[HN Gopher] Rodney Brooks's Three Laws of Robotics
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Rodney Brooks's Three Laws of Robotics
Author : belter
Score : 89 points
Date : 2024-08-10 17:00 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| xg15 wrote:
| Earlier today we got the "Taco Bell Distinguished Professor", now
| here is the "Panasonic Professor Emeritus of Robotics" (at MIT no
| less).
|
| When did academia stop to even pretend it was independent of
| commercial interests?
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Brawndo Center For Agricultural Studies
| EGreg wrote:
| But does it have electrolytes?
| Avicebron wrote:
| It's what the plants crave!
| Mistletoe wrote:
| https://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-
| wallace/in...
|
| DFW unfortunately got this so right about our future.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > years are referred to by the name of their corporate
| sponsor
|
| Many ancient cultures referenced years in relation to their
| rulers, _e.g._ 30 BCE being the year of the consulship of
| Caesar and Crassus [1]. DFW is cleverly recyling the
| corporate overlord meme.
|
| [1] https://www.trismegistos.org/calendar/cal_period_listco
| nsuls...
| mcmoor wrote:
| Military and Industry is the best environment for a scientist.
| Wild enough to reward creativity but harsh enough to not let
| frauds fester for too long. The most optimal place to conduct
| mass experiments for scientific method.
| xg15 wrote:
| The environment is good, the problem is that the acquired
| knowledge then stays under wraps and is used to accumulate
| power for the host organisation, instead of advancing the
| knowledge of everyone.
| lawn wrote:
| That's hardly the worst that could happen.
|
| Consider a Tobacco Co Professor that researches the effects
| of smoking.
|
| What do you do when you find that smoking is even worse
| than thought? Do you publish the results, knowing that if
| you do then your professor job vanishes? Or do you withhold
| your findings, or try to paint them in a more favorable
| light?
| snapcaster wrote:
| I trust commercial interests more than academic. At least their
| motives are legible
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _When did academia stop to even pretend it was independent of
| commercial interests?_
|
| Why is this worse than [rich family] Emeritus?
| sgt101 wrote:
| I do not think Rodney Brooks has _ever_ made any assertion that
| he is free of commercial interest!
| bell-cot wrote:
| I'd say >140 years ago, based on:
|
| > Stanford University (officially Leland Stanford Junior
| University) [...] was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate
| Leland Stanford, the eighth governor of and then-incumbent
| senator from California, and his wife, Jane, ...
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Endowed professorships such as these are _usually_ an
| arrangement in which:
|
| - The sponsor gifts the department enough to sustain a faculty
| member, often salary + research funds, indefinitely (i.e.,
| capital such that the interest pays the bills)
|
| - The department 'names' the professorship
|
| That's it.
| xg15 wrote:
| I'd be curious how indefinite that "indefinitely" really is.
|
| But I think the usual corruption risks apply in either case.
| In the scenario you describe, it's not clear why a commercial
| sponsor would be motivated to do such a deal. The only direct
| rewards for the sponsor would be "ad space" in the department
| name and maybe some sort of reputational bonus for "funding
| science". But I don't see why a brand like Taco Bell would
| benefit from either one, especially if the needed investment
| is massive.
|
| Also, even if there are no obvious conditions to the deal,
| this always risks inducing some degree of self-censorship on
| the side of the institution: Someone at the institution will
| think about what they can do to be attractive for more deals
| like this - and they'll probably be less welcoming for
| research that might drive away potential future sponsors.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| _indefinitely_ means one-time grant which is invested, and
| the _returns_ on investment pay the salary of a grad
| student or part of a professor 's salary. So yeah, it's
| indefinite.
|
| These profs still have to get funds to get grad students or
| lab space, and still have to teach to maintain certain
| benefits. In later years, the endowed chair is essentially
| a chair in the closet as their research and teaching
| activity tapers off before retirement.
|
| My spouse was an education-institution major gift
| fundraiser, so she dealt with endowed professorships,
| eternal grad student fellowhips, recurring scholarships,
| and the like. Generally, you can attach as many or as
| little strings to the gift as you want, but for most things
| there's no way to enforce those strings after the gift is
| made and the financial engine starts producing.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Also indefinite != infinite.
| joncrocks wrote:
| I think that either the amount (in real terms) goes down
| over time, or there is a limited time that any endowment
| will last.
|
| Faced with inflation, and the requirement that there is
| money coming out every X months, I believe it's hard for
| any other outcome to be achieved.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You would think that. But there are large expert teams of
| money managers that ensure the amount stays the same over
| time (or even matches inflation), given large enough cash
| reserves.
