Rodney Brooks

If you make your robot look exactly like Albert Einstein, then the robot better be as smart as Einstein, or its user…

— Rodney Brooks

Robotics is very interdisciplinary, and so, except at a very few colleges, there is not a major that is exactly fitted to…

— Rodney Brooks

When I look out in the future, I can't imagine a world, 500 years from now, where we don't have robots everywhere.

— 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

Two big questions that people ask me are: if we make these robots more and more human-like, will we accept them -…

— Rodney Brooks

You can make the assumption that most human drivers are not out to kill pedestrians. Well, maybe in some parts of Boston…

— Rodney Brooks

Each of the essays in this volume ranges widely across technical and philosophical domains. They examine both familiar automatons from throughout history…

— Rodney Brooks

Every technology, every science that tells us more about ourselves, is scary at the time.

— Rodney Brooks

I begin by looking for megatrends, changes in the world that will create major new demands. My goal is to create a…

— Rodney Brooks

Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers, programs written for them usually did not work.

— Rodney Brooks

The most important thing for building a robot that you can interact with socially is its visual attention system. Because what it…

— Rodney Brooks

If you want a machine to be able to interact with people, it better not do things that are surprising to people.

— Rodney Brooks

Hands-on experience is the best way to learn about all the interdisciplinary aspects of robotics.

— Rodney Brooks

I always tell people, it's never too late to start saving for retirement. It's not that important how much you have already…

— Rodney Brooks

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

I see robotic technology getting rid of the dangerous, the dirty, and the just plain boring jobs. Some people say, 'You can't.…

— Rodney Brooks

I'd rather have half of my idea change the world than my whole idea be a few papers in a journal.

— Rodney Brooks

The question is, you know, will someone accidentally build a robot that takes over from us? And that's sort of like this…

— Rodney Brooks

So robots are good at very simple things like cleaning the floor, like doing a repetitive task. Our robots have a little…

— Rodney Brooks

One of the great things about the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, which my company iRobot designed, is that it's too cheap not…

— Rodney Brooks

We have to accept that we are just machines. That's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us.

— Rodney Brooks

Anything that's living is a machine. I'm a machine; my children are machines. I can step back and see them as being…

— Rodney Brooks

My talent is getting things to work that people think are many decades in the future. I say we can make them…

— Rodney Brooks

People don't say, 'I just had a kid and I hope it turns out to be a factory worker.'

— Rodney Brooks

Are those 'terrible' machines really putting those people out of work? Or are they getting rid of a really dull job that…

— Rodney Brooks