Machines of Loving Grace (29 page)

Brooks circulated his critique in a 1990 paper titled “Elephants Don’t Play Chess,”
⁴
arguing that mainstream symbolic AI had failed during the previous thirty years and a new approach was necessary.
“
Nouvelle AI
relies on the emergence of more global behavior from the interaction of smaller behavioral units.
As with heuristics there is no
a priori
guarantee
that this will always work,” he wrote.
“However, careful design of the simple behaviors and their interactions can often produce systems with useful and interesting emergent properties.”
⁵

Brooks did not win over the AI establishment overnight.
At roughly the same time that he started designing his robotic insects, Red Whittaker at Carnegie Mellon was envisioning walking on the surface of Mars with Ambler, a sixteen-foot-tall six-legged robot weighing 5,500 pounds.
In contrast, Brooks’s Genghis robot was a hexapod weighing just over two pounds.
Genghis became a poster child for the new style of AI: “fast, cheap, and out of control”—as the title read of a 1989 article that Brooks cowrote with his grad student Anita M.
Flynn.
Brooks and Flynn proposed that the most practical way to explore space was by sending out his low-cost insect-like robots in swarms rather than deploying a monolithic overengineered and expensive system.

Predictably, NASA was initially dismissive of the idea of building robotic explorers that were “fast, cheap, and out of control.”
When Brooks presented his ideas at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, engineers who had been working on costly scientific instruments rejected the idea of a tiny inexpensive robot with limited capabilities.
He was undeterred.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Brooks’s ideas resonated with the design principles underpinning the Internet.
A bottom-up ideology, with components assembling themselves into more powerful and complex systems, had captured the popular imagination.
With two of his students, Brooks started a company and set out to sell investors on the idea of privately sending small robots into space, first to the moon and later to Mars.
⁶
For $22 million, Brooks proposed, you would not only get your logo on a rover; you could also promote your company with media coverage of the launch.
Movies, cartoons, toys, advertising in moondust, a theme park, and remote teleoperation—these were all part of one of the more extravagant marketing campaigns ever
conceived.
Brooks was aiming for a moon launch in 1990, the first one since 1978, and then planned to send another rocket to Mars just three years later.
By 2010, the scheme called for sending micro-robots to Mars, Neptune, its moon Triton, and the asteroids.

What the plan lacked was a private rocket to carry the robots.
The trio spoke with six private rocket launch companies, none of which at the time had made a successful launch.
All Brooks needed was funding.
He didn’t find any investors in the private sector, so the company pitched another space organization called the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, which was the Pentagon agency previously tasked to build the Strategic Defense Initiative, a feared and ridiculed Star Wars–style missile defense shield.
The project, however, had stalled after the fall of the Soviet Union.
For a while, however, the BMDO considered competing with NASA by organizing its own moon launch.
The MIT trio built a convincing moon launch rover prototype christened Grendel, intended to hitchhike to the moon aboard a converted “Brilliant Pebble,” the Star Wars launch vehicle originally created to destroy ICBMs by colliding with them in space.
Grendel was built in accordance to Brooks’s bottom-up behavior approach, and it had a successful trial, but that was as far as it got.

The Pentagon’s missile division lost its turf war with NASA.
The nation was unwilling to pay for two spacefaring organizations.
Ironically enough, years later the developers of the NASA Sojourner, which landed on Mars in 1997, borrowed heavily from the ideas that Brooks had been proposing.
Although he never made it into space, a little more than a decade later, Brooks’s bottom-up approach found a commercial niche.
iRobot, successor of Brooks’s spacefaring company, gained success by selling an autonomous vacuum cleaner for the civilian market, while a modified mil-spec version toured the Afghanistan and Iraq terrain sniffing out improvised explosive devices.

Eventually, Brooks would win the battle with the old guard.
He found an audience for his ideas about robotics at MIT, and won accolades for what he liked to call nouvelle AI.
A new generation of MIT grad students started following him and not Minsky.
Nouvelle AI had a widespread impact beyond the United States and especially in Europe, where attention had shifted from the construction of human-level AIs to systems that would exhibit emergent behaviors in which more powerful or intelligent capabilities would be formed from the combination of many simpler ones.

Brooks’s own interests shifted away from autonomous insects and toward social interactions with humans.
With graduate students, he began designing socializing robots.
Robots like Cog and Kismet, designed with graduate student Cynthia Breazeal, were used to explore human-robot interaction as well as the capabilities of the robots themselves.
In 2014 Breazeal announced that she planned to commercialize a home robot growing out of that original research.
She has created a plucky Siri-style family companion that remains stationary on a kitchen counter, hopefully assisting with a variety of household tasks.

