43 Quotes by Rodney Brooks

So robots are good at very simple things like cleaning the floor, like doing a repetitive task. Our robots have a little tiny bit of common sense. Our robots know that if they've got something in their hand and they drop it, it's gone. They shouldn't go and try and put it down.

Well, I think we are seeing some shifts in manufacturing. China, when you go in and you talk to the big manufacturers there, the biggest problems in mainland China are recruiting and retention. There isn't an endless supply of cheap labor anymore in China. And it's now true that the labor rates in Mexico are lower than in China.

I begin by looking for megatrends, changes in the world that will create major new demands. My goal is to create a company that can be there to meet those demands.

If you're doing something radically new, you need a team that's willing to go on a ride that's very different from anything they've encountered before.

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

When people lose faith in the idea, you have to let them go, because they start to undermine it for everyone else.

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

I think it's very easy for people who are not deep in the technology itself to make generalizations, which may be a little dangerous. And we've certainly seen that recently with Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, all saying AI is just taking off and it's going to take over the world very quickly. And the thing that they share is none of them work in this technological field.

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