Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine

Useful robots could gain experience while people supervise a limited set of tasks. That is the development path described by Physical Intelligence cofounder Sergey Levine. He recounts progressing from directly controlling robots' movements to giving capable robots spoken instructions, such as moving a cup into a sink. Those directions provide information researchers can use to improve the system. Levine expects deployments with human assistance to create further learning opportunities, allowing responsibilities to expand as capability improves. His vision of a robot managing a household therefore involves much more than performing a dexterous demonstration: it must handle changing circumstances and recover from mistakes over extended periods.

“The robot is essentially encompassing all AI technology. If you can get a robot that's truly general, then you can do, hopefully, a large chunk of what people can do.”

Sergey Levine

“It also requires industrial scale building effort. It's more like the Apollo program than it is a science experiment.”

Sergey Levine

“Moravec's paradox says that in AI the easy things are hard and the hard things are easy.”

Sergey Levine

“when it's robot plus human now, there's a lot more potential for the robot to actually learn on the job, acquire new skills”

Sergey Levine

“Education is the best buffer somebody has against the negative effects of change. If there is one single lever that we can pull collectively as a society, it's more education.”

Sergey Levine