Machines Like Us

In this prophetic talk from 2003, roboticist Rodney Brooks talks about how robots are going to work their way into our lives -- starting with toys and moving into household chores ... and beyond.

Rodney Brooks builds robots based on biological principles of movement and reasoning. In other words, instead of one giant HAL brain, he might build a swarm of small robots that use trial-and-error to develop intelligence. And it works.

Brooks realized that a top-down approach -- just building the biggest brain possible and teaching it everything we could think of -- would never work. What would work is a robot who learns like we do, by trial-and-error, and with many separate parts that learn separate jobs. The thesis of his work is captured in a paper that went on to become the title of the great Errol Morris documentary on Brooks and three others: Fast, Cheap and Out of Control.