Rodney Brooks: Robotics | Lex Fridman Podcast #217

Rodney Brooks and Lex Fridman explore the beauty of robots, the history of computation, and why intelligence is so hard to build. Brooks argues computation is a human-derived metaphor that may be the wrong model for the mind, and that perception and manipulation (Moravec's paradox) are far harder than reasoning tasks like chess. He repeatedly cautions against extrapolating from impressive demos in self-driving and deep learning, drawing on decades of experience including AlphaZero, AlphaFold, Tesla Autopilot, and Waymo. The conversation also covers his entrepreneurial journey building iRobot and Rethink Robotics, the failures and triumphs along the way, human-robot connection, and reflections on mortality and meaning.

• Brooks reveals he is halfway through a 480-page book titled 'Not Even Wrong' arguing computation may be the wrong metaphor for the mind.
  00:08:14
• He recounts visiting DeepMind in London where his own company's Sawyer robots were doing secret reinforcement learning experiments he wasn't allowed to see.
  00:36:14
• Brooks admits he thinks intelligence is 'a little bit overrated' and that we can have deep connections with robots very soon.
  00:51:47
• He confesses Rethink Robotics' biggest mistake: being talked out of a $3,000 plastic-geared force-feedback robot, ending up with overpriced $25K-$35K machines.
  01:48:52
• Rethink Robotics collapsed because every acquisition consortium had Chinese money that couldn't pass CFIUS review, then a buyer bought the assets at 1/30th the price.
  01:54:35
• Brooks says he wishes he could ask Minsky why he 'came down so hard' on neural networks in Perceptrons when Minsky's own PhD thesis was on neural networks.
  02:07:34
• Contrarian claim: 2020 will not be remembered as a watershed year for ML/AI; the papers are 'fundamentally boring' incremental work.
  02:11:38

• Brooks built his first 'computer' as a child from an ice cube tray, using nails as electrodes and copper bridges to make it learn to add.
  00:06:11
• Ada Lovelace's first computer program computed Bernoulli numbers (which describe drum vibration nodes) and contained a bug; it was never run.
  00:21:10
• Arthur Samuel's checkers program beat a world champion in the early 60s partly because he ran self-play on IBM's production-line computers overnight.
  00:46:05
• The first car drove autonomously over 55 mph on a public freeway with traffic back in 1987 in Munich.
  00:58:37
• Jaywalking became an offense only because car companies pushed it so pedestrians would stay off roads.
  01:05:18
• iRobot robots helped shut down the Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011 because the company had 9 years of harsh field experience from 6,500 robots in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  01:37:58
• iRobot had 14 failed business models before 2002, then released the Roomba and sold all 70,000 units before Christmas.
  01:43:10
• Brooks says today's conversational AI lacks continuity of topic, shared memory, and any semblance of intention or goals.
  02:01:53
• Minsky told Brooks the key to staying productive is 'to hate everything you've ever done in the past.'
  02:12:40