Column: Robot taxis? Hyperloops? A top technologist wages war on tech's hype machine

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“What is easy for humans is still very, very hard for robots,” writes Rodney Brooks, one of the world’s most accomplished experts in robotics & artificial intelligence, about autonomous vehicles. Columnist hiltzikm breaks down Brooks' latest predictions:

In an article titledin September 2021, for instance, he noted how every wave of new developments in AI was accompanied by “breathless predictions about the end of human dominance in intelligence” amid “a tsunami of promise, hype, and profitable applications.”

Robots today are common in industry and even around the home, but their capabilities are very narrow. Robot hands with true human-like dexterity have not advanced much in 40 years, Brooks says. That’s also true of autonomous navigating around any home with its clutter, furniture and moving objects. “What is easy for humans is still very, very hard for robots,” he writes.

That doesn’t mean that Brooks doubts the eventual creation of “truly artificial intelligences, with cognition and consciousness recognizably similar to our own,”He expects “robots that will roam our homes and workplaces ... to emerge gradually and symbiotically with our society” even as “a wide range of advanced sensory devices and prosthetics” emerge to enhance and augment our own bodies: “As our machines become more like us, we will become more like them. And I’m an optimist.

He conjectured that space flights with a few handfuls of paying customers wouldn’t happen before 2020; regular flights at a rate of more than once a week not before 2022 ; and the transport of two paying customers around the moon no earlier than 2020. A moon orbit of paying customers in the Falcon Heavy capsule of Musk’s SpaceX doesn’t look possible before 2024, Brooks observes. The landing of cargo on Mars for later use by humans, which Musk once forecast to happen by 2022, looks like it won’t happen before 2026, and even that date is “way over-optimistic.”that Tesla would place 1 million robo-taxis on the road by 2020 — that is, a fleet of autonomous cars summoned through an Uber-like Tesla app.

The growth rate in EV sales became turbocharged in 2022 — increasing by 68% in the third quarter over the same quarter a year earlier. If that growth rate continued, then EVs would constitute 28% of new car sales in 2025.

 

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hiltzikm You’re about to witness whole new levels of robotics at familiar places that workers stood. It ain’t gonna be pretty, except for the 1% behind them. All in the name of ‘efficiencies’ and bigger bottom line.

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Robot taxis? Hyperloops? A top technologist wages war on tech's hype machineOne of our most accomplished experts in robots and AI explains why we expect too much from technology. He's fighting the hype, one successful prediction at a time.
Source: latimes - 🏆 11. / 82 Read more »