The Intelligence Age: A History of AI

From ancient automata to modern neural networks — the story of thinking machines

75 Milestones
700+ Years of history
∞ Growing daily
Rodney Brooks

Staff photographer / CC BY-SA 3.0

Rodney Brooks

actionist approach to robotics

  • Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT
  • founding director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
  • co-founder of Rethink Robotics

Rodney Allen Brooks is an Australian roboticist and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, known for popularizing the actionist approach to robotics and his significant contributions to the field of robotics.

Milestones

  • Elephants Don't Play Chess
    Expert Systems and the Knowledge Boom Philosophy
    Elephants Don't Play Chess

    A rebel roboticist published a manifesto arguing that true intelligence doesn't come from abstract reasoning — it comes from having a body in the world.

    1990
  • The Robot That Vacuumed Its Way Into Millions of Homes
    Statistical Learning and Quiet Progress Robotics
    The Robot That Vacuumed Its Way Into Millions of Homes

    iRobot's Roomba brought autonomous robotics out of labs and onto living room floors, becoming the most commercially successful home robot in history.

    2002
← All people