Robots, AI, and other stuff
My Early Experience with Self Driving Cars Back in the summer of 1979 (forty four years ago) I was Hans Moravec’s gopher, at the Stanford AI Lab, helping test his self driving Cart for his PhD thesis. Every night that summer we would wait until midnight or so, when most people had gone home and … Continue reading Autonomous Vehicles 2023, Part I
Generative Pre-trained Transformer models (GPTs) are now all the rage and have inspired op-eds being written by everyone from Henry Kissinger (WSJ) to Noam Chomsky (NYTimes) in just the last month. That sure is some hype level. Way back in the early history of GPTs, January 1st this year, I wrote briefly about them and said: Calm down … Continue reading What Will Transformers Transform?
On January 1st, 2018, I made predictions about self driving cars, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and robotics, and about progress in the space industry. Those predictions had dates attached to them for 32 years up through January 1st, 2050. As part of self certifying the seriousness of my predictions I promised to review them, as made … Continue reading Predictions Scorecard, 2023 January 01
I see lots of hype about eVTOLs being on the verge of being big, but I can’t find any videos of prototypes doing what the hype says will be common place by 2025. Here is a story from November 1st, 2022, about a $352M series E financing for air taxi company Volocoptor. More about Volocoptor below. … Continue reading Where are the crewed eVTOL videos?
I’ve pulled together the links for the online versions of everything that I have written for IEEE Spectrum since 2008. My favorite is a sonnet, very much based on Shakespeare’s most famous one, but mine starts out Shall I compare thee to creatures of God? And I have to love that picture of me the editors dug up from … Continue reading My IEEE Spectrum Columns and Articles
rodneybrooks.com/no-front-seat-occupants-adventures-in-autonomous-ride-services/
Just over ten years ago, on April 5th, 2012 to be precise, I took my first ride in a self-driving car, from Google X, in a research unit that has now become Waymo. There was someone sitting in the driver seat, but he had his feet and hands off the controls. We left Google and … Continue reading No front seat occupants; adventures in autonomous ride services
On January 1st, 2018, I made predictions about self driving cars, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and robotics, and about progress in the space industry. Those predictions had dates attached to them for 32 years up through January 1st, 2050. I made my predictions because at the time I saw an immense amount of hype about these three … Continue reading Predictions Scorecard, 2022 January 01
rodneybrooks.com/the-origin-of-robot-arm-programming-languages/
So far my life has been rather extraordinary in that through great underserved luck1 I have been present at, or nearby to, many of the defining technological advances in computer science, Artificial Intelligence, and robotics, that now in 2021 are starting to dominate our world. I knew and rubbed shoulders2 with many of the greats, those … Continue reading The Origin of Robot Arm Programming Languages
On January 1st, 2018, I made predictions about self driving cars, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, and about progress in the space industry. Those predictions had dates attached to them for 32 years up through January 1st, 2050. I made my predictions because at the time I saw an immense amount of hype about these three topics, … Continue reading Predictions Scorecard, 2021 January 01
In surveys of AI “experts” on when we are going to get to human level intelligence in our AI systems, I am usually an outlier, predicting it will take ten or twenty times longer than the second most pessimistic person surveyed. Others have a hard time believing that it is not right around the corner … Continue reading An Analogy For The State Of AI
