Rodney Brooks

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Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

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David was awarded the title of IBM Fellow (fewer than 100 of 450,000 hold this technical distinction) and has won many awards for his work creating UIMA and Watson, including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s Innovation Award and the AAAI Feigenbaum Prize. Chapter 20. RODNEY BROOKS We don’t have anything anywhere near as good as an insect, so I’m not afraid of superintelligence showing up anytime soon. CHAIRMAN, RETHINK ROBOTICS Rodney Brooks is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost roboticists. Rodney co-founded iRobot Corporation, an industry leader in both consumer robotics (primarily the Roomba vacuum cleaner) and military robots, such as those used to defuse bombs in the Iraq war (iRobot divested its military robotics division in 2016).

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What kinds of breakthroughs should we realistically expect? RODNEY BROOKS: You can never expect breakthroughs. I expect 10 years from now the hot thing will not be deep learning, there’ll be a new hot thing driving progress. Deep learning has been a wonderful technology for us. It is what enables the speech systems for Amazon Echo and Google Home, and that’s a fantastic step forward. I know deep learning is going to enable other steps forward too, but something will come along to replace it. MARTIN FORD: When you say deep learning, do you mean by that neural networks using backpropagation? RODNEY BROOKS: Yes, but with lots of layers.

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The example people always give is the robot that would bring you a beer. It sounds like that might still be some way off. RODNEY BROOKS: Colin Angle, the CEO of iRobot, who co-founded it with me in 1990, has been talking about that for 28 years now. I think that I’m still going to be going to the fridge myself for a while. MARTIN FORD: Do you think that there will ever be a genuinely ubiquitous consumer robot, one that saturates the consumer market by doing something that people find absolutely indispensable? RODNEY BROOKS: Is Roomba indispensable? No, but it does something of value at a low enough cost that people are willing to pay for it.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

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Singer, November 17, 2006. 130 Special forces roles were felt Robert Finkelstein and James Albus, “Technology Assessment of Autonomous Intelligent Bipedal and Other Legged Robots” (DARPA, 2004). 130 “As technology advances” Ibid. 130 “2035 [that] we will have robots” Ibid. 131 “Common sense is not a simple thing” Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005), 177. 131 our “emotional intelligence” Ibid., 191. 131 Rod Brooks of MIT and iRobot predicts Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 22. 131 “My job will be eliminated” As quoted by David Bruemmer, “Intelligent Autonomy for Unmanned Vehicles,” paper presented at the Military Robotics Conference, Institute for Defense and Government Advancement, Washington, DC, April 10-12, 2006. 131 “Asking whether robots” Rodney Brooks, interview, Peter W. Singer, Washington, DC, October 30, 2006. 132 Haile, a robot musician Gil Weinberg and Scott Driscoll, “Haile,” 2006 (cited July 7, 2007); available at http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/~gilwein/Haile.htm 132 understand and interact with human musicians Matthew Abshire, “Musical Robot Composes, Performs and Teaches,” CNN.com, October 3, 2006 (cited October 3 2006); available at http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/10/03/musical.robot/index.html 132 “I firmly believe” H.

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Eric Drexler, “Nanotechnology: Six Lessons from Sept. 11,” Open Letter, Foresight Institute, December 2001. 422 “We’ve got to be pro-active” Ibid. 422 “We have to manage the ethics” Habershon and Woods, “No Sex Please, Robot, Just Clean the Floor.” 422 “Ethicists have written at length” Nick Bostrom, “Nanotechnology Perceptions: A Review of Ultraprecision,” Nanotechnology Perceptions: A Review of Ultraprecision Engineering and Nanotechnology 2, no. 2 (2006). 423 “People ask me about” Rodney Brooks, interview, Peter W. Singer, October 30, 2006. 423 “Asimov’s rules are neat” Daniel Wilson, interview, Peter W. Singer, October 19, 2006. 423 “realized during a robot exhibition” “Trust Me, I’m a Robot,” Economist 379, no. 8481 (2006): 20. 423 “You don’t want to tell” Mark Barber, “Force Protection Robotics,” paper presented at the Military Robotics Conference, Institute for Defense and Government Advancement, Washington, DC, April 10-12, 2006. 423 “There is a lot of push” Rodney Brooks, interview, Peter W. Singer, October 30, 2006. 424 “Businesses are notoriously uninterested” Robert Sawyer, “On Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics,” 1994 (cited November 1, 2007); available at http://www.sfwriter.com/rmasilaw.htm 424 “We can’t simply do our science” Bill Joy, “Forfeiting the Future,” Resurgence no. 208 (2001), http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/joy208.htm 424 “I gave him a six-foot extension cord” Roger Nygard, “Grief Counseling,” The Office, produced by B.

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When I arrive for my visit, some of the employees are testing out a tracked robot, driving it down the hallway with a jury-rigged Xbox video game controller. Think Office Space crossed with Asimov. iRobot was founded in 1990 by three MIT computer geeks, Colin Angle, the CEO, Helen Greiner, the chairman of the board, and Rodney Brooks, their former professor, who doubled as chief technical officer. Brooks was already considered one of the world’s leading experts on robotics and artificial intelligence, Greiner would eventually be named one of “America’s Best Leaders” by U.S. News & World Report, and Angle’s work would become so influential that his undergrad thesis paper ended up at the Smithsonian. iRobot, though, was no sure thing at the start.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

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Interface Agents: Excerpts from Debates at IUI 97 and CHI 97,” Association for Computing Machinery Interactions, November-December 1997, http://ritter.ist.psu.edu/misc/dirk-files/Papers/HRI-papers/User%20interface%20design%20issues/Direct%20manipulation%20vs.%20interface%20agents.pdf. 27.Ibid. 6|COLLABORATION 1.Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 28. 2.Ibid., 29. 3.Ibid., 31. 4.Rodney Brooks, “Elephants Don’t Play Chess,” Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6 (1990): 3–15, people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.ps.Z. 5.Ibid. 6.Brooks, Flesh and Machines, 31. 7.Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), 132. 8.R.

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In one sense it is the ultimate religious belief in the power of technology-driven exponential curves, an idea that has been explored by Robert Geraci in Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality. There he finds fascinating sociological parallels between singularity thinking and a variety of messianic religious traditions.39 The singularity hypothesis also builds on the emergent AI research pioneered by Rodney Brooks, who first developed a robotics approach based on building complex systems out of collections of simpler parts. Both Kurzweil in How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed and Jeff Hawkins in his earlier On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines attempt to make the case that because the simple biological “algorithms” that are the basis for human intelligence have been discovered, it is largely a matter of “scaling up” to engineer intelligent machines.

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That conversation led to Beckman funding Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as a Beckman Instruments subsidiary, but passing on the opportunity to purchase Shockley’s robotic eye. Shockley had written his proposal to replace workers with robots amid the nation’s original debate over “automation,” a term popularized by John Diebold in his 1952 book Automation: The Advent of the Automatic Factory. Shockley’s prescience was so striking that when Rodney Brooks, himself a pioneering roboticist at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s, read Brock’s article in IEEE Spectrum in 2013, he passed Shockley’s original 1951 memo around his company, Rethink Robotics, and asked his employees to guess when the memo had been written. No one came close.

Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

They had no awareness of self, and no awareness that they were cleaning, or ‘feeding,’ in any sense; no sense or internal representation of agency. If they fed a lot, their bin full sensor would say they were ‘satiated,’ but there was no connection between those two events inside the robot in any way, whether physically or in software. No adaptation of behavior based on past experience.” Rodney Brooks, “What Is It Like to Be a Robot?,” Rodney Brooks Blog: Robots, AI, and Other Stuff, 2017.   54.   Lucy Suchman, “Situational Awareness: Deadly Bioconvergence at the Boundaries of Bodies and Machines,” MediaTropes Test Journal 5 no. 1 (2015): 1–24.   55.   iRobot has since migrated its war-related operations into another company called Endeavor Robotics.

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The simulated battlefield is constructed from a Cold War mindset; “agents” in the program are modeled after “Soviet Regiments.”64 In their report for DARPA, AI practitioners evaluated SAFOR using a mix of technical considerations (such as whether the agency chose the right programming language) and tactical ones (like whether the use of AI would achieve the military’s aims in a cost-effective way). For example, Rodney Brooks, a prominent AI researcher from MIT, considered the advantages of scaling up the program so that soldiers may “experience some of the large scale aspects of battle that are not generated by, say, 300 tank simulators.”65 Brooks also considered the finances of the project, pointing out “that for significantly less than $20B it would be possible to replicate the current hardware to provide enough simulators that the whole U.S.

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They claim that “cognitive science cannot be separated from cognitive technology”—and therefore, embodied ideas must show their value pragmatically by helping to build “truly intelligent, cognitive artifacts.”50 This pragmatism leads them to search for examples of successful “applied” embodied AI. For VTR, the field of situated robotics—and the work of AI practitioner Rodney Brooks, in particular—provides such an example. Other critics of AI’s orthodoxy have also looked to situated robotics as a viable alternative. In the next section I examine the context in which situated robotics developed, in order to see how notions of embodiment work in practice. What kind of “cognitive artifacts” did these ideas help create?

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

The human use of human beings will soon be changed—once again—forever, but we can take the tiller and steer between some of the hazards if we take responsibility for our trajectory. Chapter 6 THE INHUMAN MESS OUR MACHINES HAVE GOTTEN US INTO RODNEY BROOKS Rodney Brooks is a computer scientist; Panasonic Professor of Robotics, emeritus, MIT; former director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is the author of Flesh and Machines. The roboticist Rodney Brooks, featured in Errol Morris’s 1997 documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control along with a lion tamer, a topiarist, and an expert on the naked mole rat, was described by one reviewer as “smiling with a wild gleam in his eye.”

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George Dyson: The Third Law Any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently, while any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will be too complicated to understand. CHAPTER 5. Daniel C. Dennett: What Can We Do? We don’t need artificial conscious agents. We need intelligent tools. CHAPTER 6. Rodney Brooks: The Inhuman Mess Our Machines Have Gotten Us Into We are in a much more complex situation today than Wiener foresaw, and I am worried that it is much more pernicious than even his worst imagined fears. CHAPTER 7. Frank Wilczek: The Unity of Intelligence The advantages of artificial over natural intelligence appear permanent, while the advantages of natural over artificial intelligence, though substantial at present, appear transient.

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The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Computer Challenge to the World was published in 1983. We had a code name for the project: “It’s coming, it’s coming!” But it didn’t come; it went. From that point on I’ve worked with researchers in nearly every variety of AI and complexity, including Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec, John Archibald Wheeler, Benoit Mandelbrot, John Henry Holland, Danny Hillis, Freeman Dyson, Chris Langton, J. Doyne Farmer, Geoffrey West, Stuart Russell, and Judea Pearl. AN ONGOING DYNAMICAL EMERGENT SYSTEM From the initial meeting in Washington, Connecticut, to the present, I arranged a number of dinners and discussions in London and Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as a public event at London’s City Hall.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

Professor Breazeal is trying to build an autonomous, social robot – a robot we’d be happy to treat as a living (if not breathing) entity and not just an arrangement of servos, computers and sensors. She wants to create a personality we can interact and work with, even be friends with – to all intents and purposes, an intelligent, social, multipurpose machine. This scares the hell out of a lot of people. As Breazeal’s former mentor, the restive, maverick genius Rodney Brooks, opens his book Robot: The Future of Flesh and Machines: ‘As these robots get smarter, some people worry about what will happen when they get really smart. Will they decide that we humans are useless and stupid and take over the world from us?’ We’re weaned on a diet of Hollywood movies that generally cast future robots as perilous weapons of war and aggression (The Terminator) or scheming murderers (like the iconic HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey), with only the occasional Wall-E as light relief.

