Architects of Intelligence

by Martin Ford

  MARTIN FORD: Think back to the ‘90s and the time you started iRobot, do you think since then robotics has met or even exceeded your expectations, or has it been disappointing?

  RODNEY BROOKS: When I came to the United States in 1977, I was really interested in robots and ended up working on computer vision. There were three mobile robots in the world at that point. One of those robots was at Stanford, where Hans Moravec would run experiments to get the robot to move 60 feet across a large room in six hours, another one was at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the last was at the Laboratory for Analysis and Architecture of Systems (LAAS) in Toulouse, France.

  There were three mobile robots in the world. iRobot now ships millions of mobile robots per year, so from the point of view of how far that’s come, I’m pretty happy. We made it big and we’ve moved a long, long way. The only reason that those advances in robotics haven’t been a bigger story is because in that same time frame we’ve gone from room-size mainframe computers to having billions of smartphones throughout the world.

  MARTIN FORD: Moving on from insects, I know you’ve been working on creating robotic hands. There have been some amazing videos of robotic hands from various teams. Can you let me know how that field is progressing?

  RODNEY BROOKS: Yes, I wanted to differentiate that mobile commercial robot work that I was doing at iRobot from what I was doing with my students at MIT, so my research at MIT changed from insects to humanoids and as a result, I started to work there with robot arms. That work is progressing slowly. There are various exciting things happening in lab demos, but they’re focusing on one particular task, which is very different from the more general way in which we operate.

  MARTIN FORD: Is that slow progress due to a hardware or a software problem, and is it the mechanics of it or just the control?

  RODNEY BROOKS: It’s everything. There are a whole bunch of things that you have to make progress on in parallel. You have to make progress on the mechanics, on the materials that form the skin, on the sensors embedded throughout the hand, and on the algorithms to control it, and all those things have to happen at once. You can’t race ahead with one pathway without the others alongside it.

  Let me give you an example to drive this home. You’ve probably seen those plastic grabber toys that have a handle at one end that you squeeze to open a little hand at the other end. You can use them to grab hard-to-reach stuff, or to reach a light bulb that you can’t quite get to on your own.

  That really primitive hand can do fantastic manipulation beyond what any robot can currently do, but it’s an amazingly primitive piece of plastic junk that you’re using to do that manipulation with. That’s the clincher, you are doing the manipulation. Often, you’ll see videos of a new robot hand that a researcher has designed, and it’s a person holding the robot hand and moving it around to do a task. They could do the same task with this little plastic grabber toy, it’s the human doing it. If it was that simple, we could attach this grabber toy to the end of a robot arm and have it perform the task—a human can do it with this toy at the end of their arm, why can’t a robot? There’s something dramatic missing.

  MARTIN FORD: I have seen reports that deep learning and reinforcement learning is being used to have robots learn to do things by practicing or even just by watching YouTube videos. What’s your view on this?

  RODNEY BROOKS: Remember they’re lab demos. DeepMind has a group using our robots and they’ve recently published some interesting force feedback work with robots attaching clips to things, but each of these is painstakingly worked on by a team of really smart researchers for months. It’s nowhere near the same as a human. If you take any person and show them something to do dexterously, they can do it immediately. We are nowhere close to anything like that from a robot’s perspective.

  I recently built some IKEA furniture and I’ve heard people say this would be a great robot test. Give them an IKEA kit, give them the instructions that come with it, and have them make it. I must have done 200 different dexterous sorts of tasks while building that furniture. Let’s say we took my robots, that we sell in the thousands and are state of the art and have more sensors in them than any other robot that is sold today, and we tried to replicate that. If we worked for a few months in a very restricted environment we might get a coarse demonstration of one of those 200 tasks that I just knew and did. Again, it’s imagination running wild here to think a robot could soon do all of those tasks, the reality is very different.

  MARTIN FORD: What is the reality? Thinking 5 to 10 years ahead, what are we going to see in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence? 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.

  MARTIN FORD: Maybe then the next thing will still be neural networks but with a different algorithm or Bayesian networks?

  RODNEY BROOKS: It might be, or it might be something very different, that’s what we don’t know. I guarantee, though, that within 10 years there’ll be a new hot topic that people will be exploiting for applications, and it will make certain other technologies suddenly pop. I don’t know what they will be, but in a 10-year time frame we’re certainly going to see that happen.

  It’s impossible to predict what’s going to work and why, but you can in a predictable way say something about market pull, and market pull is going to come from a few different megatrends that are currently taking place.

