YouSaid · the spoken record

Rodney Brooks

lines on the record: 146
first: 2021-09-03
most recent: 2021-09-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You know, my atheism tells me it's just random, but I want to understand the way random, and it's what I talk about in this book, how order comes from disorder.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I hope is that I actually finish writing this book. There's one person who reads it. And see something about changing the way they're thinking, and that leads to the next.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It feels a lot closer So in my blog with my predictions, my sort of pushback against that was I said, Going to review these every year for 32 years. That puts me into my Mid 90s. So, you know, it was my”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gotta say, when COVID hit. Did because we did in the early days, we didn't know how bad it was going to be. That made me work on my book harder for a while. And then I'd started this company and now I'm doing full-time, more than full-time at the company. So the books on hold. But I do want to finish this book”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so many people ask me for advice and have asked for, and I talk to a lot of people all the time. There is no one way. Know there's a lot of pressure. Who produced papers. That will be acceptable and be published Maybe I come from an age where I could be a rebel against that and still succeed. Maybe it's harder today. But I think it's important not to get too caught up. With what everyone else is doing. Well, it depends on what you want of life. If you want to have real impact, you have to be ready to fail. Lot of times, so you have to make a lot of unsafe decisions. And the only way to make that work is to keep doing it for a long time. And then one of them will be work out. And so that will make something successful. Or you just may end up not having a Having a lousy career. I mean, it's certainly possible.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we figured out it was a particular chip, 7400 series chip, which was socketed. We popped it out. We put a replacement in, put it back in, smoke comes out because we put it in backwards because we were so nervous Canute standing over.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know him now But let me tell you my Donald Canoe story. So, you know, besides analysis of algorithms, he's well known for writing tech. Which was in LaTeX, which is the academic publishing system. So he did that at the AI lab. And he would do it. He would work overnight at the AI lab. One day the mainframe computer went down A guy named Robert Poore was there. He led his PhD at the Media Lab at MIT. And he was an engineer. And so he and I tracked down what were the problem was. It was one of this big refrigerator size or washing machine size disc drives had veiled. And that's what brought the whole system down. So we've got panels pulled off and we're pulling circuit cards out. And Donald Knuth, who's a really tall guy, walks in and he's looking down and says, when will it be fixed? Because he wanted to get back to writing his”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I've had to email every day since 1977. The host field was only eight bits Places, but we can send email to other people at a few places. So that was pretty exciting to be in that world so different from what the rest of the world knew.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me tell you what really The joy memories are about having access to technology before anyone else has seen it. So, you know, I got to Stanford in 1977 and we had terminals that could show live video on them. Digital sound system. We had Xerox graphics printer. We could print. It wasn't like a typewriter bull hitting with characters. It print arbitrary things only in one bit black or white, but you get arbitrary pictures. This was science fiction sort of stuff at MIT. The list machines, which were the first personal computers and they were cost $100,000 each. I got there early enough in the day. I got one for the day. Couldn't stand up.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm not saying they're actually leading. I'm not saying that the universities are leading. But I don't think those companies are leading in general because we saw this incredible spike in attendees at Europe's. As I said in my January 1st review this year for 2020, 2020 will not be remembered as a watershed year for machine learning or AI. There was nothing surprising happened anyway, unlike when deep learning hit ImageNet. That was a shake. There's a lot more people writing papers, but the papers are fundamentally boring.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would take a slightly different approach or a different answer. I'll come back to Facebook in a minute. But I think those other places are Following a dream of One of the founders, and I'm not sure that it's well founded the dream, and I'm not sure that it's going to have the impact. He believes it is.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, and there's the publication and all that. And often, you know, although these places say they publish But I think, for instance, NetNet, I think Google buying those eight or nine robotics companies was bad for the field because it locked those people away. Didn't have to make the company succeed anymore, lock them away for years, and then Sort of all friddled away.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, I mean, some of the companies are more guilty than others of paying. Fabulous salaries to some of the highest producers and then just You never hear from them again. They're not allowed to give public talks. They're sort of locked away. And it's sort of like collecting Hollywood stars or something. And they're not allowed to make movies anymore. I own them.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I should have asked Marvin why he and Seymour Pappet came down so hard on neural networks in nineteen sixty eight in their book Perceptrons because Marvin's PhD thesis was on neural networks.