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
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 most important thing for building a robot that you can interact with socially is its visual attention system. Because what it pays attention to is what it's seeing and interacting with, and what you're understanding what it's doing.
The question is, you know, will someone accidentally build a robot that takes over from us? And that's sort of like this lone guy in the backyard, you know - 'I accidentally built a 747.' I don't think that's going to happen.
With the revolution around 1980 of PCs, the spreadsheet programs were tuned for office workers - not to replace office workers, but it respected office workers as being capable of being programmers. So office workers became programmers of spreadsheets. It increased their capabilities.
You can make the assumption that most human drivers are not out to kill pedestrians. Well, maybe in some parts of Boston they are. But with a person at the wheel who you can see, you behave accordingly. With the robotic car, how do you know what assumption to make?
Two big questions that people ask me are: if we make these robots more and more human-like, will we accept them - will they need rights eventually? And the other question people ask me is, will they want to take over?
When I look out in the future, I can't imagine a world, 500 years from now, where we don't have robots everywhere.
I think it's very easy for people who are not deep in the technology itself to make generalizations, which may be a little dangerous. And we've certainly seen that recently with Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, all saying AI is just taking off and it's going to take over the world very quickly. And the thing that they share is none of them work in this technological field.
My talent is getting things to work that people think are many decades in the future. I say we can make them happen now.
When people lose faith in the idea, you have to let them go, because they start to undermine it for everyone else.
I'd rather have half of my idea change the world than my whole idea be a few papers in a journal.
If you're doing something radically new, you need a team that's willing to go on a ride that's very different from anything they've encountered before.
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.
Artificial intelligence is a tool, not a threat