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The Rodney Brooks Hypothesis

“Artificial intelligence is a tool, not a threat.”

Rodney Brooks

 

The perception of the world would be possible for robots if there was the possibility to learn from this world, from their environment.  This is Rodney Brooks' hypothesis.

Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind is what my grandfather used to say:  if I had wheels, I would probably be a Ferrari, or its more sophisticated version, in my father: del senno di poi son piene le fosse, who quoted Manzoni every time he was presented with simplistic hypotheses.

It is clear that when artificial intelligence has the possibility to aprehend, it makes all the difference.

But Brooks is no simple man, and his work was developed at MIT.

The audacity of his proposal lies in its perspective.  The robotic system would be a being that knows absolutely nothing about its environment but is equipped with a sensory and motor system that gives it the ability to explore.  This is where the subtlety comes in: if it learns from what it perceives, such as not falling down the stairs the seventh time it encounters them, or not stepping on the tail of the dog that bit its calf, causing a small short circuit, it will be able to create increasingly complex interrelationships and, if it does not reach self-awareness, it will reach harmonious interaction with the environment.

Obviously, we started from a mechanistic and outdated approach when we conceived consciousness as an Aristotelian syllogism.

We already know what my father would say.

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