AI as a Hype Tool – Skynet Today

You are late for a work presentation due to rush-hour traffic, and you think to yourself, “if only the car could do this highly repetitive action autonomously and I could present at my meeting from the road”. But you have to feed the gas pedal every five seconds to move less than a few yards. If Silicon Valley’s stalwarts such as Waymo, Uber, and Lyft had delivered on their decade-old promises, this could have easily been a commonplace sight by now where cars would drive us to and from destinations without any human intervention.

In March 2021, Lyft relinquished its hope to create a fully-autonomous self-driving system and offloaded its self-driving division to Toyota’s Woven Planet Holdings subsidiary for $550 million. Rethink Robotics, a venture led by AI stalwart Rodney Brooks, also closed its doors in 2018 after dedicating a decade to ushering collaborative efforts between humans and intelligent robots for industrial automation. Additional fiascos in the robotics & AI space gave the impression that all wasn’t well in the much-hyped “AI kingdom”.

Although many quickly jumped the gun and declared that AI was doomed for another winter, people seemed to have missed the fact that these incidents were merely a surface-level effect of a much deep-rooted problem. For instance, Rethink Robotics’ predicament was a direct consequence of its obsession with creating the smartest robot, even if that was not the need of the hour. As a result, Rethink Robotics ended up creating overly complicated systems that were economically infeasible to scale, so they were futile to customers. Similarly, leading up to its divestment in Aurora, Uber ATG was plagued by a myriad of incidents ranging from the fatal pedestrian incident in Phoenix in 2019 to the infamous lawsuit against Anthony Levandowski.

Leave a Comment