iRobot Founder: Don't Believe the (AI and Robotics) Hype

Summary

Every so often, we find ourselves in the middle of a massive technological wave that starts to upend our presumptions and our ideas about the past, present, and future. These waves come with excess—optimism, excitement, hype, and speculation. Since non-believers don’t invent the future and speculators are always on a hustle, I often turn to practitioners to get a fix on the coordinates of reality. It has always helped me maintain a sense of pragmatic optimism when the rest of the world around me seems either overtly hyperbolic or depressingly pessimistic. We are in the middle of another massive technological wave, thanks to generative artificial intelligence and its offshoot, robotics. A tanker load of money is being poured into these two areas, and it has come with increasingly breathless promotional activity. It warrants a reality check. For that, I turned to Rodney Brooks, who has spent decades in both arenas. The Australian-born Brooks was a Professor of Robotics at MIT and former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has founded three companies: iRobot (maker of the Roomba), Rethink Robotics, and now Robust.AI, which now builds warehouse automation robots. He is an academic who entered the startup arena and hasn’t left it since. We recently connected for a conversation about robotics, artificial intelligence, and the future. Contrary to many, he believes humans will do just fine in a world filled with robots and AI. He poured cold water on the humanoid robot hype. He also said that if you look at the computer and internet revolutions, the AI revolution is going to take a lot longer than most think. “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,” he said. He painted a more pragmatic yet optimistic vision ahead. He warned that humanoid hype is creating a lot of...