  For example, the ratio of elderly retired people to working-age people is changing dramatically. Depending on whose numbers you look at, the ratio is changing from something like nine working-age people to every one retired person (9:1) to two working-age people to every retired person (2:1). There are a lot more elderly people in the world. It depends on the country and other factors, but that means there will be a market pull toward helping the elderly get things done as they get frailer. We’re already seeing this in Japan at robotics trade shows, where there are a lot of lab demos of robots helping the elderly to do simple tasks, such as getting into and out of bed, getting into and out of the bathroom, just simple daily things. Those things currently require one-to-one human help, but as that ratio of working-age to elderly changes, there isn’t going to be the labor force to fulfil that need. That’s going to pull robotics into helping the elderly.

  MARTIN FORD: I agree that that elder care segment is a massive opportunity for the robotics and AI industry, but it does seem very challenging in terms of the dexterity that’s required to really assist an elderly person in taking care of themselves.

  RODNEY BROOKS: It is not going to be a simple substitution of a robotic system for a person, but there is going to be a demand so there will be motivated people working on trying to come up with solutions because it is going to be an incredible market.

  I think we will also see a pull for construction work because we are urbanizing the world at an incredible rate. Many of the techniques that we use in construction were invented by the Romans, there’s room for a little technological update in some of those.

  MARTIN FORD: Do you think that would be construction robots or would it be construction scale 3D printing?

  RODNEY BROOKS: 3D printing may come in for aspects of it. It’s not going to be printing the whole building, but certainly we might see printed pre-formed components. We’ll be able to manufacture a lot more parts off-site, which will in turn lead to innovation in delivering, lifting, and moving those parts. There’s
room for a lot of innovation there.

  Agriculture is another industry that will potentially see robotics and AI innovation, particularly with climate change disrupting our food chain. People are already talking about urban farming, bringing farming out of a field and into a factory. This is something where machine learning can be very helpful. We have the computation power now to close a loop around every seed we need to grow and to provide it with the exact nutrients and conditions that it needs without having to worry about the actual weather outside. I think climate change is going to drive automation of farming in a different way than it has so far.

  MARTIN FORD: What about real household consumer robots? 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. It’s not quite indispensable, it’s a convenience level.

  MARTIN FORD: When do we get there for a robot that can do more than move around and vacuum floors? A robot that has sufficient dexterity to perform some basic tasks?

  RODNEY BROOKS: I wish I knew! I think no one knows. Everyone’s saying robots are coming to take over the world, yet we can’t even answer the question of when one will bring us a beer.

  MARTIN FORD: I saw an article recently with the CEO of Boeing, Dennis Muilenburg, saying that they’re going to have autonomous drone taxis flying people around within the next decade, what do you think of his projection?

  RODNEY BROOKS: I will compare that to saying that we’re going to have flying cars. Flying cars that you can drive around in and then just take off have been a dream for a long time, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.

  I think the former CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, claimed that they were going to have flying Ubers deployed autonomously in 2020. It’s not going to happen. That’s not to say that I don’t think we’ll have some form of autonomous personal transport. We already have helicopters and other machines that can reliably go from place to place without someone flying them. I think it’s more about the economics of it that will determine when that happens, but I don’t have an answer to when that will be.

  MARTIN FORD: What about artificial general intelligence? Do you think it is achievable and, if so, in what timeframe do you think we have a 50% chance of achieving it?

  RODNEY BROOKS: Yes, I think it is achievable. My guess on that is the year 2200, but it’s just a guess.

  MARTIN FORD: Tell me about the path to get there. What are the hurdles we’ll face?

  RODNEY BROOKS: We already talked about the hurdle of dexterity. The ability to navigate and manipulate the world is important in understanding the world, but there’s a much wider context to the world than just the physical. For example, there isn’t a single robot or AI system out there that knows that today is a different day to yesterday, apart from a nominal digit on a calendar. There is no experiential memory, no understanding of being in the world from day to day, and no understanding of long-term goals and making incremental progress toward them. Any AI program in the world today is an idiot savant living in a sea of now. It’s given something, and it responds.

  The AlphaGo program or chess-playing programs don’t know what a game is, they don’t know about playing a game, they don’t know that humans exist, they don’t know any of that. Surely, though, if an AGI is equivalent to a human, it’s got to have that full awareness.

  As far back as 50 years ago people worked on research projects around those things. There was a whole community that I was a part of in the 1980s through the 1990s working on the simulation of adaptive behavior. We haven’t made much progress since then, and we can’t point to how it’s going to be done. No one’s currently working on it, and the people that claim to be advancing AGI are actually re-doing the same things that John McCarthy talked about in the 1960s, and they are making about as much progress.

