really are. Everyone thought
Everyone thought Japan had incredible robotic capabilities, but what they really had was great videos and not much else Japan had incredible robotic capabilities, and this was led by an automobile company or two, when really what they had was great videos and nothing about reality. Our robots had been in war zones for nine years being used in the thousands every day. They weren’t glamorous, and the AI capability would be dismissed as being almost nothing, but that’s the reality of what’s real and what is applicable today. I spend a large part of my life telling people that they are being delusional when they see videos and think that great things are around the corner, or that there will be mass unemployment tomorrow due to robots taking over all of our jobs. At Rethink Robotics, I say, if there was no lab demo 30 years ago, then it’s too early to think that we could make it into a practical product now. That’s how long it takes from a lab demo to a practical product. It’s certainly true of autonomous driving; everyone’s really excited about autonomous driving now. People forget that the first automobile that drove autonomously on a freeway at over 55 miles an hour for 10 miles was in 1987 near
june 2019 | luckbox
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