*If we're worried about robot apocalypse we should just make Prof Brooks here the Robot Regulatory Czar and things will shake out okay.
*At least until the Chinese start building autonomous military robot sharks to defend their illegal offshore bases, anyhow.
Prof Brooks actually builds robots unlike the famous guys who fret most in public about them
(...)
TC: You’re writing a book on AI, so I have to ask you: Elon Musk expressed again this past weekend that AI is an existential threat. Agree? Disagree?
RB: There are quite a few people out there who’ve said that AI is an existential threat: Stephen Hawking, astronomer Royal Martin Rees, who has written a book about it, and they share a common thread, in that: they don’t work in AI themselves. For those who do work in AI, we know how hard it is to get anything to actually work through product level.
Here’s the reason that people – including Elon – make this mistake. When we see a person performing a task very well, we understand the competence [involved]. And I think they apply the same model to machine learning. [But they shouldn’t.] When people saw DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat the Korean champion and then beat the Chinese Go champion, they thought, ‘Oh my god, this machine is so smart, it can do just about anything!’ But I was at DeepMind in London about three weeks ago and [they admitted that things could easily have gone very wrong].
TC: But Musk’s point isn’t that it’s smart but that it’s going to be smart, and we need to regulate it now.
RB: So you’re going to regulate now. If you’re going to have a regulation now, either it applies to something and changes something in the world, or it doesn’t apply to anything. If it doesn’t apply to anything, what the hell do you have the regulation for? Tell me, what behavior do you want to change, Elon? By the way, let’s talk about regulation on self-driving Teslas, because that’s a real issue.
TC: You’ve raised interesting points about this in your writings, noting that the biggest worry about autonomous cars – whether they’ll have to choose between driving into a gaggle of baby strollers versus a group of elderly women – is absurd, considering how often that particular scenario happens today.
RB: There are some ethical questions that I think will slow down the adoption of cars. I live just a few blocks [from MIT]. And three times in the last three weeks, I have followed every sign and found myself at a point where I can either stop and wait for six hours, or drive the wrong way down a one-way street. Should autonomous cars be able to decide to drive the wrong way down a one-way street if they’re stuck? What if a 14-year-old riding in an Uber tries to override it, telling it to go down that one-way street? Should a 14-year-old be allowed to ‘drive’ the car by voice? There will be a whole set of regulations that we’re going to have to have, that people haven’t even begun to think about, to address very practical issues....
(...)
