Rodney Brooks

I see robotic technology getting rid of the dangerous, the dirty, and the just plain boring jobs. Some people say, 'You can't. People won't have anything to do.' But we found things that were a lot easier than backbreaking labor in the sun and the fields. Let people rise to better things.

Hands-on experience is the best way to learn about all the interdisciplinary aspects of robotics.

I moved to MIT from Stanford in 1984 to teach, and became the founding director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Computers sort of came around through games and toys. And you know, the first computer most people had in the house may have been a computer to play 'Pong,' a little microprocessor embedded, and then other games that came after that.

In the future, I'm sure there will be a lot more robots in every aspect of life. If you told people in 1985 that in 25 years they would have computers in their kitchen, it would have made no sense to them.