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lick Lida. I would ask him, you know, he had the vision for humans and computers working together and he really founded that at DAPA and he gave the money to MIT, which started Project Mac in 1963. And I would have talked to him about what the successes were, what the failures were, what he saw as progress, etc. I would have asked him more questions about that because now I could use it in my book. But I think it's lost. It's lost forever. A lot of the motivations are lost.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me tell you first a disappointment in myself. You know, as I've been researching this book and so many of the players were active in the 50s and 60s, I knew many of them. When they're older, and I didn't ask them all the questions now, I wish I had asked, I'd sit with them at our Thursday lunches, which we had a faculty lunch, and I didn't ask him so many questions that now I wish I had”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A woman trying to be a man would say, Oh, I lined him up, we had wars, we had battles, and the man just being announced. I stumped on him. I burnt So, you know That's what the Turing test with computers has become. What's the trick question?”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we did that at the lab. We had, you know, you'd go and type and the thing would come back and you had to tell whether it was a man or a woman. And one of the one man came up with a question that he could ask, which was always a dead giveaway over whether the other person was really a man or a woman. He would ask them, did you have green plastic toy soldiers as a kid? Yeah. What do you do with them?”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, because again, Turing, if you read the paper, Turing wasn't saying this is a good test. He was using it as a rhetorical device to argue that if you can't tell the difference between a computer and a person, you must say that the computer's thinking because you can't tell the difference when it's thinking. You can't say something different. What it has become as this sort of weird game of fooling people. At the AI Lab in the late 80s, we had this thing that still goes on called the AI Olympics. And one of the events we had one year was The original imitation game as Turing talked about, because it starts by saying, can you tell whether it's a man or a woman?”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's none of that. And there's no sort of intention of these systems that they have any goal in life, even if it's to be happy. They don't even have a semblance of that. Now, I'm not saying this can't be done. I'm just saying I think this is why we don't feel that way about them. That's a sort of a minimal requirement. If you want the sort of interaction you're talking about, it's a minimal requirement, whether it's going to be sufficient, I don't know. We haven't seen it yet. We don't know what it.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, you know, we saw Weisenbaum back in the 60s with his program Eliza. Being shocked at how much people would talk to Eliza. And I remember in the 70s typing, you know, stuff to... Liza to see what it would come back with. You know, I think right now this is a thing that Amazon's been trying to improve with the like. So there is no continuity of topic. There's not Can't refer to what we talked about yesterday. It's not the same as talking to a person where there seems to be an ongoing existence which changes.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything changes. Everything grows together. So surprisingly, it might be surprising to you or might not, I think the best movie about this stuff. Bicentennial Man And what was happening there? It was schmolte. But what was happening there? As the robot was trying to become more human, the humans were adopting the technology of the robot and changing their bodies. So there was a convergence happening. So we will not be the same. You know, we're already talking about genetically modifying our babies. There's more and more stuff happening around that. We will want to modify ourselves even more for all sorts of things. We put all sorts of technology in our bodies to improve it, you know. I've got things in my ears so that I can sort of hear you.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for some people, maybe not, but I. Know, I, I, I, Know as humans, as we think about the future, we always try to, and this is the premise of most science fiction movies, you've got the world just as is today and you change one thing. That's not how, and it's the same with a self driving car. You change one thing.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're a long way from that. I think we're a long, long way. I think Blade Runner had the time scale totally wrong.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, the screen was also used during codeless programming, where you're taught by demonstration that showed you what its understanding of the task was. So it had two roles. Some customers hated it, and so we made it so that when the robot was running, it could be showing graphs of what was happening and not show the eyes. Other people, and some surprised me who they were, were saying, well, this one doesn't look as human as the old one. We like the human looking. Those mixed bag”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was tough. I said I was never going to start another company. I was pleased that everyone liked what we did so much, that the teams hired by three companies within a week. Everyone had a job in one of these three companies. Some stayed in their same desks because another company came in and rented the space So I felt good about people not being out on the street.