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

“About not you as the customer, but someone who's in their 80s in a retirement village whose kids have said you're not driving anymore. This gives you the freedom to go to the market”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, your question is when is it going to happen in San Francisco? I say not soon, but Going to be one of, but where it is going to happen is in limited domains. Campuses of various sorts, gated communities, where the other drivers are not arbitrary people. They're people who know about these things. It's been warned about them. And at velocities where it's always safe to stop dead. You can't do that on the freeway. That, I think, we're going to start to see. And they may not be shaped like. Current cars, they may be things like May mobility has those things and various companies have these.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stroller. I assume there's a baby in there The crosswalk's blocked by this cruise vehicle. He gonna do cleverly, I think, he decided not to go in front of the car. But he had to go behind it. He had to get off the crosswalk, out into the intersection Push his baby around this car, which was stopped there and no human driver would have stopped there for that length of time. They would have got out and out of the way. And that's another one of my pet peeves, that safety is being compromised for individuals who didn't sign up for having this happen in their neighborhood. You can say that's an edge case, but”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's a case that I saw outside my house A few weeks ago, about 8 p.m. on a Friday night, it was getting dark, it was before the solstice. It was a cruise vehicle come down the hill, turned right, and stopped dead, covering the crosswalk. Why had it stopped dead? There was a human just two feet from it Now, I just glanced. I knew what was happening. The human, was a woman, was at the door of her car trying to unlock it with one of those things When you don't have a key Thought, oh, she could jump out in front of me any second. A human, I could tell no, she's not going to jump out. She's busy trying to unlock her, she's lost her keys, she's trying to get in the car and it stayed there for. Until I got bored. And so the human driver in there did not take over. But here's the kicker to me. A guy comes down the hill.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly not years from now. Going to be longer if you're allowed to go south and market way longer, unless it's re-engineering.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's always a driver at the moment. Although I have noticed that sometimes the driver does not have the authority to take over without talking to the home office because they will sit there waiting for a long time. And clearly something's going on where the home office is making a decision. So they're, you know, and so you can see whether they've got their hands on the wheel or not. And it's the incident resolution time that gives you some clues.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's take The grid streets of San Francisco north of Market. Okay. Relatively benign environment. The streets are wide. The major problem is delivery trucks stopping everywhere, which has made things more complicated. A taxi system there where Somewhat designated pickup and drop offs, unlike with Uber and Lyft, where you can sort of get to any place and the drivers will figure out how to. Get in there Still a few years away. I live in that area, so I see the self-driving car company's cars multiple ones every day outside cruise. Zook's less often Waymo all the time, and different ones come and go.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back in Cambridgeport I lived in Cambridgeport for a number of years, and the roads are narrow, and getting anywhere is a human driver is incredibly frustrating when you start to put, and people drive the wrong way on one-way streets there. It's just...”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I did put in there that there would be a dedicated self-driving lane on 101 by some year, and I think I was over-optimistic on that one.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't say I was going to make new predictions. I was just going to measure this set of predictions that I made because it was sort of. I was sort of annoyed that everyone could make predictions they didn't come true and everyone forgot. So I said, I should hold myself to a higher standard.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was January 1st 2018. I made these predictions and I said that every January 1st I was going to check back on how my predictions had.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A line there, right? You have to have a line because you over extend and it's demoralizing. But I will say that there's an additional thing here that those words also drive the stock market. And we have because of the way that rich people in the past have manipulated the rubes through investment, we have developed laws about what you're allowed to say and overpromise. There's an area here which”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's been very frustrating. It really pisses me off, I must say. I applaud that. I applaud it. It's the taking and not necessarily the people who are doing the things, but that I keep having to push back against on realistic expectations when these things can become real.