A leading technologist deflates hype over robots

It may come to your attention that we are inundated with technological hype.

- MICHAEL HILTZIK COLUMNIST

MAKING a robot that seems “as intelligent, as attentive... as a dog ... is so much harder than most people imagine,” Rodney Brooks writes.

(PAT GREENHOUSE Boston Globe)

Self-driving cars, human-like robots and AI chatbots all have been the subject of sometimes outlandishly exaggerated predictions and promises.So we should be thankful for Rodney Brooks, an Australian-born technologist who has made it one of his missions in life to deflate the hyperbole about these and other supposedly world-changing technologies offered by promoters, marketers and true believers.

As I've written before, Brooks is nothing like a Luddite. Quite the contrary: He was a co-founder of IRobot, the maker of the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, though he stepped down as the company’s chief technology officer in 2008 and left its board in 2011. He’s a co-founder and chief technology officer of RobustAI, which makes robots for factories and warehouses, and former director of computer science and artificial intelligence labs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 2018, Brooks published a post of dated predictions about the course of major technologies and promised to revisit them annually for 32 years, when he would be 95. He focused on technologies that were then — and still are — the cynosures of public discussion, including self-driving cars, human space travel, AI bots and humanoid robots.

“Having ideas is easy,” he wrote in that introductory post. “Turning them into reality is hard. Turning them into being deployed at scale is even harder.”

Brooks slotted his predictions into three pigeonholes: NIML, for “not in my lifetime,” NET, for “no earlier than” some specified date, and “by some [specified] date.”

On Jan. 1 he published his eighth annual predictions scorecard. He found that over the years “my predictions held up pretty well, though overall I was a little too optimistic.”