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had buyers This thing called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, Scythius. And that had previously been invoked twice around where the government could stop foreign money coming into a US company based on defense requirements. Went through due diligence multiple times. We were going to get acquired, but every consortium had Chinese money in it. And all the bankers would say at the last minute, you know, this isn't going to get past Siphius. And the investors would go away. And then we had two buyers. So we're about to run out of money. Two buyers. And one used heavy-handed legal stuff with the other one. Said they were going to take it and pay more, dropped out when we were out of cash and then bought the assets at 1 30th of the price they had offered a week before. Was a tough week.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sort of give ups made by a company whose name I can't remember right now, but it's the name of the gearbox. But it's got talk ripple in it. Now there was an extra two years of solving the problem of doing the force with the torque ripple. So we had to do the Thing we had avoided The plastic gearboxes, we end up having to do, the robot was now overpriced and they.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can move it around, but suppose you can you see that? Suppose you want to This thing is a precise thing that's got to fit here in this right Under position control, you had fixtured where this is, you know where this is precisely. You just move And it goes there. If force control, you would do something like slidle over here until we feel that and slide it in there. That's how a human gets precision. Use forced feed Get the things to mate rather than Go straight to it. Couldn't convince our customers who were in factories and were used to thinking about things a certain way. They wanted it. So then we said, okay, we're going to build an arm that gives you that. So now we ended up building a $35,000 robot with one arm with... What are they called?”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only people who are going to look at that were people who had arms in factories because that was somewhat cheaper for two arms than arms in factories. But they were used to 0.1 millimeter reproducibility of motion. And certain velocities. And I kept saying, but that's not what we're giving you. You don't need position repeatability. Use force control like a human does. No, but we want that repeatability. We want that repeatability. All the other robots have that repeatability. Why don't you have that repeatability?”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could use something called serious elastic actuators. We embedded them in there. We could measure forces. We knew when we hit something, et cetera. The control engineers were saying, yeah, but this is torque ripple because these plastic gears, they're not great gears. And there's this ripple and trying to do force control around this ripple is so hard. And I'm not going to name names, but I remember one of the mechanical engineers saying, we'll just build a metal gearbox with spur gears, and it'll take six weeks. We'll be done, problem solved. Two years later, we got the Spur gearbox working. Cost reduced at every possible way we could But now the price went up to, and then the CEO at the time said, well, we have to have two arms, not one arm. So our first robot product, Baxter, now cost $25,000.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'd said that as a target for the company that we were going to build $3,000 robots with force feedback that was safe for people to be around. Was my goal. And we built, so we started in 2008, and we had prototypes built of plastic, plastic gearboxes. And a $3,000, I was saying, we're going to go after not the people who already have robot arms in factories, the people who would never have a robot arm. We're going to go after a different market. So we don't have to meet their expectations. And so we're going to build it out of plastic. It doesn't have to have a 35,000 hour lifetime. It's going to be so cheap that it's OPEX, not CapEx. And so we had a prototype that worked reasonably well. Control engineers were complaining about these plastic gearboxes with a beautiful little planetary gearbox”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm most proud of that. I completely let. Myself be talked out of. I want to do, and you know, you've always got, you know, I can't replay the tape. I can't replay it. Maybe if I'd been stronger, and I remember the day, I remember the exact meeting”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that humans could retask them without writing code. And now that's sort of become an expectation for a lot of other little companies and big companies are advertising.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most proud of the fact that we got robots out of the cage in factories that was safe, absolutely safe for people and robots to be next to each other.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's very hard to get there without a lot of capital. And we're starting to see, you know, fair chunks of capital for some robotics companies, Series B's, I just saw one yesterday for $80 million, I think it was for covariant. But it can take real money to get into these things and you may fail along the way. I certainly failed at Rethink Robotics. And we lost 150 million dollars in capital there.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and I think there's a real market pull for them because of the demographic inversion. Who's going to do all the stuff for the older people? There's too many, I'm leading here. Be too many of us But we don't have capable enough robots to make that economic argument at this point. Do I expect that that will happen? Yes, I expect it will happen. But I got to tell you, we introduced the Roomba in 2002, and I stayed another nine years. We were always trying to find what the next home robot would be. Still today, the primary product of 20 years, almost 20 years later, 19 years later, the primary product is still Arumba. So iRobot hasn't found the next one.