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so can I tell you something that's really annoyed me recently? It's really annoyed me that the press and friends of mine on Facebook are going these billionaires and they're space games. You know why are they doing that?”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you are going to miss the magic At the same time, there are people who buy it. Literally pay money for it. And take those words as given.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The technology's coming along and ready, and then he'll go off and Mouth off about other things, which then people go and compete about and try and do and”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's a different argument with Elon. I think SpaceX is an amazing company. On the other hand, in one of my blog posts, I said, what's easy and what's hard? SpaceX, vertical landing rockets. It had been done before grid fins had been done since the 60s. Every Sawyer has them. Reusable space DCX reused those rockets that landed vertically. Those whole insurance industry in place for rocket launchers. There were all sorts of infrastructure. Was doable, it took a great entrepreneur, a great personal expense. He almost drove himself bankrupt doing it. A great belief to do it. Whereas Hyperloop. A whole bunch more stuff that's never been thought about, never been demonstrated. So, my estimation is hyper is a long, lot, long, lot further off. And if I've got a criticism of Of Elon. It's that he doesn't make distinctions between”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's when my harshness is reserved for people who are not doing it, who claim it's just, well, this shows that it's just going to happen.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just get so frustrated. When people make these leaps and tell me that I don't understand. Just from iRobot, which I was co founder of. I don't know the exact numbers now because I haven't, it's 10 years since I stepped off the board, but I believe it's well over 30 million robots cleaning houses from that one company. Now there's lots of other companies. Was that a crazy idea that we had to believe? In 2002, when we released it? Yeah, that was believed that it could be done.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Yeah. Look, his two great runs, great, unbelievable. 1903 first human heavier than air flight. 1969, we land on the moon. That's 60, 60 years. I'm 66 years old. My lifetime, that span of my lifetime. Barely get, you know, flying, I don't know what it was 50 feet the length of the first flight or something. Landing on the moon unbelievable.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That out, you're not here, it's done, you know, it's just, you know, we've solved it. No, we haven't yet. And that's my argument”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that sort of fits with YouTube videos I've seen of people being trapped in the car Buy a red cone on the street. And they do have rescue vehicles that come Then a person gets in and drives it.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although, you know, and I do an annual checkup on this. So as of late last year, they were aiming for hundreds of rides a week, not thousands. And there is no one in the car, but there's certainly safety people in the loop. And it's not clear what the ratio of cars to safety people is.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I don't know the answer to this thing I'm about to pose. But I do notice that on Highway 280 here in the Bay Area, which largely has concrete surface rather than blacktop surface. White lines that are painted there now have black boundaries around them. And my lane drift system in my car would not work without those black boundaries. So, I don't know whether they started doing it to help the lane drift, whether it is an instance of infrastructure following the technology, but my car would not perform as well without that change in the way they paint the line.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My gut feeling tells me it's going to be. Things will speed up when there is engineering of the environment. That's what happened with every other technology.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With long haul trucking being autonomous. I think it makes sense on freeways at night for the trucks to go autonomously. But then how to get onto and off of the freeway? What sort of infrastructure do you need for that? Do you need to have the human in there to do that? Or can you get rid of the human? So I think there's ways to get there, but it's an infrastructure argument Because the long tail of cases Very long, and the acceptance of it will not be at the same level as human drivers.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's engineering that then makes the system safe and makes them acceptable. I think we'll see similar sorts of things happen in the US. What surprised me, I thought wrongly, that we would have special purpose lanes on 101 in the Bay Area, the leftmost lane. So that it would be normal for Teslas or other cars to move into that lane and then say, okay, now it's autonomous and have that dedicated lane. I was expecting movement to that. Five years ago, I was expecting we'd have a lot more movement towards that. We haven't. And it may be because Tesla's been overpromising by saying this, you know, calling this system fully self-driving. I think they may have been gotten there quicker by. Collaborating to change the infrastructure. This is one of the problems.