Artificial intelligence is a tool, not a threat Rodney Brooks More Quotes by Rodney Brooks More Quotes From Rodney Brooks I won some genetic lottery. I always happened to be strangely good at mathematics in my head. I just popped out weird. Rodney Brooks weird good always mathematics We have to accept that we are just machines. That's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us. Rodney Brooks us just accept biology 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. Rodney Brooks computers you toys people 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. Rodney Brooks mathematics family science school 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. Rodney Brooks things great great-things company 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. Rodney Brooks you technology sun people People don't say, 'I just had a kid and I hope it turns out to be a factory worker.' Rodney Brooks say kid hope people 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. Rodney Brooks me you research people 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. Rodney Brooks being capable revolution office 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. Rodney Brooks you building understanding important 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. Rodney Brooks someone think know you 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. Rodney Brooks bag skin step children If you want a machine to be able to interact with people, it better not do things that are surprising to people. Rodney Brooks better you want people Robotics is very interdisciplinary, and so, except at a very few colleges, there is not a major that is exactly fitted to robotics. Rodney Brooks few except very robotics The benefits of having robots could vastly outweigh the problems. Rodney Brooks having problems robots benefits Every technology, every science that tells us more about ourselves, is scary at the time. Rodney Brooks more technology time science 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. Rodney Brooks say understand society limits I moved to MIT from Stanford in 1984 to teach, and became the founding director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Rodney Brooks computer-science intelligence science 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. Rodney Brooks person new robots train