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't, you know, because I'm still starting robot companies. I'm not making any such predictions in my own mind. I'm not thinking about a trillion dollar company. And by the way, I don't think in the 90s anyone was thinking that Apple would ever be a trillion dollar company. So these are very hard to predict.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expectations of what can be delivered. Mispric What a customer thinks is a valid price is not rational necessarily. Expectations of customers and Just the Sheer hardness of getting people to adopt a new technology. And I've suffered from all three. I've had more failures and successes in terms of companies. I've suffered from all three.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we never did think that. We had had 14 failed business models up till 2002, and then we had two winners the same year. No, and then I remember the board. Because by this time we had some venture capital in. Board went along with us building. Robots for aiming at the Christmas 2002 market and We went three times over what they authorized and built 70,000 of them and sold them all. That first because we released on September 18th and they were all sold by Christmas. So it was. We were Gutsy, but”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd forgotten it had this much RAM. It had 512 bytes of RAM. And it was in our budget and it had all the capabilities we needed.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they were building their innovations were to build stripped down 6802s. 6802 was what was in an Apple I get rid of half the silicon and still have it be viable and I'd previously got some of those for some earlier failed products of iRobot and that was in Hong Kong going to all these companies that built them gaming in the current sense there were these handheld games that you would play or birthday cards because we had about a 50 cent budget for computation so I'm tracking from place to place looking at their chips Looking at what they'd removed, they're interrupt handling is too weak for a general purpose. So I was going deep technical detail. And then I found this one from a company called Windbond, which had...”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was another home cleaning robot at the time. It was the Electrolux trillobyte, which sold for 2,000 euros. And to us, that was not going to be a consumer product. So we had reason to believe that $200 was a thing that people would buy at. That was our aim. But that meant we had, you know, that's on the shelf making profit. That means the cost of goods has to be minimal. So I find all these emails of me going, you know, I'd be in Taipei for an MIT meeting. I'd stay a few extra days. I'd go down to Shinshu and talk to these little tiny companies, lots of little tiny companies outside of TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, which let all these little companies be fabulous. They didn't have to have their own fab so they could.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ready to do anything. But I was. Was a wacky lawsuit that I got posed for not too many years ago. And I was the only one who had emailed from the 1990s. And no one in the company had it. So I went and went through my email. And it reminded me of... Know the joy of what we were doing. And what was I doing? What was I doing at the time we were building? Building the Rumba. One of the things was we had this incredibly tight budget because we wanted to put it on the shelves at $200.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I make the joke that I started out life as a pure mathematician and turned into a vacuum cleaner salesman. So if you're going to be an entrepreneur, be ready for it.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was because we had had about 6,500 robots deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, teleopt, but with intelligence, dealing with roadside bombs. So we had, I think it was at that time, nine years of in-field experience with the robots in harsh conditions, whereas the Japanese robots, which were getting, you know, this goes back to what annoys me so much, getting all the hype. Look at that. Look at that Honda robot, it can walk Oh, the future's here. Couldn't do a thing. They weren't deployed, but we had deployed in really harsh conditions for a long time. And so we're able to do something very positive in a very bad situation.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite proud of there, which may be a surprise, but I was still on the board when this happened. It was March 2011. And we sent robots to Japan, and they were used to help shut down the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was everything was, I've been this since I was there in 2014, and the robots, some of the robots were still there. I was proud that we were able to do that. Why were we able to do that? And people have said, well, you know, Japan is so good at robot”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Waymo before it was called Waymo discovered that they had to do that at four-way intersections. They had to nudge forward to give the cue that they were going to go. Otherwise, the other drivers would just beat them all the time.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, so here's, and I talk about it in one of the articles or blog posts that I wrote, and people have told me, one of my co-workers has told me he does this. He tortures autonomously driven vehicles and pedestrians will... Torture them. Now, you know, once they realize that putting one foot off the curb makes the car think that they might walk into the road, kids, teenagers will be doing that all the time.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I ask you when have you had to decide which person shall I kill? No, you put the brakes on and you break as hard as you can. Not”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source