|
| It's not hard. With an investment of 10,000 you can put
| it in a high yield savings account and get a few % /
| year, akin to 100/y. So A million is 10,000 / y. That's a
| very nice fellowhip "for free" just from a large
| donation. These aren't actual numbers, they're just a
| proof of existence of perpetual money from a one-time
| investment.
|
| inb4 inflation: reduce the yearly outlay by enough to
| reinvest so the yearly fellowship matches inflation. Your
| investment just needs to grow faster than inflation.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> I 'd be curious how indefinite that "indefinitely"
| really is._
|
| According to [1] for $5M UCLA will create a new full time
| professor post. Glassdoor claims the average UCLA
| professor's salary is $200k so their endowment investments
| would have to achieve 4% above inflation just to cover the
| salary. And of course there are a bunch of expenses on top
| of just salary so you might want more like 6%.
|
| Can an investor reliably get 6% above inflation? In the
| 1970s no, in the 1990s yes.
|
| Of course nothing is truly eternal - if there were major
| political upheaval in the United States, a new regime would
| have 53.2 billion reasons to find Harvard insufficiently
| loyal.
|
| [1] https://www.uclafoundation.org/Resources/Endowment
| eleveriven wrote:
| I recently played the game Detroit: Become Human. The game pushed
| me to think about many things. I wonder if I will live to see
| those times? Will such times even come?
| voidUpdate wrote:
| You already do live in times where people are discriminated
| against for things they can't control, they're just not robots
| smokel wrote:
| What could be the main cause for things being so hard to cross
| over from simulation to reality?
|
| Should we invest some more in stochastic programming to handle
| all the little quirks that cannot be modeled perfectly?
|
| Or is the major issue that robots must work together with
| _humans_ , which are already pretty complex from a biological
| perspective, let alone from a sociological or historical one.
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| Relevant: the mythical non-roboticist (114 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39707356
| teractiveodular wrote:
| Exception handling. If your web server throws a 500, you have a
| problem. If your autonomous vehicle throws a 500 and is now
| blocking a major intersection, everybody has a problem and you
| can't just hit refresh.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If your web server throws a 500, you have a problem. If
| your autonomous vehicle throws a 500 and is now blocking a
| major intersection, everybody has a problem and you can 't
| just hit refresh._
|
| This isn't unique to robots, _e.g._ Crowdstrike.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What could be the main cause for things being so hard to
| cross over from simulation to reality?_
|
| Sensor noise? (And/or quality?)
|
| We're decent at building world models that don't permit
| impossible behaviour. And we're decent at training agents in
| those world models. What's unpredictable is how a sensor in the
| real world will map to a world model.
| sgt101 wrote:
| Simulations are closed, the real world is open.
|
| Weird things happen in the real world. They happen all the time
| and we expect them to happen and hardly notice when they do.
| Simulations approximate the model that humans use to reason
| about the world, but we just ignore all the oddness and can't
| articulate the oddness until it's made explicit by some
| failure.
| hwillis wrote:
| Human fingertips and skin in _general_ are extremely precise
| high resolution pressure and vibration sensors that robots
| almost completely lack. Tactile feedback takes up the second
| most human sensor bandwidth behind vision. Imagine doing
| anything without it- interacting with the world through a
| puppet.
|
| The joints in a human arm are direct-drive series elastic
| actuators with pretty incredible sensitivity. If you were
| holding a big heavy box and I bounced a ping pong ball off it,
| you'd probably feel the vibration. That's kind of a big deal.
| You may not be able to measure absolute weight well, or even
| relative weight, but you can detect quick changes with amazing
| precision. Lifting any heavy or large object is inherently
| wobbly even for a robot, and that sensitivity is important.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| This. I often feel it's not appreciated how damn brilliant a
| human is when you look at it as a robot. Thousands of servos,
| millions of sensors, high-throughput compute AND all of that
| self-assembled and self-repaired AND built mostly out of
| water, carbohydrates and like 5 grams of iron.
|
| A meatbag is by far the best robot on the face of earth
| today, the gap is astonishing. My estimate is that we'll get
| AGI faster than human-capable robots competing with meatbags
| cost-wise. We'll have to deploy self-assembling robots
| throughout the whole supply chain from sand and ore to chips
| and servos, eliminate human salaries everywhere, only then
| the price will be comparable to a parent assembling and
| training a child which was the way for millions of years.
| 0xf00ff00f wrote:
| Also relevant:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
| krisoft wrote:
| > What could be the main cause for things being so hard to
| cross over from simulation to reality?
