Posts Tagged ‘Rodney Brooks’
“I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans. And I am rooting for the machines.”*…
Readers will know of your correspondent’s fascination with the remarkable Claude Shannon (see here and here), remembered as “the father of information theory,” but seminally involved in so much more. In a recent piece in IEEE Spectrum, the redoubtable Rodney Brooks argues that we should add another credit to Shannon’s list…
Among the great engineers of the 20th century, who contributed the most to our 21st-century technologies? I say: Claude Shannon.
Shannon is best known for establishing the field of information theory. In a 1948 paper, one of the greatest in the history of engineering, he came up with a way of measuring the information content of a signal and calculating the maximum rate at which information could be reliably transmitted over any sort of communication channel. The article, titled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” describes the basis for all modern communications, including the wireless Internet on your smartphone and even an analog voice signal on a twisted-pair telephone landline. In 1966, the IEEE gave him its highest award, the Medal of Honor, for that work.
If information theory had been Shannon’s only accomplishment, it would have been enough to secure his place in the pantheon. But he did a lot more…
In 1950 Shannon published an article in Scientific American and also a research paper describing how to program a computer to play chess. He went into detail on how to design a program for an actual computer…
Shannon did all this at a time when there were fewer than 10 computers in the world. And they were all being used for numerical calculations. He began his research paper by speculating on all sorts of things that computers might be programmed to do beyond numerical calculations, including designing relay and switching circuits, designing electronic filters for communications, translating between human languages, and making logical deductions. Computers do all these things today…
The “father of information theory” also paved the way for AI: “How Claude Shannon Helped Kick-start Machine Learning,” from @rodneyabrooks in @IEEESpectrum.
* Claude Shannon (who may or may not have been kidding…)
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As we ponder possibility, we might send uncertain birthday greetings to Werner Karl Heisenberg; he was born on this date in 1901. A theoretical physicist, he made important contributions to the theories of the hydrodynamics of turbulent flows, the atomic nucleus, ferromagnetism, superconductivity, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles. But he is most widely remembered as a pioneer of quantum mechanics and author of what’s become known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1932 “for the creation of quantum mechanics.”
During World War II, Heisenberg was part of the team attempting to create an atomic bomb for Germany– for which he was arrested and detained by the Allies at the end of the conflict. He was returned to Germany, where he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, which soon thereafter was renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics. He later served as president of the German Research Council, chairman of the Commission for Atomic Physics, chairman of the Nuclear Physics Working Group, and president of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Some things are so serious that one can only joke about them
Werner Heisenberg
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”*…
We are surrounded by hysteria about the future of artificial intelligence and robotics—hysteria about how powerful they will become, how quickly, and what they will do to jobs.
I recently saw a story in MarketWatch that said robots will take half of today’s jobs in 10 to 20 years. It even had a graphic to prove the numbers.
The claims are ludicrous. (I try to maintain professional language, but sometimes …) For instance, the story appears to say that we will go from one million grounds and maintenance workers in the U.S. to only 50,000 in 10 to 20 years, because robots will take over those jobs. How many robots are currently operational in those jobs? Zero. How many realistic demonstrations have there been of robots working in this arena? Zero. Similar stories apply to all the other categories where it is suggested that we will see the end of more than 90 percent of jobs that currently require physical presence at some particular site.
Mistaken predictions lead to fears of things that are not going to happen, whether it’s the wide-scale destruction of jobs, the Singularity, or the advent of AI that has values different from ours and might try to destroy us. We need to push back on these mistakes. But why are people making them? I see seven common reasons…
Mistaken extrapolations, limited imagination, and other common mistakes that distract us from thinking more productively about the future: Rodney Brooks on “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions.”
* Roy Amara, co-founder of The Institute for the Future
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As we sharpen our analyses, we might recall that it was on this date in 1995 that The Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology chronicled the World Wide Web in its A Day in the Life of Cyberspace project.
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the Media Lab had invited submissions for the days leading up to October 10, 1995, on a variety of issues related to technology and the Internet, including privacy, expression, age, wealth, faith, body, place, languages, and the environment. Then on October 10, a team at MIT collected, edited, and published the contributions to “create a mosaic of life at the dawn of the digital revolution that is transforming our planet.”
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