Rodney Brooks

“The benefits of having robots could vastly outweigh the problems.”

“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.”

“Robotics is very interdisciplinary, and so, except at a very few colleges, there is not a major that is exactly fitted to robotics.”

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

“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.”

“If you make your robot look exactly like Albert Einstein, then the robot better be as smart as Einstein, or its user is going to feel cheated.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I won some genetic lottery. I always happened to be strangely good at mathematics in my head. I just popped out weird.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I moved to MIT from Stanford in 1984 to teach, and became the founding director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.”

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

“Are those 'terrible' machines really putting those people out of work? Or are they getting rid of a really dull job that we shouldn't be torturing people with?”

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

“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.”