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In 1997, IBM’s computer Deep Blue beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. This is seen, rightly, as a landmark moment in AI research, but it’s part of an old AI tradition of trying to get machines to replicate highly intellectual ‘symbolic’ reasoning (the sort you need to master algebra, for instance, and the kind of tasks revered, says Rodney Brooks, by ‘highly educated male scientists’). It’s no coincidence that the frontiers of AI research seem to have been populated with computers that get ever better at playing chess. But the big elephant in the room for this kind of AI research is that Elephants Don’t Play Chess (this being the title of a paper Brooks wrote in 1990), but they do do any number of ‘common-sense’ things that machines can’t – as can dogs, cats and preschool children.

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At this point we hope they feel some responsibility for their ancestors and don’t break us down for raw materials, try to hunt us to extinction (Terminator) or (yes, Matrix fans) use us for batteries. They rule us, and our fate will be in their hands. Option three is that man and machine merge. As I found out during my chat with Nick Bostrom, this is already happening. In the opening pages of Robot, Rodney Brooks writes, ‘Recently, I was confronted with a researcher in our lab, a double-leg amputee, stepping off the elevator that I was waiting for. From the knees up he was all human, from the knees down he was robot.’ In late 2009, Robin af Ekenstam became the first recipient of ‘SmartHand’ – a prosthetic mechanical hand that not only replicates the movement of its human equivalent, but also provides Robin with a sense of touch (the replacement hand is wired to existing nerve endings in the stump left after he lost his original hand to cancer).

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

This time, the paradigm being questioned was not just the ‘Knowledge is power’ doctrine that had driven the expert systems boom, but the basic assumptions that had underpinned AI since the 1950s, symbolic AI in particular. The fiercest critics of AI in the late 1980s, though, were not outsiders, but came from within the field itself. The most eloquent and influential critic of the prevailing AI paradigm was the Australian-born roboticist Rodney Brooks. Born in 1954, Brooks seemed like an unlikely candidate to be a vocal critic of AI. He had studied and worked at the three leading centres of AI research: Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University. Brooks’ main interest was in building robots that could carry out useful tasks in the real world.

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It doesn’t remotely have the same kind of generality of intelligent capabilities that we all have. It can play board games superbly, but it can’t converse or make a joke or cook an omelette or ride a bicycle or tie a pair of shoelaces. Its remarkable abilities are still actually very narrow. And of course, board games are highly abstract – they are a long way from the real world, as Rodney Brooks would be quick to remind us. But whatever niggles and caveats one might have, I believe the simple truth is that DeepMind’s work, starting with their Atari player through to AlphaZero, represented an extraordinary series of breakthrough achievements in AI. And in doing all this, they managed to capture the imagination of millions.

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Your understanding of the picture is therefore grounded in your experiences as a person in the world. Such an understanding is not possible for CaptionBot, because CaptionBot has no such grounding (and nor, of course, does it purport to). CaptionBot is completely disembodied from the world, and as Rodney Brooks reminded us, intelligence is embodied. I emphasize that this is not an argument that AI systems cannot demonstrate understanding, but rather that understanding means more than being able to map a certain input (a picture containing Matt Smith) to a certain output (the text ‘Matt Smith’). Such a capability may be part of understanding, but it isn’t by any means the whole story.

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

The motors and sensors required to replicate that ability in a robotic hand would be expensive—even if the controlling software to make it possible were available. The reality is that, even after decades of work on robotic hands and the algorithms required to animate them, their dexterity is not yet close to human level. Rodney Brooks, one of the world’s foremost roboticists and a co-founder of iRobot Corporation, the makers of the Roomba as well as some of the world’s most advanced military robots, illustrates this by alluding to the long reach plastic gripper tools that you often see being used to pick up trash: That really primitive [gripper] can do fantastic manipulation beyond what any robot can currently do, but it’s an amazingly primitive piece of plastic junk.… That’s the clincher: you are doing the manipulation.

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The average guess was the year 2099, or roughly eighty years from now.i,63 The predictions are neatly bracketed by guesses from two people who were willing to go on the record. Ray Kurzweil, as we’ve seen, remains adamant that human-level AI will come into existence by 2029—now just eight years away. Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of iRobot Corporation and widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost roboticists, thinks it will take nearly 180 years for AGI to arrive. This gaping chasm between predictions—with multiple researchers anticipating human-level AI within a decade or two, whereas others think it could be centuries—is, I think, a vivid illustration of just how unpredictable the future of artificial intelligence is likely to be.

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A common refrain is that the emergence of superintelligence is so far off, and the specific parameters of the problem to be solved so nebulous, that there’s little point in pursuing the issue. Andrew Ng, who led AI research groups at Google and Baidu, is famous for saying that worrying about an existential threat from AI is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars—long before even the first team of astronauts has been sent to the red planet. The roboticist Rodney Brooks echoes this sentiment, saying that superintelligence is so far in the future that “it’s not going to be a case of having exactly the same world as it is today, but with an AI superintelligence in the middle of it.… We have no clue at all about what the world or [a superintelligent AI system] are going to be like.

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

Albert Einstein, Columbine, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fake news, Future Shock, global village, Hacker Ethic, helicopter parent, Howard Rheingold, industrial robot, information retrieval, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rodney Brooks, Skype, social intelligence, stem cell, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Great Good Place, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking

See Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect: A Son’s Journey (New Yorker Films, 2003). 17 Rodney Brooks, cited in “MIT: ‘Creating a Robot So Alive You Feel Bad About Switching It Off’—a Galaxy Classic,” The Daily Galaxy, December 24, 2009, www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/12/there-is-ongoing-debate-about-what-constitutes-life-synthetic-bacteria-for-example-are-created-by-man-and-yet-also-alive. html (accessed June 4, 2010). 18 Cynthia Breazeal and Rodney Brooks both make the point that robot emotions do not have to be like human ones. They should be judged on their own merits. See Cynthia Breazeal and Rodney Brooks (2005). “Robot Emotion: A Functional Perspective,” in J.

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I thank all of my colleagues and students who worked with the initiative and in the Program for Science, Technology, and Society, which is its academic home. I have profited from their support and good ideas. Collegial relationships across MIT have enriched my thinking and been sources of much appreciated practical assistance. Rodney Brooks provided me with an office at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to help me get the lay of the land. He gave me the best possible start. Cynthia Breazeal and Brian Scassellati, the principal developers of Kismet and Cog, worked with me on the first-encounters study that introduced sixty children to these robots.

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When the toy manufacturer Hasbro introduced its My Real Baby robot doll in 2000, it tried to step away from these complex matters. My Real Baby shut down in situations where a real baby might feel pain. This was in contrast to its prototype, a robot called “IT,” developed by a team led by MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks. “IT” evolved into “BIT” (for Baby IT), a doll with “states of mind” and facial musculature under its synthetic skin to give it expression.13 When touched in a way that would induce pain in a child, BIT cried out. Brooks describes BIT in terms of its inner states:If the baby were upset, it would stay upset until someone soothed it or it finally fell asleep after minutes of heartrending crying and fussing.

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson

3D printing, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital twin, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, friendly AI, fulfillment center, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Benioff, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, personalized medicine, precision agriculture, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, software as a service, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telepresence robot, text mining, the scientific method, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Robots, with their fast, decisive movements have been helpful and efficient, but also dangerous to people. They’ve often been cordoned off behind protective barriers. But that standard segregation is beginning to change. So-called collaborative robots from companies like Rethink Robotics, founded by robotics and AI pioneer Rodney Brooks, come equipped with sensors that allow them to recognize a range of objects and avoid knocking people around. When robots aren’t so clumsy, they can work well with people. Factories that use Rethink Robotics products often divide the work between the robot and the human worker, working side by side, performing tasks best suited to their abilities.

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Mike Murphy, “Siemens is building a swarm of robot spiders to 3D-print objects together,” Quartz, April 29, 2016, https://qz.com/672708/siemens-is-building-a-swarm-of-robot-spiders-to-3d-print-objects-together/. c. Robotiq, “Inertia Switch Case Study – Robotiq 2-Finger Adaptive Gripper – ROBOTIQ,” YouTube video, 1:32 minutes, posted July 28, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJftrfiGyfs. Kindler, Gentler Robots During the second AI “winter,” Rodney Brooks challenged one of the fundamental ideas that had driven previous AI research—namely, the reliance on predetermined symbols and relationships between symbols to help computers make sense of the world (see the sidebar “Two AI Winters”). He claimed a much more robust approach: instead of cataloging the world in advance and representing it with symbols, why not survey it with sensors instead?

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We owe a special debt to the many visionaries and pioneers who have blazed AI trails and whose work has inspired and informed us, including Herbert Simon, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Arthur Samuel, Edward Feigenbaum, Joseph Weizenbaum, Geoffrey Hinton, Hans Moravec, Peter Norvig, Douglas Hofstadter, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Yann LeCun, and Andrew Ng, among many others. And huge gratitude to our colleagues who provided insights and inspiration, including Nicola Morini Bianzino, Mike Sutcliff, Ellyn Shook, Marc Carrel-Billiard, Narendra Mulani, Dan Elron, Frank Meerkamp, Adam Burden, Mark McDonald, Cyrille Bataller, Sanjeev Vohra, Rumman Chowdhury, Lisa Neuberger-Fernandez, Dadong Wan, Sanjay Podder, and Michael Biltz.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

Yes, they said, we should make sure that AI programs are safe and don’t risk harming humans, but any reports of near-term superhuman AI are greatly exaggerated. The entrepreneur and activist Mitchell Kapor advised, “Human intelligence is a marvelous, subtle, and poorly understood phenomenon. There is no danger of duplicating it anytime soon.”10 The roboticist (and former director of MIT’s AI Lab) Rodney Brooks agreed, stating that we “grossly overestimate the capabilities of machines—those of today and of the next few decades.”11 The psychologist and AI researcher Gary Marcus went so far as to assert that in the quest to create “strong AI”—that is, general human-level AI—“there has been almost no progress.”12 I could go on and on with dueling quotations.

