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
Robotics is very interdisciplinary, and so, except at a very few colleges, there is not a major that is exactly fitted to robotics.
The benefits of having robots could vastly outweigh the problems.
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.
Artificial intelligence is a tool, not a threat
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.