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Rodney Brooks’s Three Laws of Robotics
- xg15 2y agoEarlier today we got the "Taco Bell Distinguished Professor", now here is the "Panasonic Professor Emeritus of Robotics" (at MIT no less). When did academia stop to even pretend it was independent of commercial interests?
- optimalsolver 2y agoBrawndo Center For Agricultural Studies
- EGreg 2y agoBut does it have electrolytes?
- Avicebron 2y agoIt's what the plants crave!
- Mistletoe 2y agohttps://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/index.php?title=Subsidized_Time https://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/in... DFW unfortunately got this so right about our future.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> years are referred to by the name of their corporate sponsor Many ancient cultures referenced years in relation to their rulers, e.g. 30 BCE being the year of the consulship of Caesar and Crassus [1]. DFW is cleverly recyling the corporate overlord meme. [1] https://www.trismegistos.org/calendar/cal_period_listconsuls.php https://www.trismegistos.org/calendar/cal_period_listconsuls...
- shiroiushi 2y agoIt's still like that here in Japan. The current year is 令和 (reiwa) 6, since the current emperor has been reigning for 5 years.
- mcmoor 2y agoMilitary and Industry is the best environment for a scientist. Wild enough to reward creativity but harsh enough to not let frauds fester for too long. The most optimal place to conduct mass experiments for scientific method.
- xg15 2y agoThe environment is good, the problem is that the acquired knowledge then stays under wraps and is used to accumulate power for the host organisation, instead of advancing the knowledge of everyone.
- lawn 2y agoThat's hardly the worst that could happen. Consider a Tobacco Co Professor that researches the effects of smoking. What do you do when you find that smoking is even worse than thought? Do you publish the results, knowing that if you do then your professor job vanishes? Or do you withhold your findings, or try to paint them in a more favorable light?
- shiroiushi 2y ago>harsh enough to not let frauds fester for too long. Didn't the US military spend decades investigating ESP?
- mcmoor 2y agoIs it actually decades? Also they tried, they find it doesn't work, they stopped. Sounds like a good experiment.
- snapcaster 2y agoI trust commercial interests more than academic. At least their motives are legible
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> When did academia stop to even pretend it was independent of commercial interests? Why is this worse than [rich family] Emeritus?
- sgt101 2y agoI do not think Rodney Brooks has ever made any assertion that he is free of commercial interest!
- bell-cot 2y agoI'd say >140 years ago, based on: > Stanford University (officially Leland Stanford Junior University) [...] was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford, the eighth governor of and then-incumbent senator from California, and his wife, Jane, ... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University
- i_am_proteus 2y agoEndowed professorships such as these are usually an arrangement in which: - The sponsor gifts the department enough to sustain a faculty member, often salary + research funds, indefinitely (i.e., capital such that the interest pays the bills) - The department 'names' the professorship That's it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- xg15 2y agoI'd be curious how indefinite that "indefinitely" really is. But I think the usual corruption risks apply in either case. In the scenario you describe, it's not clear why a commercial sponsor would be motivated to do such a deal. The only direct rewards for the sponsor would be "ad space" in the department name and maybe some sort of reputational bonus for "funding science". But I don't see why a brand like Taco Bell would benefit from either one, especially if the needed investment is massive. Also, even if there are no obvious conditions to the deal, this always risks inducing some degree of self-censorship on the side of the institution: Someone at the institution will think about what they can do to be attractive for more deals like this - and they'll probably be less welcoming for research that might drive away potential future sponsors.
- jvanderbot 2y agoindefinitely means one-time grant which is invested, and the returns on investment pay the salary of a grad student or part of a professor's salary. So yeah, it's indefinite. These profs still have to get funds to get grad students or lab space, and still have to teach to maintain certain benefits. In later years, the endowed chair is essentially a chair in the closet as their research and teaching activity tapers off before retirement. My spouse was an education-institution major gift fundraiser, so she dealt with endowed professorships, eternal grad student fellowhips, recurring scholarships, and the like. Generally, you can attach as many or as little strings to the gift as you want, but for most things there's no way to enforce those strings after the gift is made and the financial engine starts producing.
- gauravnews12 2y ago[flagged]
- eleveriven 2y agoI recently played the game Detroit: Become Human. The game pushed me to think about many things. I wonder if I will live to see those times? Will such times even come?
- voidUpdate 2y agoYou already do live in times where people are discriminated against for things they can't control, they're just not robots
- ponector 2y agoBut that was always the case. It is the base of humanity, unfortunately.
- smokel 2y agoWhat could be the main cause for things being so hard to cross over from simulation to reality? Should we invest some more in stochastic programming to handle all the little quirks that cannot be modeled perfectly? Or is the major issue that robots must work together with humans, which are already pretty complex from a biological perspective, let alone from a sociological or historical one.
