Rodney Brooks AI Scorecard

Robotics Pioneer Rodney Brooks has followed the AI space for decades.

He concludes that ChatGPT surprised outsiders only because it seems so much better than what they’ve seen previously that it’s hard for them to appreciate the limitations. Insiders know full well the limitations and realize ChatGPT is at best a small step forward.

Vice Admiral Joe Dyer, former chief test pilot of the US Navy, once reminded me that nothing is ever as good as it first seems, nor as bad. That is an incredibly helpful adage.

From his earlier post seven deadly sins of predicting the future of AI > This is a problem we all have with imagined future technology. If it is far enough away from the technology we have and understand today, then we do not know its limitations. It becomes indistinguishable from magic.

When a technology passes that magic line anything one says about it is no longer falsifiable, because it is magic.

Large language models may find a niche, but they are not the foundation for generally intelligent systems. Their novelty will wear off as people try to build real scalable systems with them and find it very difficult to deliver on the hype.

I don’t happen to think that neuro-symbolic will past the test of time, but it will lead to more short term progress

He predicts “not in my lifetime” the emergence of a robot that has any real idea about its own existence in a way that a 6-year-old understands.

ChatGPT

In essence ChatGPT is picking the most likely word to follow all those that precede it, whether it is the words in a human input prompt, or what it has already generated itself. The best analogy that I see for it is that ChatGPT is a dream generator, the dreams that you have at night when you are asleep.

Sometimes from your dreams you can pick out an insight about yourself or the world around you. Or sometimes your dreams make no sense at all, and sometimes they can be scary nightmares. Basing your life, unquestioned, on what you dreamed last night, and every night, is not a winning strategy.

## Space Flight

He’s pessimistic about the humans landing on the moon … in fact nobody will go around the moon until at least 2024. Similarly, it’ll be way past 2026 before any human-related cargo goes to Mars and way into the 2030s before there is a realistic chance of any human getting there.

Crypto

Crypto, as in all the currencies out there now, are going to fade away and lose their remaining value. Crypto may rise again but it needs a new set of algorithms and capability for scaling. The most likely path is that existing national currencies will morph into crypto currency as contactless payment become common in more and more countries. It may lead to one of the existing national currencies becoming much more accessible world wide.

Driverless Cars

The hype is overblown even on simple tasks like driverless taxis on confined spaces with low traffic. “There will be human drivers on our roads for decades to come”