People Think AI Was Created 3 Years Ago | Dr. Stephen Smith

A lot of people think AI was created about 3 years ago. Dr. Stephen Smith got his PhD in it in 1980, when his work was one of the first so-called learning systems, and today he's a research professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon and the president of AAAI, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. (He's Steve to me, because we're close personal friends. I started doing AI in 1989, when Portland State hired a 15-year-old to write bad C programs for a Prolog program to catch, and I wasn't writing buggy enough programs, so they moved me to the Prolog side. Edward, that is a very weird brag.)

Steve works on traffic lights. His system, Surtrac, has no central node at the top: every intersection watches the traffic coming at it, builds its own timing plan, tells its downstream neighbors what's headed their way, and does it all again every second or two. So I told him about a town outside Orlando where all the traffic in the world was going east-west, a couple of cars were going north-south, and by God, they timed them equally. He said that's exactly what his technology does. (I'm still not going back to that town.)

Share your route with the intersection (the one you're already following in Google Maps or Waze) and he says you get through his network maybe 20% faster, without slowing down anybody who isn't connected. Then he'd like to charge you a couple pennies for it, as a voluntary toll, so a city has its own revenue stream instead of waiting on the federal gas tax to work its way down through the state DOTs. One northeastern city heard that and brought up its potholes.

When they first deployed it in Pittsburgh, they started hearing from pedestrians right away, and he admits they weren't really thinking about pedestrians. So the lab built a smartphone app for people who are vision impaired that talks to the signal and can give them more green time to finish crossing.

We also got to LLMs, which he says are kind of like brains that sit behind a screen (reasoning and planning are not really their strong points), and to jobs, where he doesn't see massive unemployment coming. I told the story of the first traffic light, outside Parliament in 1868 (I said I'd get the year wrong, and I didn't), and assigned everybody listening to go watch Cars.

Steve is speaking at the Caribbean AI Summit, October 9-10 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on "AI for Smart Cities & Urban Mobility." Come down and tell him about your worst intersection.

I'm Edward Roske, and this is Asking Good Questions. New conversations with the people figuring out the human side of AI. If one of these questions stuck with you, subscribe and send it to someone who'd take the other side.

LINKS
Caribbean AI Summit (Oct 9-10, San Juan): https://CaribbeanSummit.AI
Steve at CMU's Robotics Institute: https://www.ri.cmu.edu/ri-faculty/stephen-smith/
Steve's research page: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sfs/
AAAI: https://aaai.org
Surtrac, now part of Miovision: https://miovision.com/adaptive/

BOOKS & RESEARCH MENTIONED
The Last Days of Night, Graham Moore (2016), Edward's pick on the war of the currents
Cars (Pixar, 2006), your homework, and the town of Radiator Springs
John Peake Knight's gas-lamp signal outside Parliament (December 1868), the first traffic light
AAAI-82, the second AAAI conference, held at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh
The Dartmouth proposal (John McCarthy, 1955), where the phrase "artificial intelligence" comes from
Moravec's paradox (Hans Moravec, 1988), the idea behind Steve's dropped ball
NASA's HOME institute for deep-space habitats (2019)
Carmel, Indiana, the Roundabout City
Also mentioned: Surtrac, Prolog, Google Maps, Waze, Uber, Lyft, Amazon's warehouse robots, embodied AI, the interstate highway system

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