- JohnKemeny 2y agoRelevant: the mythical non-roboticist (114 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39707356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39707356
- teractiveodular 2y agoException handling. If your web server throws a 500, you have a problem. If your autonomous vehicle throws a 500 and is now blocking a major intersection, everybody has a problem and you can't just hit refresh.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> If your web server throws a 500, you have a problem. If your autonomous vehicle throws a 500 and is now blocking a major intersection, everybody has a problem and you can't just hit refresh. This isn't unique to robots, e.g. Crowdstrike.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> What could be the main cause for things being so hard to cross over from simulation to reality? Sensor noise? (And/or quality?) We're decent at building world models that don't permit impossible behaviour. And we're decent at training agents in those world models. What's unpredictable is how a sensor in the real world will map to a world model.
- sgt101 2y agoSimulations are closed, the real world is open. Weird things happen in the real world. They happen all the time and we expect them to happen and hardly notice when they do. Simulations approximate the model that humans use to reason about the world, but we just ignore all the oddness and can't articulate the oddness until it's made explicit by some failure.
- stevenwoo 2y agoThe author ends with the thought that a robot that has a stop button is a failure but his most famous product for consumers, Roomba, has such a button. Does he talk elsewhere about this? He makes a paragraph about robots that interfere with ordinary people as bad and references autonomous vehicles in San Francisco. He has a whole series starting here https://rodneybrooks.com/autonomous-vehicles-2023-part-i/ https://rodneybrooks.com/autonomous-vehicles-2023-part-i/ or with no comments! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37971352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37971352
- pif 2y ago> If a customer ever feels the need to hit that button, then the people who have built and sold the robot have failed. He is not against the button per se: it's "just" that it should never be necessary! Removing the button would require enormous trust from the customer (very hard to obtain) and from the developers (impossible to obtain, because they know!), apart from legal aspects concerning personal safety.
- voxic11 2y agoI don't think he means having or using a stop button means the robot is necessarily a failure overall. He just means that every time such a stop button is used it represents that the robot still has room for improvement. It has failed in that particular instance but that doesn't necessarily mean it not overall useful.
- stevenwoo 2y agoThat’s a good nuance I overlooked when reading too fast.
- doctorpangloss 2y agoAre self driving cars more like vaccines, which are expected to harm some people but because of how important they are, there is finality and fixed structure to justice against them? Maybe. Or are they more like regular cars, which kill people all the time, including occupants who weren’t driving like the children of the driver, and everything about justice regarding them depends on random shit and vibes? Rodney Brooks is a great businessman. MIT, and Stanford and Harvard for that matter, missed the boat on autonomous vehicles - along with the other groundbreaking tech at the top of the S&P500, large language models and GLP-1 agonists. What has come of the last Ivy League breakthrough, CRISPR? When I was there, there was an energy that autonomous vehicles were 50 years away, not the 5 they turned out to be in reality. The pessimism was pervasive.
- pif 2y ago> Some of the vehicles were notorious for blocking intersections Letting self-proclaimed autonomous vehicles use public roads was so idiotic that you need a new word coined for those who didn't see it immediately.
- shiroiushi 2y agoIt's not any more idiotic than allowing untrained people to drive cars on those same roads.
- pif 2y agoWhich is, indeed, not allowed!
- shiroiushi 2y agoHuh? It's absolutely the norm in the USA. There's no real driver training or testing there at all.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- josefresco 2y ago"If a customer ever feels the need to hit that button, then the people who have built and sold the robot have failed." I understand the point, but there are already many electronic devices (robots?) ostensibly made to help me including my vehicle that sometimes need to be "strangled to death" in order to reboot and fix whatever issue was plaguing it. I say strangled to death because typically power buttons are software controlled and don't respond to just a quick press. My response? A shrug because it's very common. Why would people respond to a failing "robot" in another way? I get if it's caring for your grandmother but vacuuming your carpet? I've had to hit the "kill switch" on my: TV/iPad/iPhone/PC, ancient clothes washing machine, modern dishwasher, router/modem, TV etc.
- SoftTalker 2y ago> I've had to hit the "kill switch" on my: > > TV/iPad/iPhone/PC, ancient clothes washing machine, modern dishwasher, router/modem, TV etc. And this is why these technologies, while improving productivity and saving time in many cases, are sources of continual stress in our lives. I'm sitting enjoying a pleasant evening at home and suddenly I have to get up and reboot the router. As I'm waiting for it to restart and settle down my mind is seething with visions of smashing it with a hammer and getting it out of my life forever, like the printer scene in Office Space. Now my blood pressure is up and the evening is distrupted. "The worst thing for its acceptance by people that a robot can do in the workplace is to make their jobs or lives harder"
- exe34 2y agoit's a great opportunity to practise patience! there's a street food seller in my town, that I only go to if there's a crowd (not a queue, a crowd). he doesn't believe in serving each customer in turn, no, he'll take everybody's orders and starts to prepare them in a random order - and he'll constantly look in your general direction and ask if you want this or that on your food - but usually he's asking somebody behind you. the first time it drove me mad, but after that, I started seeing this as an opportunity to practise patience. he's a very tough teacher.
- watwut 2y ago
- michaelbuckbee 2y agoAfter having seen the rise and fall of a number of "robot to make your pizza", "robot fry cook", etc. startups, I've been pitching a new rule that: There is an inverse correlation between how much a robot looks like a _robot_ and how useful it is in the real world.
