AGI could be 300 years away because we’re dealing in the wrong kind of stuff.

hereas generative AI means we’re more question-oriented going forward. The ability to ask the right questions is going to separate us from being really good versus just average. You have to be someone special to be able to ask questions in philosophy and art and robotics and AI. Not everybody can connect the dots. So maybe there’s a whole new class... See more

Om: Before you go, how should we correctly think about robotics and AI. Right now there is a hype way of thinking about it, there is a negative way of thinking about it. What is the right way?

Rodney: The right way of thinking about it is that appearance alone is not everything. There are things that are incredibly hard for us to do with technology... See more

Rodney : There’s a new rhythm, and what I fear is that everyone jumps into new orthodoxies. For a few years now, people have been saying if you’re not working on neural net-based AI, you’re in the past, you’re a dinosaur. I guarantee there will be things that people have been working on for years that will become important and they’re not... See more

Rodney: Building a machine which could do all the things we do with our brain. It may be something that we haven’t even thought about.

[ Brooks is right in pointing out that we are busy propping up an education system that creates work for an industrial and industrial-version of digital economies. Germans (and many other parts of the world) have this idea of diplomas in specialized trade skills, which is exactly how we are going to be thinking about in the future, because the idea... See more

Rodney: It’s going to have an impact and a lot of it will be wasted too.

This bemoaning of manufacturing being lost is a little duplicitous—it’s not for us, it’s for the poor people.

Generative AI challenges us intellectually. John Searle at Berkeley talked about the Chinese Room argument. ( It says that no matter how smart a computer seems, it can’t have human consciousness.–Ed ) Well, the Chinese Room showed up. I recently gave an example. I used Google to give me a Chinese output for: “Who is Ai Weiwei?”