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In some ways, Cyc’s trajectory echoes that of IBM’s Watson: each started as a foundational AI research effort with vast scope and ambitions and ended up as a set of commercial products with elevated marketing claims (for example, Cyc “brings human-like understanding and reasoning to computers”6) but with narrow rather than general focus, and little transparency into the actual performance and capabilities of the system. As yet, Cyc has not had much of an impact on mainstream work in AI. Moreover, some in the AI community have sharply criticized the approach. For example, the University of Washington AI professor Pedro Domingos called Cyc “the most notorious failure in the history of AI.”7 The MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks was only a bit kinder: “While [Cyc] has been a heroic effort, it has not led to an AI system being able to master even a simple understanding of the world.”8 What about giving computers the subconscious knowledge about the world learned in infancy and childhood that forms the basis of all our concepts?

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In 2015, Microsoft’s research director Eric Horvitz joked that “One might even say that the [1955] proposal, if properly reformatted, could be resubmitted to the National Science Foundation … today and would probably get some funding by some excited program managers.”22 This is by no means a criticism of past AI research. Artificial intelligence is at least as hard as any of humanity’s other grand scientific challenges. MIT’s Rodney Brooks stated this better than anyone else: “When AI got started, the clear inspiration was human level performance and human level intelligence. I think that goal has been what attracted most researchers into the field for the first sixty years. The fact that we do not have anything close to succeeding at those aspirations says not that researchers have not worked hard or have not been brilliant.

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Although resources never materialized to run the project, it’s still a great idea, which someone should pursue. Two-legged robots are unstable and require a sophisticated control system to keep them from falling over. And, indeed, it takes about twelve months before a baby biped human starts walking without falling over. Rodney Brooks (figure 12.3), who made a brief appearance in chapter 2, Figure 12.3 Rodney Brooks oversees Baxter, who is preparing to place a plug into a hole on the table. Brooks is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded iRobot, which makes Roombas, and now Rethink, which makes Baxters. Courtesy of Rod Brooks. 178 Chapter 12 wanted to build six-legged robots that could walk like insects.

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The vision networks in the fly eye evolved over hundreds of millions of years, and its vision algorithms are embedded in the networks themselves. This is why you can reverse engineer vision by working out the wiring diagram and information flow through the neural circuits of the fly eye, and why you can’t do that for a digital computer, where the hardware by itself needs software to specify what problem is being solved. I recognized Rodney Brooks smiling in the back of the crowd, someone I had once invited to a workshop on computational neuroscience in Woods Hole on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Brooks is from Australia, and, in the 1980s, he was a junior faculty member in the MIT AI Lab, where he built walking robotic insects using an architecture that did not depend on digital logic.

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But, by the time his early students graduated, the programs they designed could recognize tanks under more general conditions because computers were more powerful. Today his students’ programs can recognize tanks in any image. The difference is that today we have access to millions of images that sample a wide range of poses and lighting conditions, and computers are millions of times more powerful. In “Intelligence and Bodies,” Rodney Brooks (from MIT) spoke about his experience with building robots that crawl and meander. Intelligence evolved in brains to control movements, and bodies evolved to interact with the world through that intelligence. Brooks departed from the traditional controllers used by roboticists and used behavior rather than computation as the metaphor for designing robots.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

Bartholomew’s Hospital Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate, University of Texas at Austin Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate, MIT Amir Aczel, author of Uranium Wars Buzz Aldrin, former NASA astronaut, second man to walk on the moon Geoff Andersen, research associate, United States Air Force Academy, author of The Telescope Jay Barbree, NBC news correspondent, coauthor of Moon Shot John Barrow, physicist, University of Cambridge, author of Impossibility Marcia Bartusiak, author of Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony Jim Bell, professor of astronomy, Cornell University Jeffrey Bennet, author of Beyond UFOs Bob Berman, astronomer, author of Secrets of the Night Sky Leslie Biesecker, chief of Genetic Disease Research Branch, National Institutes of Health Piers Bizony, science writer, author of How to Build Your Own Spaceship Michael Blaese, former National Institutes of Health scientist Alex Boese, founder of Museum of Hoaxes Nick Bostrom, transhumanist, University of Oxford Lt. Col. Robert Bowman, Institute for Space and Security Studies Lawrence Brody, chief of the Genome Technology Branch, National Institutes of Health Rodney Brooks, former director, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Lester Brown, founder of Earth Policy Institute Michael Brown, professor of astronomy, Caltech James Canton, founder of Institute for Global Futures, author of The Extreme Future Arthur Caplan, director, Center for Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania Fritjof Capra, author of The Science of Leonardo Sean Carroll, cosmologist, Caltech Andrew Chaikin, author of A Man on the Moon Leroy Chiao, former NASA astronaut George Church, director, Center for Computational Genetics, Harvard Medical School Thomas Cochran, physicist, Natural Resources Defense Council Christopher Cokinos, science writer, author of The Fallen Sky Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health Vicki Colvin, director of Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology, Rice University Neil Comins, author of The Hazards of Space Travel Steve Cook, director of Space Technologies, Dynetics, former NASA spokesperson Christine Cosgrove, author of Normal at Any Cost Steve Cousins, president and CEO, Willow Garage Brian Cox, physicist, University of Manchester, BBC science host Phillip Coyle, former assistant secretary of defense, U.S.

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Instead of simply waiting for robots to surpass us in intelligence and power, we should try to enhance ourselves, becoming superhuman in the process. Most likely, I believe, the future will proceed with a combination of these two goals, i.e., building friendly AI and also enhancing ourselves. This is an option being explored by Rodney Brooks, former director of the famed MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has been a maverick, overturning cherished but ossified ideas and injecting innovation into the field. When he entered the field, the top-down approach was dominant in most universities. But the field was stagnating. Brooks raised a few eyebrows when he called for creating an army of insectlike robots that learned via the bottom-up approach by bumping into obstacles.

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Evolution haphazardly cobbled together a bunch of techniques we collectively call consciousness. Take apart the brain, and you find a loose collection of minibrains, each designed to perform a specific task. He calls this the “society of minds”: that consciousness is actually the sum of many separate algorithms and techniques that nature stumbled upon over millions of years. Rodney Brooks was also looking for a similar paradigm, but one that had never been fully explored before. He soon realized that Mother Nature and evolution had already solved many of these problems. For example, a mosquito, with only a few hundred thousand neurons, can outperform the greatest military robotic system.

Emotional design: why we love (or hate) everyday things by Donald A. Norman

A Pattern Language, crew resource management, Dean Kamen, industrial robot, job automation, language acquisition, Neal Stephenson, Rodney Brooks, Vernor Vinge, Yogi Berra

Note that the end result will be better for people as well. Thus, the drink dispenser robot would allow anyone to walk up to it and ask for a can, except that you wouldn't use infrared or radio, you might push a button or perhaps just ask. I am not alone in imagining this coevolution of robots and homes. Rodney Brooks, one of the world's leading roboticists, head of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and founder of a company that builds home and commercial robots, imagines a rich ecology of environments and robots, with specialized ones living on devices, each responsible to keep its domain clean: one does the bathtub, another the toilet; one does windows, another manipulates mirrors.

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I thank Paul Bradley, David Kelly, and Craig Sampson of IDEO and Walter Herbst and John Hartman from Herbst LaZar Bell. Cynthia Breazeal and Roz Picard from the MIT Media Laboratory provided numerous useful interactions, including visits to their laboratories, which contributed considerably to chapters 6 and 7. Rodney Brooks, head of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and a roboticist, was also a great source of information. Marvin Minsky, as always, provided much inspiration, especially with the manuscript of his forthcoming book, The Emotion Machine. I tested many of my ideas on the several bulletin boards of the CHI community (the international society for Computer-Human Interaction), and many respondents have been most helpful.

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Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable law. 165 "The psychologists Robert Sekuler and Randolph Blake" (Sekuler & Blake, 1998) 166 "as happens to some emotionally impaired people" (Damasio, 1994,1999) 169 "The 1980s was the decade of the PC." Toshitada Doi, president of Sony Digital Creatures Laboratory. (Nov. 2000) 170—171 "Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel" (Stephenson, 1995) 173 "Rodney Brooks, one of the world's leading roboticists" (Brooks, 2002). The quotation is from page 125. 175 "Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist": The Buddha in the Robot (Mori, 1982). The argument that we are more bothered when the robot is too close to human appearance comes from an essay by Dave Bryant (Bryant, not dated).

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland, Jj Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, business cycle, call centre, clean water, death of newspapers, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, Kaizen: continuous improvement, knowledge worker, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, pets.com, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, work culture

One of the robots would escape their lab and start running around the building. I’d hear the mechanical clacking of legs scurrying down the hallways. On Friday afternoons I always served wine and beer at the office so that everyone could unwind and socialize after a hard week. I’d invite the roboticists down the hall to these events, and one Friday afternoon Rodney Brooks showed up. Brooks, a professor of artificial intelligence at MIT, was one of the founders of the robot company. I asked him how the roving robots worked. “For decades we’ve tried to make a really smart thinking machine,” he told me. “We spent billions of dollars, many, many years of work, building the biggest computers we could, with the biggest databases, but all we got was a computer that can beat people at chess.”

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Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls More and more I realized that, if I could create a system that, like that robot, could coordinate independent thinkers with constant feedback about their environment, much higher levels of performance would be achieved. By streamlining the flow of information among “legs” of a group, we could achieve efficiencies that had never been reached before. My conversation with Rodney Brooks took place more than two decades ago. For many years he was the head of robotics and artificial intelligence at MIT, and that spidery robot I met, dubbed “Genghis Khan,” now sits in the Smithsonian as a collector’s item. By now you’re probably familiar with one of Brooks’s companies, iRobot, which makes the Roomba vacuum cleaner and uses the same adaptive intelligence to clean your floors that Genghis Khan used to chase me around my office.

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Great empires ruled much of the world—not only Great Britain, but also France, Austria, Russia, and Ottoman. The idea that individuals were endowed with rights, rather than granted them by the powerful, was, to put it mildly, revolutionary. The “republic” was a form of government that emerged from those ideals. Like Rodney Brooks’s robot learning to walk, the United States lurched to its feet, stumbled, fell, and occasionally wandered down the wrong path. But those ideals inspired revolutions the world over, and today most major powers are governed, at least in form, by the people they purport to represent. The problem, of course, is two-hundred-plus years of bureaucratic buildup—permanent interests embedded in the very structure of the government that make it hard for people’s voices to be heard.

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, attribution theory, bitcoin, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dmitri Mendeleev, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Flynn Effect, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, hive mind, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Peoples Temple, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, seminal paper, single-payer health, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vernor Vinge, web application, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Frame problem: For a philosophical analysis, see H. L. Dreyfus (2007). “Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing It Would Require Making It More Heideggerian.” Philosophical Psychology 20(2): 247–268. Rodney Brooks’s tic-tac-toe game: www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2014/10/28/rodney-brooks-robotics. Reading text with an eye tracker: Reviewed in P. S. Churchland, V. S. Ramachandran, and T. J. Sejnowski (1994). “A Critique of Pure Vision.” In ed. C. Koch and J. L. Davis, Large-Scale Neuronal Theories of the Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 23–60.

