Rodney Brooks
Rodney Brooks
Rodney Allen Brooksis an Australian roboticist, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, author, and robotics entrepreneur, most known for popularizing the actionist approach to robotics. He was a Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is a founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot and co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Rethink Robotics. Outside the scientific community Brooks is also known...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth30 December 1954
CountryAustralia
Every technology, every science that tells us more about ourselves, is scary at the time.
In the future, I'm sure there will be a lot more robots in every aspect of life. If you told people in 1985 that in 25 years they would have computers in their kitchen, it would have made no sense to them.
We have to accept that we are just machines. That's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us.
One of the great things about the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, which my company iRobot designed, is that it's too cheap not to be autonomous.
If you want a machine to be able to interact with people, it better not do things that are surprising to people.
If you make your robot look exactly like Albert Einstein, then the robot better be as smart as Einstein, or its user is going to feel cheated.
I see robotic technology getting rid of the dangerous, the dirty, and the just plain boring jobs. Some people say, 'You can't. People won't have anything to do.' But we found things that were a lot easier than backbreaking labor in the sun and the fields. Let people rise to better things.
Anything that's living is a machine. I'm a machine; my children are machines. I can step back and see them as being a bag of skin full of biomolecules that are interacting according to some laws.
Robotics is very interdisciplinary, and so, except at a very few colleges, there is not a major that is exactly fitted to robotics.
Hands-on experience is the best way to learn about all the interdisciplinary aspects of robotics.
If we are machines, then in principle at least, we should be able to build machines out of other stuff, which are just as alive as we are.
Artificial intelligence is a tool, not a threat
So robots are good at very simple things like cleaning the floor, like doing a repetitive task. Our robots have a little tiny bit of common sense. Our robots know that if they've got something in their hand and they drop it, it's gone. They shouldn't go and try and put it down.
Well, I think we are seeing some shifts in manufacturing. China, when you go in and you talk to the big manufacturers there, the biggest problems in mainland China are recruiting and retention. There isn't an endless supply of cheap labor anymore in China. And it's now true that the labor rates in Mexico are lower than in China.