Robotics researcher and artificial intelligence expert Rodney Brooks has given an extensive interview explaining how overrated artificial intelligence is today and how guilty society is for this catastrophic madness that it could entail.
Rodney Brooks, a leading scientist, engineer, and entrepreneur in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence, has just given a revealing interview to IEEE Spectrum talking about the future precisely of AI and ChatGPT in particular.
His name may not ring a bell, but he is a co-founder of the iRobot Corporation, known for developing the famous Roomba robot vacuum cleaner and other devices. In addition, he founded Rethink Robotics, another robotics company, and was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he led the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Robotics Group.
Widely recognized and respected as an authority in these fields, he wanted to put on the table an idea that many other experts want to be taken into account when talking about this technology that promises to revolutionize the job market: how overrated AI is as well as ChatGPT.
In a few words, he comments that these tools they are much stupider than you think, not to mention that they are very far from being able to compete with humans in any task at an intellectual level. In general, he says, it is society that is to blame for these catastrophic predictions of artificial intelligence.
‘We are guilty of many sins of mispredicting the future of AI’
In his extensive interview he addresses different topics but perhaps one that really worries is this idea that AI is one step away from reaching AGI, also known as Artificial General Intelligence, which refers to the ability of a machine to match or exceed human intelligence in a wide range of cognitive tasks.
“Current language models are not capable of logically inferring meaning, even though they make it sound as if they could, which can easily fool the user”Explain. “What big language models are good for is saying what a response should sound like, which is different from what a response should be like”, adds Brooks.
In short, Brooks believes that feedback on future technologies “could end up in some interesting places, but not at AGI”.
Regarding the future of human beings and this collective madness that AI is going to kill most of the jobs, Rodney Brooks opines:
“You certainly hear these things. I was looking at a government report a few weeks ago and it said, ‘Lawyers are going to be gone in 10 years.’ So I tracked him down and he was a lawyer in England, who didn’t know anything about AI. He said: ‘Surely, if it’s that good, it’s going to get so good that we’ll be out of a job in 10 years.’ There’s a lot of hype about disasters. Someone suggests something and it gets amplified.”Explain.