- jvanderbot 2y agoOne hundred percent. It is far, far easier to automate something by building it to be automated, than it is to make a general purpose automated system to use a tool. My favorite thing to say about this is: We know how to make humans, we're good at it and its fun, why make it harder and less fun?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoThe proposal of humanoid robots is to make a human in less than 25 years for less than a million dollars :P
- jvanderbot 2y agoI understand, for sure. But if there's an effectively-free pipeline running with ancillary benefits of producing humans who want jobs, you're fighting an uphill battle against it. For structured work, I simply do not understand how making the most complicated machine imaginable is going to outproduce a targeted device made by engineers. For unstructured work, I simply do not understand how the device can perform at the required level. There is a sliding structured-unstructured scale, and I'm sure there's a niche there, I'm just not sure where it is.
- pixl97 2y agoThe particular problem with this is that effectively free pipeline of people is starting to run dry. Japan is on it's way to a population crash. China's population is on it's way to rapidly aging. The US population only grows because of immigration. Eventually the number of people that want to do your freehand task is going to be so low that the cost of building the complicated machine will be cheaper. If and when we get general intelligence in robots the paradigm changes greatly, the amount of bullshit the capitalists will get out of the robot will, to them at least, be well worth the cost.
- AndrewKemendo 2y agoThe present and future of human-robot interactions is being implemented and iterated on in Ukraine, at a pace nobody has seen in technology development since WWII Those lessons, CONOPS and technology developments are coming to the civilian world sooner than you think Kill switches are the least of your problems
- ponector 2y agoKill button on kamikadze FPV drone could be your biggest problem if it flying towards your position.
- toss1 2y ago>>Most robots require kill buttons or estops on them so that a human can shut them down. If a customer ever feels the need to hit that button, then the people who have built and sold the robot have failed. They have not made it operate well enough that the robot never gets into a state where things are going that wrong. A corollary of this is the robot that gets it's kill switch activated should also notify it's designers of the failure and details (upon rebooting, not first waiting to shut down), or provide a report that the customer can send. These should be top priority repair/upgrade tickets to improve it's function in the real world.
- csours 2y agoMy first law of robotics in production environments: 1. In order to effectively deploy real robots to solve real problems, you have to foresee and fix any problem that may occur in 99.5% of scenarios. As automation is added in series, the higher that number must be to remain economically effective. My second law of robotics: 2. Robots depreciate, which has tax advantages. Human wages do not. --- Discussion: A realistic scenario is an assembly plant that makes 1,000 widgets per day. Imagine cars, washing machines, etc. Your widget plant has 10 footprints. Any robot stoppage takes at least 5 minutes to clear. With a 99.5% success rate and one robot, you lose 25 minutes a day (1000*0.005 = 5 stoppages ) * 5 minutes. If all 10 footprints have robots with a 99.5% success rate, you lose 250 minutes a day (naive model!). That's over 4 hours. In reality, each station would have manual bypass procedures, or you would go bankrupt.
- fidotron 2y agoWhen going through a cynical phase I tend to think the only person that has thought clearly about this was Tilden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_robotics#Tilden's_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_robotics#Tilden's_laws - A robot must protect its existence at all costs. - A robot must obtain and maintain access to its own power source. - A robot must continually search for better power sources The key problem other robot laws have is the resulting robots would be such pushovers as to be useless, a point Rodney Brooks also makes quite a lot.
- stavros 2y agoThis immediately puts a robot's existence above a human's, and if it's a choice between my car killing me or totalling itself to save me, I'd prefer the latter. These sound more like "the three laws of mechanical people".
- cyberneticloops 2y agoI’ve seen Waymo vehicles clear intersections, pull over, and stop when they detect a fire truck’s blaring horn, not just the siren.
- beambot 2y agoMore like "Three Laws of Robotics businesses / engineers" -- none of these laws is particularly relevant to the robots themselves...
- hosh 2y agoIn a different HN thread, I was talking about "permatech". This was a term that some friends and I were exploring as a generalization of permacomputing. However, we had yet to come up with anything coherent. Rodney Brook's articulation of these laws of robotics is the first thing I have come across that seems to point the way to formulating something for permatech. That is, if we generalize "robots" to any kind of automation that may have to interface with humans. The first principle, that the form of automation makes a promise to humans, reminds me a lot of both Christopher Alexander's ideas on architecture, as well as Mark Burgess's Promise Theory. Alexander has a lot of ideas on design that goes beyond buildings, and is very influential to the Human-Computer Interface design and OOP. Burgess's ideas speaks a lot about how systems of agents (both human and machine) can voluntarily cooperate and coordinate together. The second principle about agency connects to a lot of things. Among them, I can draw connection to the Living Systems world view, in contrast to the Machine World view. The former retains meaning and purpose for humans, and the latter can be summed up as "beat to fit and paint to match". The third principle struck me as practical yet narrow in scope. On a second pass, I think there's something more general that can be teased out of it. I'm not exactly sure what it is. In some ways, it reminds me of how software can be improved iteratively, or what Alexander had wrote about "unfolding", where designs can change to suit inhabitants of a building.