Rodney Brooks

@rodneyabrooks.bsky.social

106

Posts

Primarily Robotics and AI. Distinguishing hype-notism from plausibility one press release at a time. rodneybrooks.com/blog people.csail.mit.edu/brooks

Posts Replies Media

Really well done, careful, insightful analysis of the how to use generative AI tools; how, when, and where they will work, along with a much more nuanced analysis of the historical background of where they came from and why. Written by a researcher for researchers. www.linkedin.com/posts/timsmi...

Tim Smithers on LinkedIn: Generative AI: Useful Tools or Expensive Toys?www.linkedin.com Here are the notes for a seminar I was invited to give at the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) last month, called Generative AI: Useful Tools or…

Now I get it! Sam Altman is just a humanoid robot connected to ChatGPT. Pure confabulation pours out of his mouth. www.independent.co.uk/tech/openai-...

OpenAI seeks ‘vast quantities’ of nuclear fusion to power superhuman AIwww.independent.co.uk ChatGPT creator seeks ‘holy grail of clean energy’ to build artificial intelligence

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Rodney Brooks

AI company: we trained this dog to talk. It doesn’t actually understand language, but it kinda sounds like it’s having a conversation by mimicking the sound of human speech. CEO: awesome, I’ve fired my entire staff, how quickly can it start diagnosing medical disorders

I wish I had thought of this. Robots to clean your house. Oh, that's right I did think of it... Young Kyle was an intern at iRobot out of high school after we were already a public company. techcrunch.com/2024/05/13/c...

Cruise founder Kyle Vogt is back with a robot startup | TechCrunchtechcrunch.com Kyle Vogt, the former founder and CEO of self-driving car company Cruise, has a new VC-backed robotics startup focused on household chores. Vogt announced

How the world sounds to me some days: I am going to build an art. I'm going to build a GA (general art) more general than any other art! It is going to be better than all the other arts. I am really smart, and I have a big computer, so I am going to build the best art ever. Art. It is the future.

My dear and long time friend Daniel Dennett passed away today. He was a towering figure in philosophy and in particular in the philosophy of AI. Now we have only memories of him. [[And do keep up to date with your correspondence--it was my turn to reply...]] www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2...

I've used my own three laws of robotics at all my robot companies and have sold 50+ million real robots to real customers; research robots, home cleaning, nuclear power plant inspection, military ground robots, upper body humanoids in factories, and now intelligent carts in warehouses and factories.

My brain hurts trying to figure this out. Headline: "Elon Musk Says It Will Be A Decade Before Most Cars Are Self-Driving — There Is A More 'Immediate Concern' At Hand". ??? The more immediate concern seems to be about Canada blocking credit cards a year or two ago. benzinga.com/news/24/03/3...

Elon Musk Says It Will Be A Decade Before Most Cars Are Self-Driving — There Is A More 'Immediate Concern' At Hand - Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA)benzinga.com

So far the timing on every prediction about self-driving being around the corner has turned out to be wrong. See my annual dated predictions and updates at rodneybrooks.com/blog for details. I appreciate this update from @IEEESpectrum twitter.com/IEEESpectrum...

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Had forgotten that I had written this for TIME back in 2000, soon after my research group had started building humanoid robots (a later company I founded put 1000s of humanoid robots in factories). Trying to decide how well it has stood up over 24 years. content.time.com/time/subscri...

Will Robots Rise Up And Demand Their Rights?content.time.com Could a robot ever really want anything? The hard-core reductionists among us, myself included, think that in principle this must be possible. Humans, after all, are machines made up of organic...

There's FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and then there's FOBAWTPALSL (Fear Of Being A Wimpy Techno-Pessimist And Looking Stupid Later). Both drive many questionable tech trends and steer tens of $B's into tar pits.

Apple has killed its electric self driving car project after a decade and lots of $$$ invested. www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/t...

Apple Kills Its Electric Car Projectwww.nytimes.com The car, which Apple spent billions of dollars researching, had been intended as a rival to Tesla’s E.V.s, which include autonomous driving features.

Stuff happening in Spaceland. Odyssey landed on the Moon (with drama). Congrats! Blue Origin's New Glenn finally vertical at Cape pad 36C. 99,000lbs to LEO, compared to 50,000 for Falcon9 expendable, 38,800 for reuse. New Glenn numbers will adjust after flight and for reuse, but competitive entry.

I just put a link to a 1993 movie of the soft landing test near the bottom of this page: people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/docum...

Cheering for Intuitive Machines Lunar landing scheduled for Thurs. iRobot's original biz plan was to land on the Moon, then Mars, 30+ years ago. We had a launch commitment for the Moon for a little while, and vertically soft landed a test six legged robot at Edwards. Hard tech takes many attempts.

Rodney Brooks Biopeople.csail.mit.edu

Voyager 1, launched Sep 5 1977 has been at the least level of communication for months, at 24.4 billion kilometers, almost 24 light hours away. Software upgrades in flight over 46 & 1/2 years let it talk to us way longer than we could have imagined. An engineering tour de force. Fingers crossed.

