A Better Lesson – Rodney Brooks

Just last week Rich Sutton published a very short blog post titled The Bitter Lesson. I'm going to try to keep this review shorter than his post. Sutton is well known for his long and sustained contributions to reinforcement learning. In his post he argues, using many good examples, that over the 70 year history of AI, more computation and less built in knowledge has always won out as the best way to build Artificial Intelligence systems. This resonates with a current mode of thinking among many of the newer entrants to AI that it is better to design learning networks and put in massive amounts of computer power, than to try to design a structure for computation that is specialized in any way for the task.