IEEE Spectrum asked pioneering roboticist Rodney Brooks, co-founder of iRobot and former head of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the eternal engineering question: "What is a robot?" Inspired by computational neuroscientist Warren McCulloch who enjoyed writing sonnets, Brooks responded to the query in iambic pentameter. — Read the rest

Rodney Brooks is the father of the Roomba, the founder of iRobot, and the creator of both the Baxter and Sawyer product lines from Rethink Robotics. He's arguably the world's most accomplished roboticist. And if he's not – and I personally can't think of who could challenge him for that crown – he's definitely the top roboticist to be profiled in an Errol Morris documentary (1997's Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control). — Read the rest

Jim Mason writes:

"interesting article on Rodney Brooks' iRobot company, focusing on a military 'bot used in Afghanistan and an autonomous vacuum cleaner for $200."

image at left: iRobot engineer Greg Landry places the company's Pyramid Rover inside a shaft at the Great Pyramid of Giza. — Read the rest

I do a weekly tips newsletter for DIYers of all kinds. For the third year on Boing Boing, here is my year-end round up of my favorite newsletter entries. If you want to see more of this sort of content, please subscribe. — Read the rest

Rodney Brooks (previously) is a distinguished computer scientist and roboticist (he's served as as head of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and CTO of Irobot); two years ago, he published a list of "dated predictions" intended to cool down some of the hype about self-driving cars, machine learning, and robotics, hype that he viewed as dangerously gaseous.

Rodney Brooks — eminent computer scientist and roboticist who has served as head of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and CTO of Irobot — has written a scorching, provocative list of the seven most common errors made (or cards palmed) by pundits and other fortune-tellers when they predict the future of AI.

MIT Professor Emeritus of Robotic Rodney Brooks has published a thought-provoking essay on the most concrete, most likely ethical questions that will be raised by self-driving cars; Brooks is uninterested in contrived questions like the "Trolley Problem" (as am I, but for different reasons); he's more attuned to the immediate problems that could be created by selfish self-drivers who use their cars to get an edge over the people who drive themselves, and pedestrians.

Literary podcaster Rick Kleffer writes, "I must admit that it was too much fun to sit down with John Markoff and talk (MP3) about his book Machines of Loving Grace. Long ago, I booted up a creaking, mothballed version of one of the first Xerox minicomputers equipped with a mouse to extract legacy software for E-mu. — Read the rest

Over at BB pal John Brockman's Edge.org, nearly 200 very smart people, like Daniel C. Dennett, Brian Eno, Alison Gopnik, Nina Jablonski, Peter Norvig, and Rodney Brooks, ponder the EDGE Annual Question of 2015: What do you think about machines that think? — Read the rest

Our dear BB pal and STREETtech.com editor Gareth Branwyn is the first guestblogger at LEGO's Nxtbot, a new blog about LEGO Mindstorms NXT and DIY robotics in general. From one of Gar's posts today:

MIT's Rodney Brooks has an adage (to paraphrase): A bunch of working "dumb" bots (i.e.

Each year, John Brockman at Edge.org asks some of the brightest minds in science and technology to consider one question. This year: What is your dangerous idea?

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious.

Ambiguous.org's Quinn Norton covers last weekend's Robogames event for the O'Reilly Network:

A sensor board coordinates data from two infrared controllers at 45° and 135° (angled to give some advanced data about the angle of the walls just in front of the robot).

If you're anywhere near San Francisco this weekend, join me at the inaugural edition of Wired Magazine's NextFest.

I worked with Wired Magazine to produce a series of panels, presentations, and "fireside chats" at the event — guests include Andrew Stanton from Pixar, "Doom" creator John Carmack, Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson, X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis, James Luyten of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Xcor CEO Jeff Greason, NASA Space Architect Gary Martin, robotics guru Rodney Brooks, and creators of the film "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow." — Read the rest

CMU in Pennsylvania is creating a "Robot hall of Fame" to honor great bots, both real and fictional. The first inductees will be honored this fall, and plans for the hall include interactive and educational exhibits about robotics, as well as a possible arena for RoboCup robotic soccer competitions. — Read the rest

For the 6th Annual edition of Edge.org's "World Question," John Brockman posed the following imaginary query from George W. Bush to the Third Culture mail list:

"What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the
world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with them?"

"There's this stupid myth out there that A.I. has failed, but A.I. is everywhere around you every second of the day. People just don't notice it." MIT robot evangelist Rodney Brooks talks to Technology Review. Link Discuss — Read the rest

The future sucks. WEF presentations predict a dire technocratic future rife with superbugs, killer robots and global warming. Predictably enough, the AI guys are still trying to convince us that they're going to have viable AI any day now, only now they're expressing this prediction as a warning. — Read the rest