Rodney Brooks

Chief Technical Officer, iRobot Corp

Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT and CTO of iRobot Corp (Nasdaq: IRBT). He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984. He has published papers and books in model-based computer vision, path planning, uncertainty analysis, robot assembly, active vision, autonomous robots, micro-robots, micro-actuators, planetary exploration, representation, artificial life, humanoid robots, and compiler design.

Dr. Brooks is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science, and a Foreign Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.

At the 2007 Singularity Summit in San Francisco, hosted by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, he gave a keynote lecture entitled "The Singularity: A Period Not An Event." He predicted that whatever it is that writes future history, it will look back at what we are calling the singularity not as a single event but as a period of time. The singularity period will encompass a time where a collection of technologies were invented, developed, and deployed in fits and starts, driven not by the imperative of the singularity itself, but by the normal economic and sociological pressures of human affairs.

A Hollywood treatment of the singularity would have a world just like today's, plus the singularity, as a singular event. In reality, the world will be changing continuously due to rapid growth in technologies that are both related and unrelated to the singularity itself. The future will be embedded in a different world than the one we inhabit. And the AI systems we create will not have the same desires, beliefs, and goals as today-us. Tomorrow-us will be much better equipped for the changes that will take place in our world. This talk will explore how things might unfold and how we will transform ourselves along the way.

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The Limits of Intelligent Machines: Moderated by Rodney Brooks

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2007 Singularity Summit keynote
British Computer Society, Robotkind: on the battlefield and in the home

transcripts

2007 Singularity Summit, "The Singularity: A Period Not An Event"

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2007 Singularity Summit, "The Singularity: A Period Not An Event"