I’m roboticist Rodney Brooks and have spent my career thinking about how artificial and intelligent systems should interact with humans. Ask Me Anything!

How will humans and robots interact in the future? How should we think about artificial intelligence, and how does it compare to human consciousness? And how can we build robots that can do useful things for humans?

These are the questions I’ve spent my career trying to answer. I was the chairman and chief technology officer of Rethink Robotics, which developed collaborative robots named Baxter and Sawyer, but ultimately closed in October 2018. I’m also cofounder of iRobot, which brought Roomba to the world.

I recently shared my thoughts on how to bet on new technologies, and what makes a new technology “easy” or “hard,” in an essay for IEEE Spectrum: https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/the-rodney-brooks-rules-for-predicting-a-technologys-commercial-success

And back in 2009, I wrote about how I think human and artificial intelligence will evolve together in the future. https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/i-rodney-brooks-am-a-robot

I’ll be here for one hour starting at 11AM PT / 2 PM ET on Friday, November 16. Ask me anything!

Proof: https://i.redd.it/etrpximjqdy11.jpg