As founder of iRobots and Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT, Dr. Rodney Brooks has a unique and highly qualified perspective of robotics and artificial intelligence. Much of Dr. Brooks' perspective can be seen as related to Arthur C. Clarke's quotation concerning technology: "When it comes to technology, most people over-estimate it in the short term and under-estimate it in the longer term."
In this keynote presentation from the 2007 Singularity Summit, Dr. Brooks explains some of the fallacies (and difficulties) in predicting the future, especially when we use movies as examples. By unequivocally stating his position on the singularity, Dr. Brooks provides a foundation to further explore his opinions on whether the future needs AI and robotics.
To help the audience understand those needs, Dr. Brooks provides an examination of several examples of exponential technology growth, with a special look at the current state of robotics. Dr. Brooks concludes his presentation by delivering on the premise of the Singularity Summit with some surprising singularity scenarios that he believes are not under consideration.
Dr. Rodney Brooks was Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT. He is also co-founder and CTO of iRobot Corp. 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 has published numerous papers and books on a wide array of robotic-related topics. Dr. Brooks is a member of many distinguished academic and science related associations, most notably, he is a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Resources
This free podcast is from our Singularity Summit series.
For The Conversations Network: