Rodney Brooks Quotes

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.
Are those 'terrible' machines really putting those people out of work? Or are they getting rid of a really dull job that we shouldn't be torturing people with?
Computers sort of came around through games and toys. And you know, the first computer most people had in the house may have been a computer to play 'Pong,' a little microprocessor embedded, and then other games that came after that.
Every technology, every science that tells us more about ourselves, is scary at the time.
Hands-on experience is the best way to learn about all the interdisciplinary aspects of robotics.
I grew up in Adelaide, Australia. No one in my family had finished high school, and I was smart at mathematics, so I became an academic and got my Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford. I didn't set out to be a businessperson.
I moved to MIT from Stanford in 1984 to teach, and became the founding director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
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.
I won some genetic lottery. I always happened to be strangely good at mathematics in my head. I just popped out weird.
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.
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.
If you want a machine to be able to interact with people, it better not do things that are surprising to people.
In 2008, I decided I wanted to begin a new venture, so I started Rethink Robotics. We build factory robots that a person can learn to train in just a few minutes. In May 2011, I stepped off the iRobot board.
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.
It's reasonable to say that certain things we understand should perhaps have limits on how they're used and how certain technologies are deployed. That's very much what we should do as a society.
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.
People don't say, 'I just had a kid and I hope it turns out to be a factory worker.'
Robotics is very interdisciplinary, and so, except at a very few colleges, there is not a major that is exactly fitted to robotics.
So maybe with the research robots that are out there, people will come up with ways to use them to take care of the elderly. And that can help me someday. Because, you know what? I'm heading in that direction.
The benefits of having robots could vastly outweigh the problems.
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AuthorName
Rodney Brooks
Profession
Scientist
BirthDate
30 December, 1954
Country
Australia
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