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But Getting the closest thing. And I have, I have often gone on a fully autonomous train in Japan, one that goes out to that fake island in the middle of Tokyo Bay. I forget the name of the. And what do you see when you look at that? What do you see when you go to a fully autonomous train in an airport? It's not like regular trains. At every station, there's a double set of doors so that there's a door of the train and there's a door off the platform. And it's really visible in this Japanese one because it goes out in amongst buildings. The whole track is built so that people can't climb onto it.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's either 15 or 16. Most of them are in airports. There's a few that go about two that go about five kilometers out of airports. When is the first fully autonomous train system for mass transit expected to operate fully autonomously? No driver in a U.S. city. Expected to operate in 2017 in Honolulu. It's delayed, but they will get there. But by the way, was originally going to be autonomous here in the Bay Area.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First into our daily lives, we completely rebuilt our cities and we changed all the laws. Jaywalking was That was pushed by the car company so that people would stay off the road so there wouldn't be deaths from pedestrians getting hit. We completely changed the structure of our cities and had these foul smelling things, you know, everywhere around us. And now you see pushback in cities like Barcelona is really trying to exclude cars, et cetera. So I think that to get to self-driving, we will. Large adoption, it's not going to be just take the current situation, take out the driver and put the same car doing the same stuff because the end case is too many. Here's an interesting question. How many fully autonomous train systems do we have in the US?”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a few things. In the US, I think that the death rate from motor vehicle accidents is about 35,000 a year Which is an outrageous number. Not outrageous compared to COVID deaths, but there is no rationality. And that's part of the thing. People have said engineers say to me, well, if we cut down the number of deaths by 10% by having autonomous driving, that's going to be great. Everyone will love it. And my prediction is that if autonomous vehicles kill more than 10 people a year, they'll be screaming and hollering. Even though 35,000 people a year have been killed by human drivers. It's not rational. It's a different set of expectations. And that will probably continue. So, there's that aspect of it. The other aspect of it is that. When we introduced new technology, we often change the rules of the game. So when we introduced cars,”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suspect that can't go all the way, and one reason is without new cameras that have a dynamic range closer to the human eye, because human eye has incredible dynamic range, and we make use of that dynamic range in its 11 orders of magnitude or some crazy number like that. The cameras don't have that, which is why you see the bad cases where the sun on a white thing and it blinds in a way it wouldn't blind a person. I think there's a bunch of things to think about before you say this is so good it's just going to work. And I'll come out of it from multiple angles. And I know you've got a lot of time.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My point is that what I see happening again is someone sees a demo and they overgeneralize and say, we must be almost there. We've been working on it for 35 years.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, 1987 in Munich At the Bundesvar. So they had it running in 1987. When do you think, and Elon has said he's going to do this, when do you think we'll have the first car drive coast to coast in the US hands off the wheel, hands off the wheel, feet off the pedals, coast to coast.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“360 view synthesized as though it's above the car, and it is unbelievable. I got this car in January. It's the longest I've ever owned a car without digging it. So it's better than me. Wow. And me and it together better. So I'm not saying technology's bad or not useful. Here's my point. It's a replay of the same movie. So maybe you've seen me ask this question before. But when When did the first car go over fifty five miles an hour for over Over 10 miles On a public freeway with other traffic around driving completely autonomously. When did that happen?”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, when I'm going in close to something in the park, I get this beautiful, gorgeous top-down view of the world. I am impressed up the wazoo of how registered and metrical that is”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first, let me say I really like the car I came here today. 2021 Model Mercedes E450. Am impressed by the Machine And other things. I'm impressed by what it can do. I'm really impressed with many aspects of it. And”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a surprising It's been a really hard problem. So that was a surprise how many it gets raped. So far, the usefulness is limited because you don't know which ones are right or not. And now they've come out with a thing in the last few weeks, which is trying to get a useful tool out of it. And they may well do it.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so if we're going to make the distinction between surprise and usefulness, I have to explain. I would say alpha fold One of the problems at the moment with Alpha Fold is, you know, it gets a lot of them right, which is a surprise to me because they're a really complex thing, but you don't know which ones it gets right, which then is a bit of a problem. Now, they've come out with a reason.