Today we present the third and final installment of my interview with the world-renowned roboticist and AI pioneer Rodney Brooks. Please check out parts one and two if you missed them.

We start today’s installment with the very cliffhanger sentence yesterday’s installment ended with: Rodney saying “Yeah, let’s talk about deep learning.” We proceed to do just that. For anyone giddy about the glittering newness of neural networks and the deep learning systems they power, Rodney points out that this work began in 1943.

This leads to an argument similar to yesterday’s point about self-driving cars regarding the importance of knowing a technology’s full history before handicapping its future. Rodney’s basic point is that deep learning is an overnight success that required 70 years to percolate. So the next giant breakthrough could be further off than we think.

This takes us to super AI risk, which Rodney believes is quite overblown. He contends that augmented variants of natural intelligence are more likely to present a threat before anything purely digital—a provocative thought that may deserve more play. In this part of our conversation, Rodney expands on many of the fine points from his essay “The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI.”

As I noted in my introduction to the first installment on Wednesday, If your job description includes freaking out about AI risks (and I guess mine kind of does) you may find Rodney’s perspective to be frustratingly sanguine. On the other hand, if you prefer that humanity not perish at the hands of amoral and genocidal AI overlords, you might find his arguments reassuring, particularly given the authority and experience that they're based on.

If you enjoyed my interview with Rodney, please consider browsing the full archives of the After On podcast on my site. Alternatively, you can find it in your favorite podcast app simply by searching for “After On.” I’ve posted deep-dive interviews with dozens of world-class thinkers, founders, and scientists—tackling subjects like cryptocurrency, astrophysics, drones, genomics, synthetic biology, neuroscience, consciousness, privacy and government hacking, and more.

I also hope you’ll join me here again on Ars next week, when we’ll be featuring another of my episodes.

This special edition of the Ars Technicast podcast can be accessed in the following places:

iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ars-technicast/id522504024?mt=2 (Might take several hours after publication to appear.)

RSS:

http://arstechnica.libsyn.com/rss

Stitcher

http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/ars-technicast/the-ars-technicast

Libsyn:

http://directory.libsyn.com/shows/view/id/arstechnica