All through the fall my head was spinning, and I steered into the spin by watching Fast. Cheap & Out of Control, 1. Errol Morris' rhapsodic 1997 documentary about a bunch of monomaniacs features a xylophone heavy score and the roboticist Rodney Brooks. 1 wanted to hear Brooks dilate on robots in his cosmic way again. 2. As it happens, this fall had also seemed like the right time to clean the hell out of my apartment. To that end, I bought a Roomba, the blockbuster robovac Brooks coinvented in 2002. five years after he went public in the Morris movie with his theo ries of what robots ought and ought not to be. Among his most famous aphorisms: "Robots are good at very simple things like cleaning the floor." 3. So while Roomba purred around the living room, very good at its simple thing, which is clean-ing the floor, I found the Morris movie and entered that sweet hopeful decade of my early adulthood, the dawn of modern-day artificial intelligence, when AI was still called robots and machine learning was still called consciousness (with a question mark): consciousness? The 1990s.
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