|
| When you are simulating you are leaving out of details. Some
| knowingly, some without you even being aware of them.
|
| Let's imagine you are working on some perception algorithm for
| a lidar. You have a cool simulation using geometry to calculate
| how far each laser goes before they bounce back.
|
| Did you remember to implement that the lidar takes some amount
| of time to sweep around? It is not making instantenous global
| captures. (Which is a lot easier to code down.) This causes a
| kind of smearing effect particularly as things move fast
| relative to the sensor.
|
| Do you know if your sensor sweeps with one plane of lasers or
| multiple? What is the exact geometry? Are you simulating it as
| the sensor is designed or as it is built?
|
| Did you remember that the sun blinds the sensor? And if so, do
| you simulate it correctly? Including the algorithms it has
| internally to try to compensate for it?
|
| Did you know that retroreflective surfaces interact with the
| laser differently? In particular if there is moisture on the
| lidar. The light straying through water droplets cause false
| readings.
|
| Did you know that lidars can, under certain meteorological
| conditions see the exhaust of diesel vehicles? I hope you
| planed a fluid dynamics engine into your similation to account
| for the exhaust plume spreading upwards and expanding.
|
| And these are just the niggles of a particular sensor modality
| from the top of my head. I know similarly long lists for other
| sensor types. And then we didn't even got into thermal issues,
| or the sensor aging or anything. And I bet reality has an even
| longer list than I do.
|
| Is any of this important in your domain? If yes you ignore them
| at your peril. If no, you will waste your time implementing
| them in your simulation. But the only way you will know for
| sure is when you stumble uppon them and they surprise you out
| of nowhere by breaking your assumptions and your code.
|
| > Should we invest some more in stochastic programming to
| handle all the little quirks that cannot be modeled perfectly?
|
| That is robotics. This is what people writing software for
| robots do. This is what researchers working on robotics
| problems are working on.
|
| If you want a nice and small example of this maybe read up
| onnKalman filters or the RANSAC algorithm. If you fancy a more
| academic treatment of the topic I recommend Probabilistic
| Robotics from Sebastian Thrun.
|
| > is the major issue that robots must work together with humans
|
| That certainly does not make it easier. Have you seen the video
| of the russian chess robot breaking its oponent's finger?[1]
| That is just the least gruesome of the recent incidents that I
| can recall. How much is this your "main problem" depens on your
| problem domain though.
|
| 1: https://youtu.be/Mt-1smlom_M?si=19sOPkQf3s6JHoFo
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Sebastian Thrun is a great source but I'm getting the feeling
| that everything anyone has every written about autonomous
| behaviour is not something you want to follow, knowing how
| far we are from robust autonomy in arbitrary real-world
| environments.
|
| On the other hand, autonomous behaviour is a great field for
| a new researcher because there are so many wide open
| problems. Even pathfinding with obstacle avoidance, something
| that every game dev knows how to code in a bit, is an open
| challenge in robotics. Wide open world, plenty of research
| hills to plant one's flag on.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> What could be the main cause for things being so hard to
| cross over from simulation to reality?
|
| Resolution. Simulations are too low-resolution and the current
| dominant approach to learning behaviour (Reinforcement
| Learning) is too high-resolution (more precisely, too high-
| variance). So the simulations don't represent reality
| accurately enough and the learned policies overfit to the
| simulations' inaccuracies.
|
| Learning from pixels sounds like a great idea until you realise
| the physical world is not quite made of pixels.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| The author ends with the thought that a robot that has a stop
| button is a failure but his most famous product for consumers,
| Roomba, has such a button. Does he talk elsewhere about this?
|
| He makes a paragraph about robots that interfere with ordinary
| people as bad and references autonomous vehicles in San
| Francisco. He has a whole series starting here
| https://rodneybrooks.com/autonomous-vehicles-2023-part-i/ or with
| no comments! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37971352
| pif wrote:
| > If a customer ever feels the need to hit that button, then
| the people who have built and sold the robot have failed.
|
| He is not against the button per se: it's "just" that it should
| never be necessary!
|
| Removing the button would require enormous trust from the
| customer (very hard to obtain) and from the developers
| (impossible to obtain, because they know!), apart from legal
| aspects concerning personal safety.
| voxic11 wrote:
| I don't think he means having or using a stop button means the
| robot is necessarily a failure overall. He just means that
| every time such a stop button is used it represents that the
| robot still has room for improvement. It has failed in that
| particular instance but that doesn't necessarily mean it not
| overall useful.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| That's a good nuance I overlooked when reading too fast.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Are self driving cars more like vaccines, which are expected to
| harm some people but because of how important they are, there
| is finality and fixed structure to justice against them? Maybe.