In 2008, Brooks retired from the MIT AI Lab and started a low-profile company with a high-profile name, Heartland Robotics.
The name evoked the problem Brooks was trying to solve: the disappearance of manufacturing from the United States as a consequence of lower overseas wages and production costs.
As energy and transportation costs skyrocket, however, manufacturing robots offer a potential way to level the playing field between the United States and low-wage nations.
For several years there were tantalizing rumors about what Brooks had in mind.
He had been working on humanoid robots for almost a decade, but at that point the robotics industry hadn’t even managed to successfully commercialize toy humanoid robots, let alone robots capable of practical applications.

When Baxter was finally unveiled in 2012, Heartland had changed its name to Rethink, with the humanoid robot receiving
mixed reviews.
Not everyone understood or agreed with Brooks’s deliberate choice of approximating the human anatomy.
Today many of his competitors sell robot arms that make no effort to mimic a human counterpart, opting for simplicity and function.
Brooks, however, is undeterred.
His intent is to build a robot that is ready to collaborate with rather than replace human workers.
Baxter is one of a generation of robots intended to work in proximity to flesh-and-blood coworkers.
The technical term for this relationship is “compliance,” and there is widespread belief among roboticists that over the next half decade these machines will be widely used in manufacturing, distribution, and even retail positions.
Baxter is designed to be programmed easily by nontechnical workers.
To teach the robot a new repetitive task, humans only have to guide the robot’s arms through the requisite motions and Baxter will automatically memorize the routine.
When the robot was introduced, Rethink Robotics demonstrated Baxter’s capability to slowly pick up items on a conveyor belt and place them in new locations.
This seemed like a relatively limited contribution to the workplace, but Brooks argues that the system will develop a library of capabilities over time and will increase its speed as new versions of its software become available.

Rodney Brooks rejected early artificial intelligence in favor of a new approach he described as “fast, cheap, and out of control.”
Later he designed Baxter, an inexpensive manufacturing robot intended to work with, rather than replace, human workers.
(
Photo courtesy of Evan McGlinn/
New York Times/
Redux
)

It is perhaps telling that one of Rethink’s early venture investors was Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon.
Amazon has increasingly had problems with its nonunionized warehouse workers, who frequently complain about poor working conditions and low wages.
When Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, Bezos signaled that he was intent on displacing as much human labor from his warehouses as possible.
In modern consumer goods logistics there are two levels of distribution: storing and moving whole cases of goods, and retrieving individual products from those cases.
The Kiva system consists of a fleet of mobile robots that are intended to save human workers the time of walking through the warehouse to gather individual products to be shipped together in a composite order.
While the humans work in one location, the Kiva robots maneuver bins of individual items at just the right time in the shipping process, and the humans pick out and assemble the products to be shipped.
Yet Kiva is clearly an interim solution toward the ultimate goal of building completely automated warehouses.
Today’s automation systems cannot yet replace human hands and eyes.
The ability to quickly recognize objects among dozens of possibilities and pick them up from different positions remains a uniquely human skill.
But for how long?
It doesn’t take much imagination to see Baxter, or a competitor from similar companies like Universal Robots or Kuka, working in an Amazon warehouse alongside teams of mobile Kiva robots.
Such lights-out warehouses are clearly on the horizon, whether they are made possible by “friendly” robots like Baxter or by more impersonal systems like the ones Google’s new robotics division is allegedly designing.

As the debates over technology and jobs reemerged in 2012 in the United States, many people were eager to criticize Brooks’s Baxter and its humanoid design.
Automation fears have ebbed and flowed in the United States for decades, but because Rethink built a robot in the human form, many thought that Rethink was building machines that should be—and now are—capable of replacing human labor.
Today, Brooks argues vociferously that robots don’t simply kill jobs.
Instead, by lowering the cost of manufacturing in the United States, robots will contribute to rebuilding the nation’s manufacturing base in new factories with jobs for more skilled, albeit perhaps fewer, workers.

The debate over humans and machines continues dogging Brooks wherever he travels.
At the end of the school year in 2013, he spoke to the parents of graduating students at Brown University.
The ideas in his Baxter pitch were straightforward and ones that he assumed would be palatable to an Ivy League audience.
He was creating a generation of more intelligent tools for workers, he argued, and Baxter in particular was an example of the future of the factory floor, designed to be used and programmed by average workers.
But the mother of one of the students would have none of it.
She put up her hand and indignantly asked, “But what about jobs?
Aren’t these robots going to take away jobs?”
Patiently, Brooks explained himself again.
This was about collaborating with workers, not replacing them outright.
As of 2006 the United States was sending vast sums annually to China to pay for manufacturing there.
That money could provide more jobs for U.S.
workers, he pointed out.
You’re just speaking locally, she retorted.
What about globally?
Brooks threw up his hands.
China, he contended, needs robots even more than the United States does.
Because of their demographics and particularly the one-child policy, the Chinese will soon face a shortage of manufacturing workers.
The deeper point that Brooks felt he couldn’t get across to a group of highly educated upper-middle-class parents was that the repetitive jobs
Baxter will destroy are not high-quality ones that should be preserved.
When the Rethink engineers went into factories, they asked the workers whether they wanted their children to have similar jobs.
“Not one of them said yes,” he noted.