My neighborhood in SF, except for my block, is always thick with humanless Waymo vehicles. In tonight's rush hour I saw my first humanless Waymo on a highway, on 101, driving north to the city around the 280 interchange. I first took a ride in autonomous mode in a Waymo (then…

5 paras from John Markoff's Feb 16, 2011, NYT story on Watson when it won Jeopardy. Substitute ChatGPT, or similar, for Watson and one of many companies for IBM and it still reads pretty well.

.@mattbinder reports on fake headline on eX-twitter generated by its chatbot Grok, and how more information here will be generated by an LLM which is, as one must expect if one knows how LLMs work, an avid confabulator (others call it hallucination). As often, hubris about the…

John Carpenter's first movie ($60k budget) was released 50 years (and a few days) ago. Dark Star. 'Talk to the bomb.' 'Teach it phenomenology.' Echoes of 2001. The bomb's dialog could today be generated by an LLM, I think, coupling together sort of related ideas from philosophy…

Amazon Fresh failure.

My third law of robotics, shared here yesterday is:
3. Technologies for robots need 10+ years of steady improvement beyond lab demos of the target tasks to mature to low cost and to have their limitations characterized well enough that they can deliver…

My three laws of robotics.

The companies that I have founded have sold 50+ million real robots to real customers; research robots, home cleaning, nuclear power plant inspection, military ground robots, upper body humanoids in factories, and now at Robust.AI,…

I'm sure the founding team has a well thought out strategy to build a real and valuable business. Founded in November, now seeking $2B valuation. 'first conceived of as a crypto company but pivoted as AI took over Silicon Valley'  -- wsj.com/tech/ai/a-pete…

Europa Clipper, launching Oct 2024, reaches Europa (Jupiter) in 2030, *may* be able to detect life if life is there. Should it do so I will find it much less surprising than if we have AGI by then despite what NVIDIA CEO might predict. Same for 2040, 2050, or any 20xx.…

When the Boeing 707 first flew 66 years ago it looked wildly different from the first crewed powered Wright Flyer from just 54 years before that. Today, post Concorde, *all* our commercial jets look pretty much like a 707 with engines hanging from two wings pointing out from a…

I always find Melanie Mitchell's writing to be incredibly clear headed and helpful. No exception here. She cuts through much of the hype to fundamental scientific questions that are glossed over by AI hypers (and misunderstood by AI doomers). All thumbs up on this piece.

My brain hurts trying to figure this out. Headline: 'Elon Musk Says It Will Be A Decade Before Most Cars Are Self-Driving — There Is A More 'Immediate Concern' At Hand'. From the guy who has said every year for ten years that self driving will be here by the end of the year, the…

I’ve been around long enough to remember when we were 3 to 5 years away from automating software engineering in the 1970’s. E.g., Waters & Rich.

So far the timing on every prediction about self-driving being around the corner has turned out to be wrong. See my annual dated predictions and updates at rodneybrooks.com/blog for details. I appreciate this update from IEEE Spectrum.

Bad UX = bad product. As often, went to turn vol down on my hearing aids (yeah, 'boomer') & app said I had to load new software right then, making them silent for 10 mins, before I could change vol. Either way, unusable when I needed them, so like not having them. UX is primary.

Sorry, TIME gave me that short link just today, and it doesn't work. Try one of these: content.time.com/time/subscribe… or news.mit.edu/2000/robots-10…

Had forgotten that I had written this back in 2000, soon after my research group had started building humanoid robots (a later company I founded put 1000s of humanoid robots in factories). Trying to decide how well it has stood up over 24 years. ti.me/Wa5ftZ via TIME

There's FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and then there's FOBAWTPALSL (Fear Of Being A Wimpy Techno-Pessimist And Looking Stupid Later). Both drive many questionable tech trends and steer tens of $B's into tar pits.