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And there are really fast computers today that compute extraordinarily quickly. But even today’s fastest computers are not fast enough for GOFAI. Robots today are impressive because they’ve incorporated a different style of computation into their decision-making and action, a style inspired by how animals compute. Embodied Intelligence Rodney Brooks was a computer science professor at MIT for over twenty years starting in the mid-1980s. He was at the center of the revolution in robotics. His attitude toward machines was foreshadowed when, as a twelve-year-old growing up in Australia, he built an electronic tic-tac-toe game. Rather than doing it the old-fashioned way, by programming the logic of tic-tac-toe into the software of an existing computer, he built the game from scratch, out of scrap metal, switches, wires, and lightbulbs.

Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century by Mark Walker

3D printing, 8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, commoditize, confounding variable, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, industrial robot, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, longitudinal study, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, plutocrats, precariat, printed gun, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, working poor

When the batteries run low, the robots return to their “feeding stations” where they recharge. They are by no means perfect but certainly much better at vacuuming than your average teenager. They also work cheaper and do not complain. Another example of robotic progress is Baxter from Rethink Robotics. Baxter is an industrial robot designed by Rodney Brooks, inventor of the Roomba robot. Let us consider the cost first. Unimate is usually credited with the installation of the first industrial robot in 1961.13 This robotic arm worked at a General Motors factory with hot die cast metal sorting and stacking. Unimate sold the robot at a loss: it cost $65 million to make and Unimate sold it for a paltry $18 million.

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As mentioned above, the robotic revolution is being spearheaded by specific purpose-built machines. And because of this, there are very few who are able to see the revolution in all its clarity, as it requires knowledge of developments in a number of specialized domains. For example, when a reporter asked Rodney Brooks, inventor of both the aforementioned Roomba and Baxter robots, how long it might be before robots could replace McDonald’s workers, his response was very telling. Brooks claimed that “it might be 30 years before robots will cook for us.”14 His reasoning for this prediction is also interesting, “In a fast food place you’re not doing the same task very long.

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Interestingly, there is already a robotic hamburger maker available from Momentum Machines.17 It will cook up to 360 hamburgers an hour, plus cut fresh tomatoes, lettuce, and pickles. Or consider Kura, a sushi restaurant chain in Japan that uses robotics to lower its labor costs.18 The fact that a world-class roboticist like Rodney Brooks has underestimated the robotic revolution is revealing. The reality is that we are almost at a tipping point where robots are cheaper even in an industry known for its low-cost labor.19 Indeed, what is disturbing is that even in China, with its notoriously low wages and harsh working conditions, there is a move to robotics.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Some people, like my former student and now colleague Erik Brynjolfsson and his coauthor Andrew McAfee, suggest that continuing advances in computer hardware together with the surprisingly rapid progress in artificial intelligence make it likely that machines may possess general intelligence soon.10 Others, like artificial intelligence expert Rodney Brooks, say that it may take hundreds of years.11 In fact, progress in the field of artificial intelligence has been notoriously difficult to predict ever since its early days, in the 1950s. For instance, one study by researchers Stuart Armstrong and Kaj Sotala analyzed 95 predictions—made between 1950 and 2012—about when general AI would be achieved.12 They found a strong tendency for both experts and nonexperts to predict that general AI would be achieved between 15 and 25 years in the future… regardless of when the predictions were made!

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Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (New York: Prentice Hall, 1995). 2. Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (1950): 433–60. 3. Wikipedia, s.v. “artificial intelligence,” accessed August 8, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence. 4. Rodney Brooks, “Artificial Intelligence Is a Tool, Not a Threat,” Rethink Robotics, November 10, 2014, http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/blog/artificial-intelligence-tool-threat. 5. David Ferrucci, e-mail message to the author, August 24, 2016. Ferrucci was the leader of the IBM team that developed the Watson technology. 6.

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Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014); Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (New York: Basic Books, 2015). 11. Brooks, “Artificial Intelligence Is a Tool”; Rodney Brooks, “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions,” MIT Technology Review, October 6, 2017, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609048/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-ai-predictions/. 12. Stuart Armstrong and Kaj Sotala, “How We’re Predicting AI—or Failing To,” in Beyond AI: Artificial Dreams, ed. Jan Romportl, Pavel Ircing, Eva Zackova, Michal Polak, and Radek Schuster (Pilsen, Czech Republic: University of West Bohemia, 2012): 52–75, https://intelligence.org/files/PredictingAI.pdf. 13.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

According to cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, this is the most significant discovery about AI.31 It suggests that in the second machine age, while lawyers and doctors may struggle on social benefits, gardeners and janitors will remain in business and thrive. But why is this so? Many AI researchers, including former MIT professor and current robotics entrepreneur Rodney Brooks, point out that human sensorimotor skills are not related to cognition but are the product of millions of years of evolution.32 Despite the success achieved in AI by approaching the problem of intelligence from a different angle (the ‘aeroplane’ way), one would really need to reverse-engineer evolution in order to reproduce the full capabilities of a human brain including self-awareness and high-levels of consciousness.

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Lem was keen to argue in his novel that evolution does not necessarily lead to a species with superior intellect. Human evolution can only be regarded as accidental. Perhaps on another planet, like Regis III, nanorobots have taken over from their creators? Perhaps Regis III is Earth in the future? ‘Nouvelle AI’, a concept championed by robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks, argues that instead of trying to reproduce human intelligence in AI, we should focus on creating robots possessed of an insect-like intelligence that is capable of evolving.8 Nanotechnologists, like the visionary Eric Drexler,9 see the future of intelligent machines at the level of molecules: tiny robots that evolve and – as happens in Lem’s novel – which come together to form intelligent superorganisms.

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Early 1980s: The Internet is invented. 1982: The 5th Generation Computer Systems Project is launch-ed by Japan. 1982: The film Blade Runner is released, directed by Ridley Scott, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick. 1989: Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web. 1990: Seiji Ogawa presents the first fMRI machine. 1993: Rodney Brooks and others start the MIT Cog Project, an attempt to build a humanoid robot child in five years. 1997: Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov at chess. 2000: Cynthia Breazeal at MIT describes Kismet, a robot with a face that simulates expressions. 2004: DARPA launches the Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles. 2009: Google builds the self-driving car. 2011: IBM’s Watson wins the TV game show Jeopardy!.

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, do what you love, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, fundamental attribution error, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller describes the final courtesy that even the failed, deluded, doomed Willy Loman deserves, because “he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.” Because it’s impossible to communicate, much less bond, with someone who can’t or won’t focus on you, that capacity is crucial even to exchanges between people and the interactive robots designed to do their bidding. For that reason, MIT’s Rodney Brooks, founder of iRobot, is particularly proud of Mertz, a mechanical grandchild created by his former student Lijin Aryananda, because the fetching machine adeptly expresses “beingness” by paying attention to you and engaging your attention to . . . it? Her? Mertz’s most distinctive features are the big, blinking eyes, emphasized by strong brows, that dominate its childlike, Kewpie doll head.

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To paraphrase John Milton, “Heaven or hell?” It will depend on what we focus on. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For their contributions to our understanding of attention and for kindly sharing their insights with me, I wish to thank George Ainslie, Marie Banich, Aaron Beck, Marlene Behrmann, George Bonanno, Thomas Bradbury, Rodney Brooks, Bill Brown, Fred Bryant, Laura Carstensen, Javier Castellanos, Tanya Chartrand, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Richard Davidson, Edward Deci, Angela Duckworth, Dugu Choegyal Rinpoche, Carol Dweck, Barbara Fredrickson, Howard Gardner, Joseph Giunta, Scott Hagwood, Shannon Howell, Amishi Jha, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Daniel Kahneman, Ellen Langer, Marsel Mesulam, Richard Nisbett, Donald Norman, Elinor Ochs, James Pawelski, Chris Peterson, Gail Posner, Michael Posner, Lobsang Rapgay, Mary Rothbart, Paul Rozin, Oliver Schultheiss, Barry Schwartz, Paschal Sheeran, Ann Treisman, and Leslie Ungerleider.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Misgivings about AI wasn’t the only thing we shared; we also believed that time to take action and avoid disaster was running out. * * * For more than twenty years I’ve been a documentary filmmaker. In 2000, I interviewed science-fiction great Arthur C. Clarke, inventor Ray Kurzweil, and robot pioneer Rodney Brooks. Kurzweil and Brooks painted a rosy, even rapturous picture of our future coexistence with intelligent machines. But Clarke hinted that we would be overtaken. Before, I had been drunk with AI’s potential. Now skepticism about the rosy future slunk into my mind and festered. My profession rewards critical thinking—a documentary filmmaker has to be on the lookout for stories too good to be true.

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In fact, we might even expect them to be more ethical than we are, since we don’t want to build an intelligence with an appetite for violence and homicide, right? Yet those are precisely the sorts of autonomous drones and battlefield robots the U.S. government and military contractors are developing today. They’re creating and using the best advanced AI available. I find it strange that robot pioneer Rodney Brooks dismisses the possibility that superintelligence will be harmful when iRobot, the company he founded, already manufactures weaponized robots. Similarly, Kurzweil makes the argument that advanced AI will have our values because it will come from us, and so, won’t be harmful. I interviewed both scientists ten years ago and they made the same arguments.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, facts on the ground, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, out of africa, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, trolley problem

The Brain Is a Team of Rivals 1 See Marvin Minsky’s 1986 book Society of Mind. 2 Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel. 3 For a concrete illustration of the advantages and shortcomings of a “society” architecture, consider the concept of subsumption architecture, pioneered by the roboticist Rodney Brooks (Brooks, “A robust layered”). The basic unit of organization in the subsumption architecture is a module. Each module specializes in some independent, low-level task, such as controlling a sensor or actuator. The modules operate independently, each doing its own task. Each module has an input and an output signal.

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But the downside is that all patterns of behavior in these systems are prewired. Subsumption agents are fast, but they depend entirely on the world to tell them what to do; they are purely reflexive. In part, subsumption agents have far-from-intelligent behavior because they lack an internal model of the world from which to make conclusions. Rodney Brooks claims this is an advantage: by lacking representation, the architecture avoids the time necessary to read, write, utilize, and maintain the world models. But somehow, human brains do put in the time, and have clever ways of doing it. I argue that human brains will be simulated only by moving beyond the assembly line of sequestered experts into the idea of a conflict-based democracy of mind, where multiple parties pitch in their votes on the same topics. 4 For example, this approach is used commonly in artificial neural networks: Jacobs, Jordan, Nowlan, and Hinton, “Adaptive mixtures.” 5 Minsky, Society of Mind. 6 Ingle, “Two visual systems,” discussed in a larger framework by Milner and Goodale, The Visual Brain. 7 For the importance of conflict in the brain, see Edelman, Computing the Mind.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Is there some spark that makes human intelligence fundamentally different from machine intelligence? Do we each have some élan vital that animates our reasoning that machines simply do not have? Is there some X factor we aren’t even aware of that is the source of human creativity? The answer is not obvious. Consider how Rodney Brooks, the renowned Australian roboticist, views a similar question. He thinks there is something in biology about living systems that we simply don’t understand. Something really big. He termed this missing something “the juice” and described it by talking about the difference between a robot trapped in a box who methodically goes through a series of steps to escape, versus an animal that very desperately wants to free itself.

