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The 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

The 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 ago
I 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 ago
  That’s a good nuance I overlooked when reading too fast.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
Are 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

> 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 ago

I 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 ago
That’s a good nuance I overlooked when reading too fast.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

Are 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.