  It’s a hard problem. It doesn’t mean you don’t make progress on the way in a lot of technologies, but some things just take hundreds of years to achieve. We think that we’re the golden people at the critical time. Lots of people have thought that at lots of times, it doesn’t make it true for us right now and I see no evidence of it.

  MARTIN FORD: There are concerns that we will fall behind China in the race to advanced artificial intelligence. They have a larger population, and therefore more data, and they don’t have as strict privacy concerns to hold back what they can do in AI. Do you think that we are entering a new AI arms race?

  RODNEY BROOKS: You’re correct, there is going to be a race. There’s been a race between companies, and there will be a race between countries.

  MARTIN FORD: Do you view it as a big danger for the West if a country like China gets a substantial lead in AI?

  RODNEY BROOKS: I don’t think it’s as simple as that. We will see uneven deployment of AI technologies. I think we are seeing this already in China in their deployment of facial recognition in ways that we would not like to see here in the US. As for new AI chips, this is not something that a country like the US can afford to even begin to fall behind with. However, to not fall behind would require leadership that we do not currently have.

  We’ve seen policies saying that we need more coal miners, while science budgets are cut, including places like the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It’s craziness, it’s delusional, it’s backward thinking, and it’s destructive.

  MARTIN FORD: Let’s talk about some of the risks or potential dangers associated with AI and robotics. Let’s start with the economic question. Many people believe we are on the cusp of a big disruption on the scale of a new Industrial Revolution. Do you buy into that? Is there going to be a big impact on the job market and the economy?

  RODNEY BROOKS: Yes, but not in the way people talk about. I don’t think it’s AI per se. I think it’s the digitalization of the world and the creation of new digital pathways in the world. The example I like to use is toll roads. In the US, we’ve largely gotten rid of human toll takers on toll roads and toll bridges. It’s not particularly done with AI but it’s done because there’s a whole bunch of digital pathways that have been built up in our society over the last 30 years.

  One of the things that allowed us to get rid of toll takers is the tag that you can put on your windscreen that gives a digital signature to your car. Another advance that made it practical to get rid of all the human toll lanes is computer vision, where there is an AI system with some deep learning that can take a snapshot of the license plate and read it reliably. It’s not just at the toll gate, though. There are other digital chains that have happened to get us to this point. You are able to go to a website and register the tag in your car and the particular serial code that belongs to you, and also provide your license number so that there’s a backup.

  There’s also digital banking that allows a third party to regularly bill your credit card without them ever touching your physical credit card. In the old days you had to have the physical credit card, now it’s become a digital chain. There’s also the side effect for the companies that run the toll booth, that they no longer need trucks to collect the money and take it to the bank because they have this digital supply chain.

  There’s a whole set of digital pieces that came together to automate that service and remove the human toll taker. AI was a small, but necessary piece in there, but it wasn’t that overnight that person was replaced by an AI system. It’s those incremental digital pathways that enable the change in labor markets, it’s not a simple one-for-one replacement.


  MARTIN FORD: Do you think those digital chains will disrupt a lot of those grass roots service jobs?

  RODNEY BROOKS: Digital chains can do a lot of things but they can’t do everything. What they leave behind are things that we typically don’t value very much but are necessary to keep our society running, like helping the elderly in the restroom, or getting them in and out of showers. It’s not just those kinds of tasks—look at teaching. In the US, we’ve failed to give schoolteachers the recognition or the wages they deserve, and I don’t know how we’re going to change our society to value this important work, and make it economically worthwhile. As some jobs are lost to automation, how do we recognize and celebrate those other jobs that are not?

  MARTIN FORD: It sounds like you’re not suggesting that mass unemployment will happen, but that jobs will change. I think one thing that will happen is that a lot of desirable jobs are going to disappear. Think of the white-collar job where you’re sitting in front of a computer and you’re doing something predictable and routine, cranking out the same report again and again. It’s a very desirable high-paying job that people go to college to get and that job is going to be threatened, but the maid cleaning the hotel room is going to be safe.

  RODNEY BROOKS: I don’t deny that, but what I do deny is when people say, oh that’s AI and robots doing that. As I say, I think this is more down to digitalization.

  MARTIN FORD: I agree, but it’s also true that AI is going to be deployed on that platform, so things may move even faster.

  RODNEY BROOKS: Yes, it certainly makes it easier to deploy AI given that platform. The other worry, of course, is that the platform is built on totally insecure components that can get hacked by anyone.

  MARTIN FORD: Let’s move on to that security question. What are the things that we really should worry about, aside from the economic disruption? What are the real risks, such as security, that you think are legitimate and that we should be concerned with?