Our Robot Future September 2023

Dear Readers,

Well I am not succeeding in getting this newsletter out a little earlier this month. I had great hopes but COVID caught me for the tail part of the month. For those getting this newsletter for the first time welcome. Here’s the deal if you are on the free tier you get one newsletter, every three months, if you pay you get all the intervening newsletters. So if you like what you see toss me $5 a month and get the rest of the newsletters. For those sponsoring this, thank you, I hope you find it enlightening.

When I caught COVID I was out in CA for Tech Crunch Disrupt and attending the factory launch party for Agility Robotics Digit. Agility is opening a factory in Oregon that will be capable of producing 10,000 digit humanoids a year: (https://agilityrobotics.com/news/2023/opening-robofab-worlds-first-factory-for-humanoid-robotsnbsp)

I got to chat a bit with Pras Velagapudi about his work using large language models, in this case ChatGPT, as an action planner for digit in clean up tasks. The embeded knowledge for robot direction held within large language models is a significant resource and that is going to help unlock using robots in unstructured evironments. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq_DcZ_xc_E). Of course a bit later in the evening when I was able to bring this up to Rodney Brooks he reassured me humanoids walking the streets was something that was NIML. A Not in my lifetime event. Here’s hoping that Rodney is wrong on that both in respect to him living a long life and robots walking the streets in a decade or so.

On a more somber note related to mortality the renowned AI researcher Doug Lenat passed on August 31st. To many younger readers that name may not mean anything but Doug was responsible for the CYC project. Which still probably means nothing to the younger readers, but in terms of publicity and press CYC was the ChatGPT of the 90s and was the great project of the symbolic AI period.

I remember reading about it in High School and college being astounded by the associations being made by the system. Much like a an early chatGPT it had a conversational interface that let you talk to the system chatbot style. Though I think we would have been a bit blown away by ChatGPT’s current ability to hear and see (https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-can-now-see-hear-and-speak). But given the technology of the day the stories of CYC were astounding. At the time CYC was able to make revelatory connections, based on a grounded set of associations that are human readable.

Doug published a paper shortly before his passing with Gary Marcus, https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04445, that laid out a bold vision for melding these two worlds of AI the symbolic world of CYC and the modern LLM, to create more trustworthy AI. I think as they stated in the abstract “any trustworthy general AI will need to hybridize the approaches, the LLM approach and more formal approach . . .” and this paper is a good starting point to finding such an approach.

In other news the Writer’s Guild of America (W.G.A) struck a strike deal with the Studios. This deal is good news for anybody fighting to keep and adapt their jobs in the face of automation. I found the comparisons drawn by the New York Times to prior labor actions in the face of automation enlightening. Here is an excerpt:

“In the past, when labor has sought to simply resist or impede technological change, it’s been completely run over. Ask any of the 6,000 hot-metal typesetters, compositors and other workers whom News International summarily dismissed in 1986 when Rupert Murdoch secretly transferred newspaper production from London’s famous Fleet Street to the company’s state-of-the-art computerized facility in the London Docklands. Rather than negotiating a more gradual transition, along with buyouts and rules around worker reskilling and reassignment, the union dug in — and lost. They walked away with nothing. The event catapulted Murdoch to international fame without costing him a single day of production or distribution on any of his papers.

The W.G.A. may have taken a lesson from more successful tactics, such as those of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in 1960. Their leader, Harry Bridges, convinced a reluctant rank-and-file that they would have to face the reality of port containerization, meaning many jobs would disappear as shipping containers, and the attendant technology, became more prevalent. Instead of opposing this implementation, Mr. Bridges negotiated wage and job guarantees for most workers and generous benefits for those displaced. Mr. Bridges’s strategy was itself informed by the United Mine Workers’ Mechanization Agreement in 1950. Negotiated by John L. Lewis, it encouraged the mechanization of large mines and the windfall returns it would generate — not just for the mine owners but also for the rank-and-file workers and retirees.”

-- Dr. Adam Seth Litwin Cornell University, New York Times, September 29, 2023 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/opinion/wga-strike-deal-ai-jobs.html

For folks interested in this vision of a blended future of humans working WITH robots I highly recommend the following. First this podcast with Tye Brady from Amazon Robotics: https://www.geekwire.com/2023/amazons-robots-and-its-larger-vision-for-work-a-conversation-with-robotics-tech-leader-tye-brady/

And second: This paper by Dr. Karen Eggleston of Stanford University on the use of automation in Japanese nursing homes:

https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/robotics-and-future-work-lessons-nursing-homes-japan

Finally Mass Robotics had their RoboBoston block party today. For those who remember the Providence Robot Block Party, RoboBoston is very similar. A large public event filled with robotics companies, robots and the kids who will be the next generation of robotics innovators.

Until next time,

Peter Haas