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll come back to connections But I do want to say too many people make the mistake of seeing that magic and thinking, well, it will just continue. But each one of those is a hard-fought battle for the next step, the next step”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I knew how it worked. I was probably nine years old, and I built a thing that. Was a game where you take turns and taking matches from a pile and either the one who takes the last one or the one who doesn't take the last one wins, I forget. And so it was pretty easy to build that out of wires and nails and little coils that were like plugging in the number and a few light bulbs. The one I was proud of, I was 12 when I built a thing out of old telephone switchboard switches that could always win at tic-tac-toe. That was a much harder circuit to design. But again, it was just Was no active components, it was just three position switches empty x, zero, and nine of them and a light bulb on, which move it wanted next. Human would go and move that”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ice Cube trail was on, but I built other machines, and what I like to build was machines that could beat adults at a game, and adults couldn't beat my machine. Yes, you were like a”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can I tell you my disease in this way? Which actually is closer to what you're saying. So as a child, you know, I was building various, I called them computers, they weren't general purpose computers.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better robots You know, I'm putting my bet on Still missing a whole lot. Lot and why would I say that? Well, in these games, they're all 100% information games. But each of these systems is a very short description of the current state, which is different from registering and perception in the world. Gets back to our of X paradox.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outlined on chess playing, outlined the learning mechanism that Arthur Samuel used, and they had met in 1956. I assume there was some communication, but I don't know that for sure. But Arthur Samuel had been a vacuum tube engineer getting reliability of vacuum tubes and then had overseen the first transistorized computers at IBM. And in those days, before you shipped a computer, you ran it for a week to get early failures. So he had this whole farm of computers running random code for hours and hours for each computer. He had a whole bunch of them. So he ran his chess learning program with self-play. On IBM's production line, he had more computation available to him than anyone else in the world. And then he was able to produce a chess playing program, I mean a checkers playing program that could beat the world champion.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so that's just Using a different learning technique. Samuel in the early 60s, and he was the first person to use machine learning had a program that could beat the world champion at Checkers. And that at the time was considered amazing. By the way, Arthur Samuel had some fantastic advantages. Do you want to hear Arthur Samuel's advantages? Yes, please. Two things. One, he was at the 1956 AI conference. I knew Arthur later in life. He was at Stanford when I was a grad student there. He wore a tie and a jacket every day. The rest of us didn't. Delightful man, delightful man. It turns out Claude Shannon in a 1950 scientific American article”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You didn't like it when I referred to Donald Mickey's 1961 paper? There in the second part of it. A year later, they had self play on an electronic computer at Tic Tac-Toe, okay? It's not as, but it learned to play Tic-Tac-Toe through self-play. Learned to play optimally.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It gets better performance under some measure. Some set of conditions at that thing. And most of these learning algorithms, learning systems, fail when you change the conditions just a little bit in a way that humans don't. I was at The Alpha Go had just come out. And I said, what would have happened if you'd given it a 21 by 21 board instead of a 19 by 19 board? They said, fail totally. But a human player would actually, you know, would actually be able to play a game.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there's so many different forms of learning. So many different forms. You know, I learned my way around the city. I learnt to play chess. I learnt Latin. I learned to ride a bicycle. All of those are, you know, a very different capabilities. And if someone has a In the old days, people would write a paper about learning something. Now the corporate press office puts out a press release about Company X is leading the world because they have a system that can.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, Came across this 1946 report that, and I'd seen this as a kid in one of those books that my mother had given me actually, 1946 report, which pitted Someone with an abacus against an electronic calculator and he beat the electronic calculator. So there at that point was, well, humans are still better than machines are calculating. Are you surprised today that a machine can do a billion floating point operations a second and you're puzzling for minutes through one? So, you know.”
2021-09-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #217 – Rodney Brooks: Robotics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source