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And finally, the Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom likened the current effort to build an AGI to “children playing with a bomb.” Others in the industry find such doomsday concerns to be misguided. Andrew Ng, one of the most respected AI experts on the planet, says, “There’s also a lot of hype, that AI will create evil robots with super-intelligence. That’s an unnecessary distraction.” Rodney Brooks directly answers some of the concerns above by saying that the generalizations about AI made by those who aren’t deep in the technology are “a little dangerous.” He then goes on to add, “And we’ve certainly seen that recently with Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, all saying AI is just taking off and it’s going to take over the world very quickly.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Each time the task changes—each time the location of the screw holes move, for example—production must stop until the machinery is reprogrammed. Today’s factories, especially large ones in high-wage countries, are highly automated, but they’re not full of general-purpose robots. They’re full of dedicated, specialized machinery that’s expensive to buy, configure, and reconfigure. Rethinking Factory Automation Rodney Brooks, who co-founded iRobot, noticed something else about modern, highly automated factory floors: people are scarce, but they’re not absent. And a lot of the work they do is repetitive and mindless. On a line that fills up jelly jars, for example, machines squirt a precise amount of jelly into each jar, screw on the top, and stick on the label, but a person places the empty jars on the conveyor belt to start the process.

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But they argue that creating the bounty depends on finding ways to race with the machine rather than racing against the machine. That means people like me need to build machines that are easy to master and use. Ultimately, those who embrace the new technologies will be the ones who benefit most.” —Rodney Brooks, chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics, Inc “New technologies may bring about our economic salvation or they may threaten our very livelihoods . . . or they may do both. Brynjolfsson and McAfee have written an important book on the technology-driven opportunities and challenges we all face in the next decade.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Every time you use a piece of Microsoft software, you've got an A.I. system trying to figure out what you're doing, like writing a letter, and it does a pretty damned good job. Every time you see a movie with computer-generated characters, they're all little A.I. characters behaving as a group. Every time you playa video game, you're playing against an A.I. system. —RODNEY BROOKS, DIRECTOR OF THE MIT AI LAB161 I still run into people who claim that artificial intelligence withered in the 1980s, an argument that is comparable to insisting that the Internet died in the dot-com bust of the early 2000s.162 The bandwidth and price-performance of Internet technologies, the number of nodes (servers), and the dollar volume of e-commerce all accelerated smoothly through the boom as well as the bust and the period since.

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An underlying problem with artificial intelligence that I have personally experienced in my forty years in this area is that as soon as an AI technique works, it's no longer considered AI and is spun off as its own field (for example, character recognition, speech recognition, machine vision, robotics, data mining, medical informatics, automated investing). Computer scientist Elaine Rich defines AI as "the study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment, people are better." Rodney Brooks, director of the MIT AI Lab, puts it a different way: "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, Oh, that's just a computation." I am also reminded of Watson's remark to Sherlock Holmes, "I thought at first that you had done something clever, but I see that there was nothing in it after all."164 That has been our experience as AI scientists.

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We understand that speed to be the speed of light, but there are suggestions that we may be able to circumvent this apparent limit (possibly by taking shortcuts through wormholes, for example) . . . . on the Human Body So many different people to be. —DONOVANI1 Cosmetic baby, plug into me And never, ever find another. And I realize no one's wise To my plastic fantastic lover. —JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, "PLASTIC FANTASTIC LOVER" Our machines will become much more like us, and we will become much more like our machines. —RODNEY BROOKS Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling. —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, "SAILING TO BYZANTIUM" A radical upgrading of our bodies' physical and mental systems is already under way, using biotechnology and emerging genetic-engineering technologies.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

In one of his best-known documentaries, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, he offers up a character study of four people doing jobs that, at least in 1997, seemed eccentric in their obscurity: a topiary gardener named George Mendonca; a lion tamer named Dave Hoover; the world’s leading authority on the colony behavior of naked mole rats, Ray Mendez; and (this is the one that seems far less obscure today) Rodney Brooks, inventor of autonomous robots. Morris saw a connection, and a romanticism, in their various versions of control of nature. Undoubtedly he also found infectious their sheer enthusiasm for their craft. Bob Sutton of Stanford University takes a more academic interest in such people, since he studies creativity and innovation in organizations.

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It often involves persuading and herding individuals who don’t actually report to the product manager, so it can be a challenging role. Jim Lawton, whom we also mentioned in Chapter 2, is chief product and marketing officer at Rethink Robotics, a “collaborative robotics” manufacturer in Boston. Rethink was founded and is led by Rodney Brooks, a former MIT professor, who also plays the role of chief technology officer. He handles the vision and the research. It is Lawton’s job to understand what customers want from robots and translate that into product capabilities. He’s also an evangelist for the idea that robots and people can collaborate with each other.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

During the AI winters, researchers cooked up euphemistic names like “machine learning” to disguise the true nature of their AI work from funders. But today’s anxieties stem from a fuller reckoning of techniques that are widely appreciated in the AI community but whose capabilities are poorly understood beyond. Much of the angst revolves around deep learning, which has been weaponized in rhetoric far beyond its technical potential. As Rodney Brooks, the former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, points out, the phrase is often mistakenly used to suggest that there is “a deep level of understanding that a ‘deep learning’ algorithm has when it learns something. In fact the learning is very shallow” in comparison to genuine human learning.

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., https://twitter.com/kvnweb/status/1068485225607585798. 234“an exponential runaway beyond”: Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” VISION-21 Symposium, NASA Lewis Research Center and Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30–31, 1993, https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html. 234John von Neumann had raised: John Brockman, Possible Minds (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 8. 234“AI enthusiasts have been making claims”: Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity.” 234“I have set the date 2045”: Christianna Reddy, “Kurzweil Claims That the Singularity Will Happen by 2045,” Futurism, October 5, 2017, https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-will-happen-by-2045/. 235“machine learning” to disguise the true nature: Chris Smith et al., “The History of Artificial Intelligence,” University of Washington, December 2006, https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590/06au/projects/his tory-ai.pdf. 235“a deep level of understanding”: Rodney Brooks, “Post: [For&AI] The Origins of Artificial Intelligence,” Robots, AI, and Other Stuff (blog), April 27, 2018, https://rodneybrooks.com/forai-the-origins-of-artificial-intelligence/. 235“Contemporary neural networks do well on challenges”: Gary Marcus, “Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal,” New York University, accessed January 22, 2019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.00631.pdf. 236“If . . . driverless cars should also disappoint”: Marcus, “Deep Learning.” 236Frey tallied his predictions of the jobs: Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

Ewald Art Making Going Rural: James Croak The Cat Is Out of the Bag: Max Tegmark Everyone Is an Expert: Roger Schank Pioneering Insights: Neil Gershenfeld Thinking in the Amazon: Daniel L. Everett The Virtualization of the Universe: David Gelernter Information-Provoked Attention Deficit Disorder: Rodney Brooks Present Versus Future Self: Brian Knutson I Am Realizing How Nice People Can Be: Paul Bloom My Perception of Time: Marina Abramović The Rotating Problem, or How I Learned to Accelerate My Mental Clock: Stanislas Dehaene I Must Confess to Being Perplexed: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Taking on the Habits of the Scientist, the Investigative Reporter, and the Media Critic: Yochai Benkler Thinking as Therapy in a World of Too Much: Ernst Pöppel internet is wind: Stefano Boeri Of Knowledge, Content, Place, and Space: Galia Solomonoff The Power of Conversation: Gloria Origgi A Real-Time Perpetual Time Capsule: Nick Bilton Getting from Jack Kerouac to the Pentatonic Scale: Jesse Dylan A Vehicle for Large-Scale Education About the Human Mind: Mahzarin R.

…

Thus “I” am an emergent property of my body and mind; “I” (my subjective experience of the world and my self ) am a virtual machine, of sorts; but “I” (or “consciousness”) am just as real (despite being virtual) as the pull-down menu built of software—or the picture that emerges from the pixels. Like industrialization, virtualization is an intellectual as well as a technological and economic transition; like industrialization, it’s a change in the texture of time. Information-Provoked Attention Deficit Disorder Rodney Brooks Panasonic Professor of Robotics, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab; author, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us When a companion heads to the bathroom during dinner, I surreptitiously pull out my iPhone to check my e-mail and for incoming SMS. When I am writing computer code, I have my e-mail inbox visible at the corner, so that I can see if new messages arrive—even though I know that most that do arrive will be junk that has escaped my spam filters.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

We have preconceptions about how an intelligent robot should look and act, and these can blind us to what is already happening around us. To demand that artificial intelligence be humanlike is the same flawed logic as demanding that artificial flying be birdlike, with flapping wings. Robots, too, will think different. Consider Baxter, a revolutionary new workbot from Rethink Robotics. Designed by Rodney Brooks, the former MIT professor who invented the bestselling Roomba vacuum cleaner and its descendants, Baxter is an early example of a new class of industrial robots created to work alongside humans. Baxter does not look impressive. Sure, it’s got big strong arms and a flat-screen display like many industrial bots.

…

Two of my former colleagues at Wired, Russ Mitchell and Gary Wolf, waded through an early rough draft and made important suggestions that I incorporated. Over the span of years that I wrote this material I benefited from the precious time of many interviewees. Among them were John Battelle, Michael Naimark, Jaron Lanier, Gary Wolf, Rodney Brooks, Brewster Kahle, Alan Greene, Hal Varian, George Dyson, and Ethan Zuckerman. Thanks to the editors of Wired and The New York Times Magazine, who were instrumental in shaping initial versions of portions of this book. Most important, this book is dedicated to my family—Giamin, Kaileen, Ting, and Tywen—who keep me grounded and pointed forward.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

Furthermore, it presupposes that there is a “right” objective out there in the world; it would have to be an objective on which iron-eating bacteria and humans and all other species agree, which is hard to imagine. The most explicit critique of Bostrom’s orthogonality thesis comes from the noted roboticist Rodney Brooks, who asserts that it’s impossible for a program to be “smart enough that it would be able to invent ways to subvert human society to achieve goals set for it by humans, without understanding the ways in which it was causing problems for those same humans.”31 Unfortunately, it’s not only possible for a program to behave like this; it is, in fact, inevitable, given the way Brooks defines the issue.

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A seminal work on many philosophical topics, including the question of whether moral obligations may be perceived in the natural world: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (John Noon, 1738). 31. An argument that a sufficiently intelligent machine cannot help but pursue human objectives: Rodney Brooks, “The seven deadly sins of AI predictions,” MIT Technology Review, October 6, 2017. 32. Pinker, “Thinking does not imply subjugating.” 33. For an optimistic view arguing that AI safety problems will necessarily be resolved in our favor: Steven Pinker, “Tech prophecy.” 34. On the unsuspected alignment between “skeptics” and “believers” in AI risk: Alexander, “AI researchers on AI risk.”

Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

., “Mastering the Game of Go without Human Knowledge,” Nature 550 (October 19 2017), 354–355, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24270.epdf. 298reduced the compute needed for training by a factor of eight: Hernandez and Brown, Measuring the Algorithmic Efficiency of Neural Networks, 18. 298may make AI models available: Desislavov et al., Compute and Energy Consumption Trends in Deep Learning Inference; Sharir et al., The Cost of Training NLP Models, 3. 298AI training costs could be as much as thirty times higher: Khan and Mann, AI Chips, 26. 299costly and locks out university researchers: Rodney Brooks, “A Better Lesson,” Rodney Brooks (personal website), March 19, 2019, https://rodneybrooks.com/a-better-lesson/; Kevin Vu, “Compute Goes Brrr: Revisiting Sutton’s Bitter Lesson for Artificial Intelligence,” DZone.com, March 11, 2021, https://dzone.com/articles/compute-goes-brrr-revisiting-suttons-bitter-lesson; Bommasani et al., On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models. 299contributes to carbon emissions: “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots”; Brooks, “A Better Lesson”; Vu, “Compute Goes Brrr”; Lasse F.

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Its understanding of “humans” and “walking” was limited solely to the data on which it had been trained. It had no capacity to even recognize, let alone interpret and understand, a human somersaulting or hiding under a box. These limitations of AI’s narrowness are exacerbated by the tendency of humans to extrapolate AI performance on one task to related tasks, or what MIT robotics professor Rodney Brooks has called “mistaking performance for competence.” Humans interacting with AI systems are primed to expect a model of intelligence that roughly approximates our own. For example, we would not expect a human who can drive safely in traffic to suddenly steer toward a concrete barrier. Yet even AI systems that outperform humans in narrow tasks have no understanding of the tasks they are performing.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

But it is daft to dismiss as failures today’s best pattern recognition systems, self-driving cars, and machines which can beat any human at many games of skill. Informed scepticism about near-term AGI We should take more seriously the arguments of very experienced AI researchers who claim that although the AGI undertaking is possible, it won’t be achieved for a very long time. Rodney Brooks, a veteran AI researcher and robot builder, says “I think it is a mistake to be worrying about us developing [strong] AI any time in the next few hundred years. I think the worry stems from a fundamental error in not distinguishing the difference between the very real recent advances in a particular aspect of AI, and the enormity and complexity of building sentient volitional intelligence.”

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

“Basically people in that industry are used as an extension of a forklift. Human forklift extenders are pretty expensive. Robot arms cut that cost drastically.” Sawyer, an industrial robot created by Boston-based Rethink Robotics, offers an impressive illustration of how all-embracing those arms can be. Sawyer is the brainchild of Rodney Brooks, the inventor of both Roomba, the vacuum-cleaning robot, and PackBot, the robot used to clear bunkers in Iraq and Afghanistan and the World Trade Center after 9/11. Unlike Roomba and PackBot, Sawyer looks almost human—it has an animated flat-screen face and wheels where its legs should be. Simply grabbing and adjusting its monkey-like arm and guiding it through a series of motions “teaches” Sawyer whatever repeatable procedure one needs it to get done.

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“Labor is the highest-cost factor” Tim Linder, “New Patent Report,” Connected World Magazine, January 28, 2014, https://connect­edworld.com/​new-patent-report-january-28-2014/. Sawyer (and his older brother, the two-armed Baxter robot) Dr. Brooks gave $4 per hour as the approximate cost of employing Baxter in response to a question at the Technonomy 2012 Conference in Tucson. See John Markoff, Andrew McAfee, and Rodney Brooks, “Where’s My Robot?,” Techonomy, November 2012, http://techonomy.com/​conf/​12-tucson/​future-of-work/​wheres-my-robot/. the Weather Channel broadcasts 18 million forecasts John Koetsier, “Data Deluge: What People Do on the Internet, Every Minute of Every Day,” Inc.com, July 25, 2017, https://www.inc.com/​john-koetsier/​every-minute-on-the-internet-2017-new-numbers-to-b.html.

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

The security risks from those precursor technologies are already with us, and they’re increasing as the technologies become more powerful and more prevalent. So, while I am worried about intelligent and even driverless cars, most of the risks are already prevalent in Internet-connected drivered cars. And while I am worried about robot soldiers, most of the risks are already prevalent in autonomous weapons systems. Also, as roboticist Rodney Brooks pointed out, “Long before we see such machines arising there will be the somewhat less intelligent and belligerent machines. Before that there will be the really grumpy machines. Before that the quite annoying machines. And before them the arrogant unpleasant machines.” I think we’ll see any new security risks coming long before they get here.

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id=sjMsDwAAQBAJ. 86The US Department of Defense defines: Heather Roff (9 Feb 2016), “Distinguishing autonomous from automatic weapons,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, http://thebulletin.org/autonomous-weapons-civilian-safety-and-regulation-versus-prohibition/distinguishing-autonomous-automatic-weapons. 86If they are autonomous: Paul Scharre (29 Feb 2016), “Autonomous weapons and operational risk,” Center for a New American Security, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/autonomous-weapons-and-operational-risk. 86Technologists Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking: Michael Sainato (19 Aug 2015), “Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates warn about artificial intelligence,” Observer, http://observer.com/2015/08/stephen-hawking-elon-musk-and-bill-gates-warn-about-artificial-intelligence. 86The risks might be remote: Stuart Russell et al. (11 Jan 2015), “An open letter: Research priorities for robust and beneficial artificial intelligence,” Future of Life Institute, https://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter. 86I am less worried about AI: These two essays talk about that: Ted Chiang (18 Dec 2017), “Silicon Valley is turning into its own worst fear,” BuzzFeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway. Charlie Stross (Jan 2018), “Dude, you broke the future!” Charlie’s Diary, http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html. 87“Long before we see such machines arising”: Rodney Brooks (7 Sep 2017), “The seven deadly sins of predicting the future of AI,” http://rodneybrooks.com/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-predicting-the-future-of-ai. 87For example, there is widespread suspicion: Sean Gallagher (15 Nov 2016), “Chinese company installed secret backdoor on hundreds of thousands of phones,” Ars Technica, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/chinese-company-installed-secret-backdoor-on-hundreds-of-thousands-of-phones. 87computer security products from Kaspersky Lab: Cyrus Farivar (11 Jul 2017), “Kaspersky under scrutiny after Bloomberg story claims close links to FSB,” Ars Technica, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/kaspersky-denies-inappropriate-ties-with-russian-govt-after-bloomberg-story. 87In 2018, US intelligence officials: Selena Larson (14 Feb 2018), “The FBI, CIA and NSA say Americans shouldn’t use Huawei phones,” CNN, http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/14/technology/huawei-intelligence-chiefs/index.html. 87Back in 1997, the Israeli company Check Point: Emily G.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

Some experts, for instance Stuart Russell at Berkeley, and Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, think that the AI field, like synthetic biotech, already needs guidelines for ‘responsible innovation’. Moreover, the fact that AlphaGo achieved a goal that its creators thought would have taken several more years to reach has rendered DeepMind’s staff even more bullish about the speed of advancement. But others, like the roboticist Rodney Brooks (creator of the Baxter robot and the Roomba vacuum cleaner) think these concerns are too far from realisation to be worth worrying about—they remain less anxious about artificial intelligence than about real stupidity. Companies like Google, working closely with academia and government, lead the research into AI.

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, butterfly effect, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, effective altruism, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Frances Oldham Kelsey, game design, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hedonic treadmill, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, language acquisition, longitudinal study, machine translation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, multi-armed bandit, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, premature optimization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Steve Jobs, strong AI, the map is not the territory, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

Even if we—that is, everyone working on AI and ethics, AI and technical safety—do our jobs, if we can avoid the obvious dystopia and catastrophes, which is far from certain—we still have to overcome the fundamental and possibly irresistible progression into a world that increasingly is a formalism. We must do this even as, inevitably, we are shaped—in our lives, in our imaginations, in our bodies—by those very models. This is the dark side of Rodney Brooks’s famous robotics manifesto: “The world is its own best model.” Increasingly, this is true, but not in the spirit Brooks meant it. The best model of the world stands in for the world itself, and threatens to kill off the real thing. We must take great care not to ignore the things that are not easily quantified or do not easily admit themselves into our models.

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For more on DARPA’s Strategic Computing initiative, see “Strategic Computing.” For more on DARPA’s mid-1980s projects, see Stefik, “Strategic Computing at DARPA.” See also Roland and Shiman, Strategic Computing. 36. Moravec, “Obstacle Avoidance and Navigation in the Real World by a Seeing Robot Rover.” 37. See also Rodney Brooks’s reflections in Brooks, Flesh and Machines. 38. As per the segment on Scientific American Frontiers, Season 7, Episode 5, “Robots Alive!” Aired April 9, 1997, on PBS. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4JrcVEkink. 39. Thorpe had tested the collision-avoidance system on the Navlab by seeing if the car would brake when Leland, on a bicycle with training wheels, rode out in front of it.

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

But how can we know if they really mean what they say, or if they understand any of it. I think the answer is that we do not know. And it could be that we cannot know, because the question does not even apply to them. Maybe intelligence is not an absolute property that exists independent from its environment, and it is us that ultimately see intelligence in others. Or, as Rodney Brooks put it:29 “Intelligence is in the eye of the observer” This is certainly a fascinating topic to dig into, and several excellent books have been written about it30; but it has little relevance when talking about how machine “intelligence” has profoundly changed our culture, and how it will dramatically change our economy and our way of living.

Choose Yourself! by James Altucher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, cashless society, cognitive bias, dark matter, digital rights, do what you love, Elon Musk, estate planning, John Bogle, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, PageRank, passive income, pattern recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, superconnector, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, Y2K, Zipcar

In essence, people are taking what they already have—homes, cars, time—and using these assets to create wealth. Or, we can take it one step back: creating an information product that studies this trend and gives suggestions on how to make money is another way to generate income. * * * Trend #5: Robotics In 1988 I went to a lecture given by MIT professor Rodney Brooks. I was neck deep in studying the technology behind current-day robotics at the time. He said that robots don’t have to start out “smart.” They can figure out lots of small things along the way—just like humans, he said. He showed an example of a small robot that would bump into a wall a few times, then realize that a wall was there, and turn around and go a different direction.

