Rodney Brooks

Blue Origin just landed booster on 2nd orbital launch. 99,000lb to LEO compared to 110,000lb for 3 booster Falcon Heavy with all 3 landing. This is a leap frog. Today's payloads are headed to Mars in the next few hours. Different dev approach than Starship. Slower but cheaper, and ultimately faster.

Tonight in center Waymo in a phalanx of three with another two rows behind. In 4.5 mile journey across SF it as only the last 14 blocks where there moments where no other Waymos were visible. Before that always one within three car lengths and sometimes up to three others.

Jobs changing so fast! Today in Kendall Sq Cambridge MA saw a human operated backhoe digging a trench in the road and a guy standing there ducking the backhoe pushing dirt spilled on the blacktop back into the trench. I had exactly that job in Dec 1974 in Adelaide Australia. 51 years ago. No change.

A short essay following up on the recently rediscovered poem by Adrienne Rich, titled "Artificial Intelligence", and written in 1961. I do what she suggested back then. I forced AI systems to write some poems. rodneybrooks.com/a-prophetic-...

The Man Who Invented AGI Everyone is obsessed with artificial general intelligence—the stage when AI can match all feats of human cognition. The guy who named it saw it as a threat.

The origin of the term AGI by @stevenlevy.bsky.social-I have worked in AI for 50 years and still think we were chasing what AGI claims to be chasing. Meta now chases ASI--Artificial Super Intelligence. I think we should all be chasing AHI--Artificial Hyper Intelligence. www.wired.com/story/the-ma...

$20,000 Robot Servant Comes With a Major Catch Owners of the NEO butler-bot from 1X will have to schedule a time for remote operators to plug in and complete tasks.

Pay $500/month&request on phone app a task to be done-human virtually in your house teleops robot-sometimes succeeds. "In reality, projects like Tesla’s Optimus or 1X’s NEO are less about practical consumer robotics and more about cashing in off of technological hype." futurism.com/future-socie...

Having run an 800+ person AI/CS research lab at MIT I can say that diversity of thought and passionate arguments are at the core of advancing. Laying off 600 researchers at Meta today Alexandr Wang explained: By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision.

I Test Drove a Flying Car. Get Ready, They’re Here. Dan Neil takes a test flight of the Pivotal BlackFly, a series-produced electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle made for consumers

No they are not here. Read the story & judge for yourself. Flying cars used to be things that could drive on roads & fly. Now they are simply electric helicopters on the very edge of being able to fly people due to the physics of flight and today's known battery tech. www.wsj.com/lifestyle/ca...

Architecture for SpaceX Moon Landing requires high teens of refueling flights in LEO before heading to Moon & soft landing of crewed Starship on Moon. Space refueling has never been done by anyone. Starship has never flown crewed, nor actually landed. Schedule says mid 2027. Not happening!

NASA is understandably getting wobbly about SpaceX's ability to land astronauts on the Moon soon. This morning on Fox acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy: "I'm in the process of opening that contract up...a space race in...American companies competing...who can actually get us back to the Moon".

Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Turing Test YouTube video by The Royal Society

Alan Kay (invented personal computers) on AI. We love theater as system 1 (Kahneman) fires and fools, but we know it's not real due to system 2, logical reasoning. Exposed to LLMs sys 1 fires wildly but we have no sys 2 understanding of it to control our love of it. www.youtube.com/live/GmnBTCK...

This morning Prez Kornbluth of MIT sent a letter to US Dept of Ed Secretary McMahon. Key sentence replying to the demand for MIT to submit to POTUS whims in exchange for science funds:
Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.

As Elon Musk Preps Tesla’s Optimus for Prime Time, Big Hurdles Remain When Elon Musk takes the stage at Tesla’s annual meeting next month, one of the centerpieces of his plan to impress shareholders will be a dancing troupe of Optimus bots, the humanoid machines that he...

Promised 5,000 Optimus this year. "Tesla slashed its production goal to 2,000 a few months later ... Then, ... summer, staffers told Musk Tesla could meet the 2,000 target, but the robots wouldn’t be very useful due to issues with their hands." But, dancing!! www.theinformation.com/articles/elo...

So proud of Sawyer, from my previous company. We designed them to run for 30,000 hours. That is 15 years (= 15 x 50wks x 40 hrs) of human work. This one provided 17.5 years of productivity. And… |... So proud of Sawyer, from my previous company. We designed them to run for 30,000 hours. That is 15 years (= 15 x 50wks x 40 hrs) of human work. This one provided 17.5 years of productivity. And Sawyer...