As global warming seems to move faster than predicted there are more geo-engineering solutions proposed, by some who formerly thought them unthinkable. What will the unexpected side effects be? There are no good clean options. It is going to get messier. www.wsj.com/science/envi...

Scientists Resort to Once-Unthinkable Solutions to Cool the Planetwww.wsj.com Three geoengineering projects seek to alter the chemistry of the atmosphere and the ocean. Critics warn of unintended consequences.

Cybertruck was a 10 second fantasy thought ordered into production, full of grandiose misbeliefs about materials and design and manufacturing processes with guessed at performance goals. It has not and is not going well. The flatulence quote is particularly harsh. www.fastcompany.com/90945689/tes...

Tesla’s Cybertruck has a serious problem that only a complete redesign can fixwww.fastcompany.com Elon Musk is calling for Lego-like precision in the Cybertruck. Its design makes that an impossible ask.

Edge cases are indeed endless & low frequency so there is no training data. A pickup truck was being "improperly towed" pointing backwards. Two Waymos collided with it, getting the direction of travel wrong. Humans figure that out instantly. techcrunch.com/2024/02/13/w...

Waymo recalls and updates robotaxi software after two cars crashed into the same towed truck | TechCrunchtechcrunch.com Waymo is issuing its first-ever recall after two of its autonomous vehicles crashed into the same towed pickup truck in December.

Heard this commotion from inside a restaurant last night, but didn't witness directly. How to interpret? Rebellion by people fed up with poorly behaving AVs that fill our streets? Or natural crowd behavior with massive amount of street fireworks for Chinese New Year? sfstandard.com/2024/02/10/w...

Waymo robotaxi set on fire in San Francisco's Chinatownsfstandard.com A crowd in San Francisco's Chinatown surrounded a Waymo robotaxi Saturday, broke the windows and threw fireworks inside, setting it ablaze.

“I think we’ve got a good chance of shipping some number of Optimus units next year.” For him that is an extraordinarily pessimistic statement. Like his hypno-optimistic past predictions for Tesla this one won't happen either. www.wsj.com/business/aut...

After many years the autonomous car hype bubble is slowly deflating; $100B already invested. My problem with hype is that it diverts enormous amounts of capital to things that aren't ready for enormous amounts yet, and the public make plans around an impossible timeline. jalopnik.com/americans-ar...

What we are doing at Robust.AI. Getting real robots working everyday with real people in real warehouses, and measuring the impact. Those big flat buildings you see from the plane as you land or takeoff are full of people and stuff. And now there are robots in there too. www.dhl.com/us-en/home/p...

www.dhl.com

Wow, Stephanie Wilson assigned to her 4th spaceflight after a 14 year hiatus, 28 years into her time as an astronaut. www.space.com/nasa-names-a...

NASA names astronauts for SpaceX's Crew-9 mission to the ISSwww.space.com Crew-9 will lift off no earlier than August.

Thanks @ieeespectrum.bsky.social and @evanackerman.bsky.social for following up on Peter Corke's post about deceptive robot videos, where the teleoperation component is obscured, with some clear writing about good standards for captioning all robot videos. spectrum.ieee.org/robot-teleop...

That Awesome Robot Demo Could Have a Human in the Loopspectrum.ieee.org How to tell whether a robot is being teleoperated

Chinese rocket company Landspace did first stage 350m high hop and vertical landing a week ago. Planned Falcon competitor with about 80% of the payload. www.space.com/chinese-star...

Watch Chinese startup Landspace launch and land reusable rocket prototype for 1st time (video)www.space.com A test version of the company's Zhuque-3 rocket soared about 1,150 feet (350 meters) high on Jan. 19.

After 2.5 years and 70+ flights on Mars, NASA/JPL's Ingenuity helicopter has broken a blade and will fly no more. It carried a tiny swath of material from one of the wings of the Wright brothers' Flyer 1, the first powered airplane to carry a person aloft in Dec 1903. arstechnica.com/space/2024/0...

The amazing helicopter on Mars, Ingenuity, will fly no morearstechnica.com Ingenuity has spent more than two hours flying above Mars since April 2021.

Akio Toyoda has been consistent with labelling CO2 the enemy rather than declaring battery-based cars the solution. Toyota also produces hydrogen powered cars and hybrids. Expect a Toyota hydrogen hybrid once there is a good H2 supply chain established. www.msn.com/en-us/autos/...

How to screw up useful ideas. HUBRIS. SV is full of it. They think they are so smart. I moved to SV in 1977. Have started 6 companies & done very well. But hubris makes people think they are gods & that their ideas excuse them from responsible behavior. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

San Francisco takes legal action over ‘unsafe,’ ‘disruptive’ self-driving carswww.washingtonpost.com San Francisco is suing California over an August decision to allow two major autonomous car companies to expand in the city.