Comment by Isamu
8 years ago
Since he brings up a number of Elon Musk initiatives, it seems to relate in part to the public conversation that Elon has been having about AI.
For those who don't know Rodney Brooks, he was faculty at MIT for years, co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, where he is working on collaborative robotics (robots that can work with humans without maiming them.)
It kind of gives you a sense of the sort of messaging that Dr. Brooks doesn't have a lot of respect for. I have big fan of Brooks' work from his MIT days on, it is very practical robotics which has done things that others haven't (Ghengis, the walking robot, really was a revolution in terms of mobility[1]).
But hype cycle or not, it would have been interesting to see where he had placed reusable rocketry in 2007. Would it have been 'by 2020 it will be common' or would it have been 'won't happen, the existing rockets work quite well and there isn't enough gain to justify the additional work.'
While Brooks picks on Elon a lot, the core of his essay is what makes it 'easy' to predict something will happen versus what makes it 'hard'. And I think he doesn't give enough credit to the fact that even if something is possible it needs a catalyst to get it to precipitate out of the realm of possibility into the realm of reality.
I think Dr. Brooks has a blind spot on space challenges, but I enjoyed his AI predictions. Of course it is entirely possible I just want easy access to space more than he does :-)
[1] I'm guessing @animats will disagree with that assessment :-) But he and Dr. Brooks approached the problem of inverse kinematics very differently and both got good results.
> he and Dr. Brooks approached the problem of inverse kinematics very differently
Could you expand on this? Thanks.
I like this essay, it seems to condense a lot of his thinking over some time.