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

They looked at a whole host of technological functions to see how they have changed over the years. From information storage and information transportation to how we deal with energy, in each case they found mathematical regularities. This ongoing doubling of technological capabilities has even been found in robots. Rodney Brooks is a professor emeritus at MIT who has lived through much of the current growth in robotics and is himself a pioneer in the field. He even cofounded the company that created the Roomba. Brooks looked at how robots have improved over the years and found that their movement abilities—how far and how fast a robot can move—have gone through about thirteen doublings in twenty-six years.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

But the industrial robotics industry is changing: as well as growing quickly, its output is getting cheaper, safer and far more versatile. A landmark was reached in 2012 with the introduction of Baxter, a 3-foot tall robot (6 feet with his pedestal) from Rethink Robotics. The brainchild of Rodney Brooks, an Australian roboticist who used to be the director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Baxter is much less dangerous to be around. By early 2015, Rethink had received over $100m in funding from venture capitalists, including the investment vehicle of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith

dark pattern, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, ocean acidification, publish or perish, Rodney Brooks

Cuttlefish appear to have a form of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep: See Marcos Frank, Robert Waldrop, Michelle Dumoulin, Sara Aton, and Jean Boal, “A Preliminary Analysis of Sleep-Like States in the Cuttlefish Sepia officinalis,” PLoS One 7, no. 6 (2012): e38125. One central idea is that our body itself, rather than our brain: A classic general discussion is Andy Clark’s book Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). For the robotics work, see Rodney Brooks, “New Approaches to Robotics,” Science 253 (1991): 1227–32. The paper by Hillel Chiel and Randall Beer is “The Brain Has a Body: Adaptive Behavior Emerges from Interactions of Nervous System, Body and Environment,” Trends in Neurosciences 23, no. 12 (1997): 553–57. Two interesting papers that make use of the concept of “embodiment” when thinking about octopuses are Letizia Zullo and Binyamin Hochner, “A New Perspective on the Organization of an Invertebrate Brain,” Communicative and Integrative Biology 4, no. 1 (2011): 26–29, and Hochner’s “How Nervous Systems Evolve in Relation to Their Embodiment: What We Can Learn from Octopuses and Other Molluscs,” Brain, Behavior and Evolution 82, no. 1 (2013): 19–30.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Not an Implacable Force Perhaps in a bid to calm growing hysteria, well-respected scientists—people actively developing algorithms, robots, and artificial intelligence—have become more emphatic of late in tamping down the hype of Silicon Valley futurism, particularly concerning the future of work. Responding to an article in the business press predicting the takeover of work by robots, Rodney Brooks, the emeritus Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT, called the claims “ludicrous.”38 Greg Ip, the Wall Street Journal’s chief economics commentator, characterized reports of the wholesale destruction of jobs by automation and algorithms “baffling and misguided.” Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, says, “No matter how many times a purported expert claims we are facing an epochal technology revolution that will destroy tens of millions of jobs and leave large swathes of human workers permanently unemployed, it still isn’t true.”39 Data scientists are also speaking up to assert that algorithms don’t take people out of the equation and they aren’t unbiased or neutral.

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

Up to that day, every form of life that had ever existed on Earth had been honed in the crucibles of natural selection—but Venter’s team created an entirely new form of life they would call Mycoplasma laboratorium. It was a remarkable feat, and made headlines worldwide. But again, that would come later. For now, Venter willingly joined the five referees for the SENS Challenge, which included other heavy hitters like Rodney Brooks, the founder of iRobot and Roomba, and Nathan Myhrvold, formerly one of Bill Gates’s top advisers. Together, Technology Review and de Grey’s own Methuselah Foundation agreed to launch a $20,000 prize that would reward any scientist working in the field of biology who could prove that de Grey’s thinking was so wrong it was “unworthy of learned” debate.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

While 9/11 1.0 was about human beings’ seizing aircraft and flying them into occupied buildings for terrorist effect, 9/11 2.0 makes it possible to disintermediate the humans and use robots in their stead. We, Robot In the future, I’m sure there will be a lot more robots in every aspect of life. If you told people in 1985 that in 25 years they would have computers in their kitchen, it would have made no sense to them. RODNEY BROOKS Throughout the history of film and television, we’ve seen robots presented in a variety of lights. Some were lovable and helpful such as WALL-E, Johnny Number 5 of Short Circuit, and C-3PO and R2-D2 from Star Wars. Other robots were dangerous and out to destroy mankind, such as Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still and the T-800s from The Terminator.

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We’ll Soon Be Fusing Technology with Living Matter,” Wired, May 27, 2014. 4 Despite the costs: Industrial Federation of Robotics, http://​www.​ifr.​org/​industrial-​robots/​statistics/. 5 In just one Hyundai factory: “Car, Airbag, Money: Robots Make Cars,” video, http://​channel.​nationalgeographic.​com/; Tamara Walsh, “Rise of the Robots: 2 Industries Increasingly Turning to Robotics for Innovation,” Motley Fool, Aug. 24, 2014. 6 Not to be outdone: Katie Lobosco, “Army of Robots to Invade Amazon Warehouses,” CNNMoney, May 22, 2014. 7 More impressive is the fact: Rodney Brooks, “Robots at Work,” World Future Society, Futurist, May–June 2013. 8 In more than 150 medical centers: “The Invisible Unarmed,” Economist, March 29, 2014. 293 Over 500,000 such operations: Stewart Pinkerton, “The Pros and Cons of Robotic Surgery,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 17, 2013. 9 Using similar technology: Jacques Marescaux et al., “Transcontinental Robot-Assisted Remote Telesurgery: Feasibility and Potential Applications,” Annals of Surgery 235, no. 4 (2002): 300–301. 10 Though the gains: For a definitive view into the world of military robotics, see Peter W.

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

g=43194ac7-9d44-46f5-9e4c-9c759f8e3641 https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-05-16/waymo-s-next-challenge-making-driverless-passengers-feels-safe http://newsroom.aaa.com/2017/03/americans-feel-unsafe-sharing-road-fully-self-driving-cars/ https://www.fastcompany.com/40419374/the-future-of-autonomous-vehicles-relies-on-middle-america Negative articles include: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2599426/emerging-technology/did-you-know-googles-self-driving-cars-cant-handle-99-of-roads-in-the-us.html https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530276/hidden-obstacles-for-googles-self-driving-cars/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/15/the-guardian-view-on-self-driving-cars-apply-the-brakes https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/opinion/google-wants-driverless-cars-but-do-we.html?_r=0 Blogs: A selection of blogs on the topic of Driverless cars: http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-transportation-problem/# http://utilware.com/autonomous.html http://ideas.4brad.com/rodney-brooks-pedestrian-interaction-andrew-ng-infrastructure-and-both-human-attitudes https://medium.com/@alexrubalcava/a-roadmap-for-a-world-without-drivers-573aede0c968 http://www.newgeography.com/content/005024-preparing-impact-driverless-cars http://blog.piekniewski.info/2017/05/11/a-car-safety-myths-and-facts/ https://medium.com/@christianhern/self-driving-cars-as-the-new-toolbar-8c8a47a3c598 https://backchannel.com/self-driving-cars-will-improve-our-cities-if-they-dont-ruin-them-2dc920345618#.4va0brsyg Videos: A selection of Videos on the topic of Driverless cars: Video of Tesla Auto pilot - https://thescene.com/watch/arstechnica/cars-technica-hands-on-with-tesla-s-autopilot https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg (15 Minute TED Talk by Chris Urmson of Google, 2015) * * * [1] http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functions/McKinsey%20Digital/Our%20Insights/Disruptive%20technologies/MGI_Disruptive_technologies_Full_report_May2013.ashx [2] http://www.morganstanley.com/articles/autonomous-cars-the-future-is-now [3] http://www3.weforum.org/docs/Media/WEF_FutureofJobs.pdf [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara [5] https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/763209924302090240 [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Dichotomy_paradox [7] https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/771115479393906688 [8] https://lilium.com/ [9] https://www.uber.com/info/elevate/ [10] The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams, 2002 [11] http://farmerandfarmer.org/mastery/builder.html [12] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/innovation-and-its-enemies-9780190467036?

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

Better that than for an isolated team of engineers to have to invent an ethical universe over the weekend that AI becomes all-powerful. As Yudkowsky said, “I don’t think we should ignore a problem we’ll predictably have to panic about later.” In 2018 Jeff Bezos and Amazon hosted a conference in Palm Springs where neuroscientist Sam Harris debated MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks (cofounder of iRobot, known for carpet-cleaning robots). Harris expressed concern that competitors in an AI arms race would ignore precautions. “This is something you made up,” Brooks objected. Harris had no data; he was saying things that could not be proven either way. Of course, nobody has data about a technology that doesn’t yet exist.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

For more than a decade, FANUC, a Japanese builder of robots for other manufacturers, has made those robots with . . . robots, at the rate of fifty units every twenty-four hours. The FANUC facility can run, without human supervision, for days—and stops only to allow shippers to remove the completed robots.31 In the United States, meanwhile, companies are now snapping up robot technology as rapidly as it comes onto the market. Rodney Brooks, a robotics pioneer, has recently introduced a model, dubbed Baxter, that is designed to work on an assembly line. The model sells for around twenty-two thousand dollars32—less than the average factory worker’s pay—and is so easy to program that line workers will be able to “teach” it how to do tasks.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

Artificial general intelligence would be a major turning point in the relationship between humans and machines—what many predict would be the most significant single event in the history of the human race. It’s a milestone that I believe we should not cross unless we have first definitively solved all problems of control and safety. But given the relatively slow rate of progress on fundamental scientific breakthroughs, I and other AI experts, among them Andrew Ng and Rodney Brooks, believe AGI remains farther away than often imagined. Does that mean I see nothing but steady material progress and glorious human flourishing in our AI future? Not at all. Instead, I believe that civilization will soon face a different kind of AI-induced crisis. This crisis will lack the apocalyptic drama of a Hollywood blockbuster, but it will disrupt our economic and political systems all the same, and even cut to the core of what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

If a particular species' brain design has already gone down the need-to-know path with regard to some control problem, only minor modifications (fine tuning, you might say) can be readily made to the existing structures, so the only hope of making a major revision of the internal environment to account for new problems, new features of the external environment that matter, is to submerge the old {377} hard-wiring under a new layer of preemptive control (a theme developed in the work of the AI researcher Rodney Brooks [e.g., 1991]). It is these higher levels of control that have the potential for vast increases in versatility. And it is at these levels in particular that we should look for the role of language (when it finally arrives on the scene), in turning our brains into virtuoso preselectors. We engage in our share of rather mindless routine behavior, but our important acts are often directed on the world with incredible cunning, composing projects exquisitely designed under the influence of vast libraries of information about the world.

…

The idea is to hand-code all the millions of facts in an encyclopedia (plus all the other millions of facts that everyone knows, so there is no point in putting them in the encyclopedia — such as the facts that mountains are bigger than molehills, and toasters can't fly), and then attach an inference engine that can update, preserve consistency, deduce surprising implications, and in general service the world-knowledge base. For an entirely different approach to AI, consider Rodney Brooks' and Lynn Stein's humanoid-robot project (Dennett 1994c). 7. Some have argued that my account of patterns in Dennett 1991b is epiphenomenalistn about content. This is my reply. 8. Since these are just boxes of truths, no support is hereby given to the "language of thought" hypothesis (Fodor 1975).

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

In her book, Designing Sociable Robots, Breazeal reveals how when she saw the movie Star Wars when it first came out in 1977, she was enthralled with the droids C3PO and R2D2.8 Years later, with a degree in engineering and a background in the sciences, Breazeal was working on her master’s in artificial intelligence at MIT when she was introduced to robotics by its then director Rodney Brooks. With that life-changing introduction, Breazeal realized this was the field for which she was destined. It was in 1997—in the midst of Breazeal’s studies at MIT—that the Sojourner Rover landed on Mars, becoming the first robot to ever land on another planet. The up-and-coming roboticist found herself wondering why we could put robots in space, yet we still didn’t have them in our homes.