|
| Or are they more like regular cars, which kill people all the
| time, including occupants who weren't driving like the children
| of the driver, and everything about justice regarding them
| depends on random shit and vibes?
|
| Rodney Brooks is a great businessman. MIT, and Stanford and
| Harvard for that matter, missed the boat on autonomous vehicles
| - along with the other groundbreaking tech at the top of the
| S&P500, large language models and GLP-1 agonists. What has come
| of the last Ivy League breakthrough, CRISPR? When I was there,
| there was an energy that autonomous vehicles were 50 years
| away, not the 5 they turned out to be in reality. The pessimism
| was pervasive.
| pif wrote:
| > Some of the vehicles were notorious for blocking intersections
|
| Letting self-proclaimed autonomous vehicles use public roads was
| so idiotic that you need a new word coined for those who didn't
| see it immediately.
| josefresco wrote:
| "If a customer ever feels the need to hit that button, then the
| people who have built and sold the robot have failed."
|
| I understand the point, but there are already many electronic
| devices (robots?) ostensibly made to help me including my vehicle
| that sometimes need to be "strangled to death" in order to reboot
| and fix whatever issue was plaguing it. I say strangled to death
| because typically power buttons are software controlled and don't
| respond to just a quick press. My response? A shrug because it's
| very common. Why would people respond to a failing "robot" in
| another way? I get if it's caring for your grandmother but
| vacuuming your carpet?
|
| I've had to hit the "kill switch" on my:
|
| TV/iPad/iPhone/PC, ancient clothes washing machine, modern
| dishwasher, router/modem, TV etc.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > I've had to hit the "kill switch" on my: > >
| TV/iPad/iPhone/PC, ancient clothes washing machine, modern
| dishwasher, router/modem, TV etc.
|
| And this is why these technologies, while improving
| productivity and saving time in many cases, are sources of
| continual stress in our lives. I'm sitting enjoying a pleasant
| evening at home and suddenly I have to get up and reboot the
| router. As I'm waiting for it to restart and settle down my
| mind is seething with visions of smashing it with a hammer and
| getting it out of my life forever, like the printer scene in
| _Office Space_. Now my blood pressure is up and the evening is
| distrupted.
|
| "The worst thing for its acceptance by people that a robot can
| do in the workplace is to make their jobs or lives harder"
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> TV/iPad/iPhone/PC, ancient clothes washing machine, modern
| dishwasher, router/modem, TV etc.
|
| Crucially, none of those can move around on their own or
| (attempt to) grasp objects within their reach (or without).
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| After having seen the rise and fall of a number of "robot to make
| your pizza", "robot fry cook", etc. startups, I've been pitching
| a new rule that:
|
| There is an inverse correlation between how much a robot looks
| like a _robot_ and how useful it is in the real world.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| One hundred percent. It is far, far easier to automate
| something by building it to be automated, than it is to make a
| general purpose automated system to use a tool.
|
| My favorite thing to say about this is: We know how to make
| humans, we're good at it and its fun, why make it harder and
| less fun?
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| The proposal of humanoid robots is to make a human in less
| than 25 years for less than a million dollars :P
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I understand, for sure. But if there's an effectively-free
| pipeline running with ancillary benefits of producing
| humans who want jobs, you're fighting an uphill battle
| against it.
|
| For structured work, I simply do not understand how making
| the most complicated machine imaginable is going to
| outproduce a targeted device made by engineers.
|
| For unstructured work, I simply do not understand how the
| device can perform at the required level.
|
| There is a sliding structured-unstructured scale, and I'm
| sure there's a niche there, I'm just not sure where it is.
| yodelshady wrote:
| That's a lovely saying, although the main issue currently
| seems to be that, in the West, we are currently _not_ good at
| making more humans. See various demographic crises.
| bergie wrote:
| Nah, we've just outsourced production to countries with
| cheaper labour costs.
|
| It's a great deal: somebody else somewhere else deals with
| changing the diapers, and yet there will be a tax base to
| keep the country running when I'm retirement age.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| This is only a problem if you also restrict immigration.
| Fertility crisis issues are not generally global. That
| solution costs effectively $0.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| It is not surprising that the message of "We are facing
| demographic collapse" correlates strongly with "We need
| highly capable robotic workers". Especially among certain
| high profile people. I just don't see it coming together
| like those proponents say it will.
|
| Any other comments about the truthiness of those statements
| or the truthiness of the correlation will just get into
| politics, so I'll stop before that.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| This aligns with my thinking about people wanting exoskeletons
| as well.
|
| Construction workers have all kinds of great speciality
| machines these days that let do everything from dig ditches to
| drive piles. The number of various attachments for Bobcat
| machines alone is crazy. None of them look like the
| exoskeletons I've seen in sci-fi, yet they're remarkably
| effective.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Have you seen a human operating a bobcat with attachments? It
| pretty much is an exoskeleton.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| The present and future of human-robot interactions is being
| implemented and iterated on in Ukraine, at a pace nobody has seen
| in technology development since WWII
|
| Those lessons, CONOPS and technology developments are coming to
| the civilian world sooner than you think
|
| Kill switches are the least of your problems
| toss1 wrote:
| >>Most robots require kill buttons or estops on them so that a
| human can shut them down. If a customer ever feels the need to
| hit that button, then the people who have built and sold the
| robot have failed. They have not made it operate well enough that
| the robot never gets into a state where things are going that
| wrong.
|
| A corollary of this is the robot that gets it's kill switch
| activated should also notify it's designers of the failure and
| details (upon rebooting, _not_ first waiting to shut down), or
| provide a report that the customer can send. These should be top
| priority repair /upgrade tickets to improve it's function in the
| real world.
| csours wrote:
| My first law of robotics in production environments:
|
| 1. In order to effectively deploy real robots to solve real
| problems, you have to foresee and fix any problem that may occur
| in 99.5% of scenarios. As automation is added in series, the
| higher that number must be to remain economically effective.
|
| My second law of robotics:
|
| 2. Robots depreciate, which has tax advantages. Human wages do
| not.
|
| ---
|
| Discussion:
|
| A realistic scenario is an assembly plant that makes 1,000
| widgets per day. Imagine cars, washing machines, etc.
|
| Your widget plant has 10 footprints. Any robot stoppage takes at
| least 5 minutes to clear.
|
| With a 99.5% success rate and one robot, you lose 25 minutes a
| day (1000*0.005 = 5 stoppages ) * 5 minutes.
|
| If all 10 footprints have robots with a 99.5% success rate, you
| lose 250 minutes a day (naive model!). That's over 4 hours.
|
| In reality, each station would have manual bypass procedures, or
| you would go bankrupt.
| fidotron wrote:
| When going through a cynical phase I tend to think the only
| person that has thought clearly about this was Tilden:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_robotics#Tilden's_laws
|
| - A robot must protect its existence at all costs.
|
| - A robot must obtain and maintain access to its own power
| source.
|
| - A robot must continually search for better power sources
|
| The key problem other robot laws have is the resulting robots
| would be such pushovers as to be useless, a point Rodney Brooks
| also makes quite a lot.
| stavros wrote:
| This immediately puts a robot's existence above a human's, and
| if it's a choice between my car killing me or totalling itself
| to save me, I'd prefer the latter. These sound more like "the
| three laws of mechanical people".
| cyberneticloops wrote:
| I've seen Waymo vehicles clear intersections, pull over, and stop
| when they detect a fire truck's blaring horn, not just the siren.
| beambot wrote:
| More like "Three Laws of Robotics businesses / engineers" -- none
| of these laws is particularly relevant to the robots
| themselves...
| hosh wrote:
| In a different HN thread, I was talking about "permatech". This
| was a term that some friends and I were exploring as a
| generalization of permacomputing. However, we had yet to come up
| with anything coherent.
|
| Rodney Brook's articulation of these laws of robotics is the
| first thing I have come across that seems to point the way to
| formulating something for permatech. That is, if we generalize
| "robots" to any kind of automation that may have to interface
| with humans.
|
| The first principle, that the form of automation makes a promise
| to humans, reminds me a lot of both Christopher Alexander's ideas
| on architecture, as well as Mark Burgess's Promise Theory.
| Alexander has a lot of ideas on design that goes beyond
| buildings, and is very influential to the Human-Computer
| Interface design and OOP. Burgess's ideas speaks a lot about how
| systems of agents (both human and machine) can voluntarily
| cooperate and coordinate together.
|
| The second principle about agency connects to a lot of things.
| Among them, I can draw connection to the Living Systems world
| view, in contrast to the Machine World view. The former retains
| meaning and purpose for humans, and the latter can be summed up
| as "beat to fit and paint to match".
|
| The third principle struck me as practical yet narrow in scope.
| On a second pass, I think there's something more general that can
| be teased out of it. I'm not exactly sure what it is. In some
| ways, it reminds me of how software can be improved iteratively,
| or what Alexander had wrote about "unfolding", where designs can
| change to suit inhabitants of a building.
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