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
Hands-on experience is the best way to learn about all the interdisciplinary aspects of robotics.
Robotics is very interdisciplinary, and so, except at a very few colleges, there is not a major that is exactly fitted to robotics.
We have to accept that we are just machines. That's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us.
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 won some genetic lottery. I always happened to be strangely good at mathematics in my head. I just popped out weird.
People don't say, 'I just had a kid and I hope it turns out to be a factory worker.'
The benefits of having robots could vastly outweigh the problems.
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.
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.
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.
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.