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo

Alfred Russel Wallace, biofilm, butterfly effect, Celebration, Florida, classic study, corporate governance, delayed gratification, experimental subject, gentrification, impulse control, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, placebo effect, post-industrial society, Rodney Brooks, Ted Kaczynski, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, Walter Mischel

But human intelligence is not something operating on the basis of closed circuits locked away inside the skull. If you want to create a brain as versatile as a human brain, its intelligence—like human intelligence—must be “embodied.” This kind of information processing works from the ground up, through sensory (which means bodily) input. Rodney Brooks, who makes robots, gave up trying to make them smarter by focusing solely on symbolic processing—playing chess or doing advanced mathematics—the kind of tasks, as he told the New York Times, that “highly educated male scientists found challenging.”8 If you want to create a robot that can get along in the world, you need to give it the kind of capabilities that human toddlers need to master: knowing the difference between self and other, learning to interact with the physical environment, being able to distinguish between chalk and cheese.

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Ćirković, eds. Global Catastrophic Risks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Bostrom, N., and E. Yudkowsky. “The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.” In Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, edited by K. Frankish and W. Ramsey. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Brooks, R. A. “I, Rodney Brooks, Am a Robot.” IEEE Spectrum 45, no. 6 (2008). Brundage, M., et al., “The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation.” https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07228. Brynjolfsson, E., and A. McAfee. The Second Machine Age. New York: Norton, 2014. Bryson, J., M. Diamantis, and T.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford

airport security, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital Maoism, Google Glasses, hive mind, index card, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, large denomination, new economy, new new economy, Norman Mailer, online collectivism, Plato's cave, plutocrats, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

Surprisingly, it is in the field of robotics that some of the most convincing evidence has emerged that inference, calculation, and representation are a grossly inefficient way to go about negotiating a physical environment. In his now-classic article “Intelligence Without Representation,” published in the journal Artificial Intelligence in 1991, Rodney Brooks wrote that “the world is its own best model.” Roboticists are learning a lesson that evolution learned long ago, namely, that the task of solving problems needn’t be accomplished solely by the brain, but can be distributed among the brain, the body, and the world. Consider the problem of catching a fly ball.

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

Every time you use a piece of Microsoft software, you’ve got an AI system trying to figure out what you’re doing, like writing a letter, and it does a pretty damned good job. Every time you see a movie with computer-generated characters, they’re all little AI characters behaving as a group. Every time you play a video game, you’re playing against an AI system. —Rodney Brooks, Director, MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory288 CHAPTER 13 MAKING US OBSOLETE? Will Als impoverish humanity by stealing our jobs? No human occupation is safe from future AI incursions. I can imagine highly proficient robot teachers, artists, soldiers, plumbers, prostitutes, social workers, computer programmers. . . .

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

A Versatile Robotic Worker Industrial Perception’s robot is a highly specialized machine focused specifically on moving boxes with maximum efficiency. Boston-based Rethink Robotics has taken a different track with Baxter, a lightweight humanoid manufacturing robot that can easily be trained to perform a variety of repetitive tasks. Rethink was founded by Rodney Brooks, one of the world’s foremost robotics researchers at MIT and a co-founder of iRobot, the company that makes the Roomba automated vacuum cleaner as well as military robots used to defuse bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Baxter, which costs significantly less than a year’s wages for a typical US manufacturing worker, is essentially a scaled-down industrial robot that is designed to operate safely in close proximity to people.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

For Bezos, in addition to his family and Amazon, there’s Blue Origin, where he typically spends each Wednesday, and Bezos Expeditions, his personal venture-capital firm, which holds stakes in companies such as Twitter, the taxi service Uber, the news site Business Insider, and the robot firm Rethink Robotics. Since August of 2013, Bezos has owned the Washington Post newspaper and has said he wants to apply his passion for invention and experimentation to reviving the storied newspaper. “He invests in things where information technology can disrupt existing models,” says Rodney Brooks, the MIT robotics professor behind Rethink Robotics, which aims to put inexpensive robots on manufacturing assembly lines. “He’s certainly not hands-on but he has been a good person to talk to when various conundrums come up. When we go ask him questions, it’s worth listening to his answers.” Bezos coordinates closely with the creators of the Clock of the Long Now and oversees its quarterly review sessions, which the clock engineers call Ticks.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Staff of the US Securities and Exchange Commission and Staff of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Joint Study on the Feasibility of Mandating Algorithmic Descriptions for Derivatives (April 2011), 16, 16n77, 24, https://www.sec.gov/news/studies/2011/719b-study.pdf. 28. John Markoff, “The Creature That Lives in Pittsburgh,” New York Times, April 21, 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/21/business/the-creature-that-lives-in-pittsburgh.html?pagewanted=all; Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002). 29. See John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), which describes pioneering IA work by Doug Engelbart and a long line of proteges. See also Doug Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (Washington, DC: Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 1962). 30.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

These fulfillment center jobs are, for now at least, impossible to outsource like the factory jobs that came before them, because next-day delivery depends on the proximity of warehouses to the people who consume their contents. That doesn’t mean these jobs are safe forever, though. Roboticist Rodney Brooks once described his motivation for creating robots that could work alongside humans like this: If the trend of rising wages in developing countries continues, manufacturers will eventually run out of pools of cheap labor. At that point, if a company wants to remain competitive, the only way forward is more automation and more robots.

Advances in Artificial General Intelligence: Concepts, Architectures and Algorithms: Proceedings of the Agi Workshop 2006 by Ben Goertzel, Pei Wang

AI winter, artificial general intelligence, backpropagation, bioinformatics, brain emulation, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, epigenetics, friendly AI, functional programming, G4S, higher-order functions, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, John Conway, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Occam's razor, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, semantic web, statistical model, strong AI, theory of mind, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Y2K

If there was a panel like this in 1960 that was asked the very opposite question: which aspects of AGI do you think are really easy, what answers would have been given? Those would be my answers for the really hard aspects. I’m talking about things like vision and motor control, sensory stuff and perception. Rodney Brooks has a copy of a memo from Marvin Minsky, in which he suggested charging an undergraduate for a summer project with the task of solving vision. I don’t know where that undergraduate is now, but I guess he hasn’t finished yet. So these are really, really hard problems. But they are the things that all of us here, or most of us, not including me, are sort of brushing under the carpet.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

(2004), calls such arrangements “politburo control” and notes that this top-down way to accomplish complex tasks is not the brain’s way. Economists have shown why centrally planned economies don’t work as well as market economies, and centrally planned (top-down) architectures are ineffective brain-organizers for much the same reasons. As roboticist Rodney Brooks has observed (personal communication) the hardware of existing digital computers depends critically on millions (or billions) of identical elements, perfect clones of each other almost down to the atomic level, so that they will always respond as they are supposed to respond: robotically! Engineers have managed to create the technology to print microscopic computer circuits with millions of identical flip-flops each reliably storing a 0 or 1 until ordered (from on high) to “flip the bit.”

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Air France Flight 447, air gap, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, brain emulation, Brian Krebs, cognitive bias, computer vision, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, DevOps, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, Freestyle chess, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, IFF: identification friend or foe, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sensor fusion, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, Tesla Model S, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche, Y2K, zero day

Technology, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/30/libratus-poker-artificial-intelligence-professional-human-players-competition. 242 “imperfect information” game: Will Knight, “Why Poker Is a Big Deal for Artificial Intelligence,” MIT Technology Review, January 23, 2017, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603385/why-poker-is-a-big-deal-for-artificial-intelligence/. 242 world’s top poker players had handily beaten: Cameron Tung, “Humans Out-Play an AI at Texas Hold ’Em—For Now,” WIRED, May 21, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/05/humans-play-ai-texas-hold-em-now/. 242 upgraded AI “crushed”: Cade Metz, “A Mystery AI Just Crushed the Best Human Players at Poker,” WIRED, January 31, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/01/mystery-ai-just-crushed-best-human-players-poker/. 242 “as soon as something works”: Micah Clark, interview, May 4, 2016. 242 “as soon as a computer can do it”: Stuart Armstrong, interview, November 18, 2016. This point was also made by authors of a Stanford study of AI. Peter Stone, Rodney Brooks, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ryan Calo, Oren Etzioni, Greg Hager, Julia Hirschberg, Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, Ece Kamar, Sarit Kraus, Kevin Leyton-Brown, David Parkes, William Press, AnnaLee Saxenian, Julie Shah, Milind Tambe, and Astro Teller. “Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030.” One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence: Report of the 2015–2016 Study Panel, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, September 2016, 13. http://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report. 243 “responsible use”: AAAI.org, http://www.aaai.org/home.html. 243 “most of the discussion about superintelligence”: Tom Dietterich, interview, April 27, 2016. 243 “runs counter to our current understandings”: Thomas G.

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

In this section, we avoid setting out our taxonomy by referring the term “legal persons” because the philosophical status of “personality” could lead to confusion by eliding various of the characteristics which we identify as features of being a subject and an agent, respectively. See, for example, Rodney Brooks, Robot: The Future of Flesh and Machines (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 2002), 194–195; Benjamin Allgrove, Legal Personality for Artificial Intellects: Pragmatic Solution or Science Fiction (DPhil Dissertation, University of Oxford, 2004). 19See, for example, Shawn Bayern, Thomas Burri, Thomas D.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

This list includes Daniel Kahneman, Vasik Rajlich, Dr. Alexander “Sandy” McDonald, Roger Pielke Jr., John Rundle, Thomas Jordan, Irene Eckstrand, Phil Gordon, Chris Volinsky, Robert Bell, Tim Berners-Lee, Lisa Randall, Jay Rosen, Simon Jackman, Diane Lauderdale, Jeffrey Sachs, Howard Lederer, Rodney Brooks, Henry Abbott, and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita among others. I hope to return all these favors someday. I will start by buying the first beer for anybody on this list, and the first three for anybody who should have been, but isn’t. —Nate Silver Brooklyn, NY NOTES INTRODUCTION 1.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

To appreciate what goes on in our minds when we effortlessly learn from other people, we have to imagine what it would be like to have some other kind of mind. Fortunately, cognitive scientists have imagined it for us by plumbing the minds of robots, animals, and people whose minds are impaired. The artificial intelligence researcher Rodney Brooks, who wants to build a robot capable of learning by imitation, immediately faced this problem when he considered using techniques for learning that are common in computer science: The robot is observing a person opening a glass jar. The person approaches the robot and places the jar on a table near the robot.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Cellan-Jones, “Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind,” BBC News, Dec. 2, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540. 20. In a 2014 poll of the hundred most-cited AI researchers, just 8 percent feared that high-level AI posed the threat of “an existential catastrophe”: Müller & Bostrom 2014. AI experts who are publicly skeptical include Paul Allen (2011), Rodney Brooks (2015), Kevin Kelly (2017), Jaron Lanier (2014), Nathan Myhrvold (2014), Ramez Naam (2010), Peter Norvig (2015), Stuart Russell (2015), and Roger Schank (2015). Skeptical psychologists and biologists include Roy Baumeister (2015), Dylan Evans (2015a), Gary Marcus (2015), Mark Pagel (2015), and John Tooby (2015).