Rodney Brooks Quotes

I got interested in computers and how they could be enslaved to the megalomaniac impulses of a teenager.

I thank God for not making me a computer scientist.

The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

I just write mechanical things.

The idea of a computer winning the Nobel Prize for physics is not too unlikely, citing a computer as joint recipient. It's obviously not a huge leap to think of something similar happening in fiction.

Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you're given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world.

At Harvard, I worked for some time as a researcher in a lab for computer graphics and spatial analysis, which is one of the birthplaces for what we do.

I'm fascinated by artificial intelligence.

Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.

Yeah, computers are going to take over the programming business because they have become so fast recently that they can solve the Halting Problem in five seconds flat.

No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does.

Dad was very into electronics, robotics and computers, so I was interested in what he was doing.

Machines built by human beings they will function correctly if we provide them with a very specific environment. But if that environment is changed, they won't function at all.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

Unlike us, machines do not have a 'nature' consistent across vast reaches of time. They are, at least to begin with, whatever we set in motion - with an inbuilt tendency towards the exponential.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

I've always been interested in technology, but specifically how we can use machines to engage the imagination. I started using computers when I was young and was fascinated by creating rules and instructions that allow a computer to engage in a dialogue with humans. The stories found in the data all around us can do just that.

When you apply computer science and machine learning to areas that haven't had any innovation in 50 years, you can make rapid advances that seem really incredible.

My background really comes from geekdom and the idea of building a smart machine. If we're going to build a smart machine, let's have it read good books.

We didn't use the shuttle robot arm before, so this has been a training flow to get ready for that.

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.

With the advent of computing, human invention crossed a threshold into a world different from everything that came before. The computer is the universal machine almost by definition, machine-of-all-trades, capable of accomplishing or simulating just about any task that can be logically defined.

Computing technology started out as number-crunching.

Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.