From my previous company. This Sawyer ran for 35,236 hours in a factory in Oregon. You can move within its workspace, and grab it as it is operating. This is what real robots, real deployments, and real ROI are all about; productive, reliable, and safe operation. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

My attempt to establish cred as a humanoid realist may not be working as well as I hoped. Today I was offered a chance to invest in a pre-seed for a humanoid robot company that will have $1T (yes they said "T") revenues in 7 years. Repeat essay from last Friday: rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-h...

Robots are learning to make human babies. Twenty have already been born. One in six people of reproductive age suffer from infertility. Start-ups are using AI-powered robots to increase IVF success rates and lower costs.

Just for the record this is a stupid headline. The robots are carrying out automated steps moving samples around and using vision to apply tools. They don't "know" what they are doing and certainly have no conception(!) of what a baby, human, or conception are. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

‘No driver, no hands, no clue’: Driverless car pulled over on Bay Area road Police say they warned the company about the "glitch."

My 2nd law of robotics: When robots and people coexist in the same spaces, the robots must not take away from people’s agency, particularly when the robots are failing, as inevitably they will at times. -- Here it is cops stymied by Waymos. www.sfgate.com/bayarea/arti...

I have just finished and just published some weekend reading for you. 9,600 words of not easy reading, on why today's humanoid robots won't learn to be dexterous. rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-h...

YouTube video by Automated Podcast Rodney Brooks: The Truth About Humanoid Robots and AI Hype

A few months ago I sat down to talk with @bheater.bsky.social about humanoids, automation, and deploying them at scale. He published it on his automate outlet today. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qxO...

In 2011 I wrote a review of Alan Turing's 1948 paper Intelligent Machinery where he considered the case for embodied intelligence. My review was intended for a 2012 centenary celebration of Turing's birth, but no proceedings were published. So here it is. rodneybrooks.com/alan-turing-...

The Useful Idiots of AI Doomsaying Those who predict that superintelligence will destroy humanity serve the same interests as those who believe that it will solve all of our problems.

This is a thoughtful review of the new book: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. I might rephrase it in terms of 2 of my 7 deadly sins of predicting the future of AI: performance vs competence, & indistinguishability of sufficiently advanced technology from magic. www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

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Our team at Robust AI makes robots more intuitive for real users. We're not replacing people, we are giving them superpowers with robots that understand when and how to help them. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

OpenAI Ramps Up Robotics Work in Race Toward AGI The company behind ChatGPT is putting together a team capable of developing algorithms to control robots and appears to be hiring roboticists who work specifically on humanoids.

This story says that there is yet another entrant in the humanoid space. Oh, good grief! www.wired.com/story/openai...

Tom Dietterich ‪@tdietterich.bsky.social‬ talks about the problem of AI generated papers being a virtual DOS attack on human reviewers, and suggests some new rules for this new situation.

Reality Is Ruining the Humanoid Robot Hype ​It takes more than building a humanoid robot to build a humanoid robot product.

Evan Ackerman has been a thoughtful reporter on robotics for a decade or more @spectrum.ieee.org spectrum.ieee.org/humanoid-rob...

Benjie's Humanoid Olympic Games A gauntlet thrown

Benjie Holson has come up with a humanoid robot Olympics, all events are trivial for real humans. generalrobots.substack.com/p/benjies-hu...

Oh no. The book he is holding "The Promise of Artificial Intelligence" has been profoundly influential on me these last few years. It is his most concise book, and you have to want to read it as it is dense and deep. But it is a real treasure, as was Brian himself.

5/5
Still, when
they make you write your poems, later on,
who’d envy you, force-fed
on all those variorum
editions of our primitive endeavors,
those frozen pemmican language-rations
they’ll cram you with? denied
our luxury of nausea, you
forget nothing, have no dreams.

4/5
I’m sulking, clearly, in the great tradition
of human waste. Why not
dump the whole reeking snarl
and let you solve me once for all?
(Parameter: a black-faced Luddite
itching for ecstasies of sabotage.)

3/5
You never had a mother,
let’s say? no digital Gertrude
whom you’d as lief have seen
Kingless? So your White Queen
was just an “operator.”
(My Red had incandescence,
ire, aura, flare,
and trapped me several moments in her stare.)