Om Malik interviewed Rodney Brooks, the founder of iRobot and former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
You can do so much more computation, sensing, some actuation, but people underestimate the long tail of the natural environment. That’s what we see with autonomous vehicles. I first attended a talk on autonomous vehicles in 1979 in Tokyo. By 1990, Ernst Dickmanns in Germany had his truck driving on the Autobahn at 100 kilometers an hour. He took it to Paris, and an autonomous vehicle drove around Paris in 1990. Then in 2007, 2008, people saw the DARPA autonomous vehicle and said, “Oh, it’s going to be everywhere instantly.” But it’s taken almost 20 years, and it’s still only in little tiny geographical areas because of the long tail of all the things that can happen.
There’s a tendency to go for the flashy demo, but the flashy demo doesn’t deal with the real environment. It’s going to have to operate in the messy reality. That’s why it takes so long for these technologies.
Historical context and the reality of building things for a physical world is almost a shocking point of view these days. It usually feels like we’re either headed towards the end of the world or some kind of automated utopia. Brooks offers optimism, but a view in between doom and the box of dreams.
