Enlarge / Robots doing robot things.
Today is the second week of our experiment connecting a podcast to the written pages here at Ars. Specifically, we’re running episodes of my tech- and science-heavy podcast (called After On) in installments. You can access these episodes via an embedded audio player or by reading accompanying transcripts (both of which are below). The podcast is built around deep-dive interviews with world-class thinkers, founders, and scientists. Episodes generally run 60 to 120 minutes, which we carve up into two to four daily segments for Ars. (The first part of last week’s episode is available here.)
This week, my guest is the world-renowned roboticist and AI pioneer Rodney Brooks. Rodney co-founded iRobot. Best known for its Roomba vacuum cleaner, the company makes many other product as well—such as robots that defuse IEDs and other deadly contraptions in war zones. Rodney later founded Rethink Robotics, makers of the dexterous and creepily human-ish Sawyer and Baxter robots. Rodney’s celebrated academic career spanned decades, including many years running the AI and robotics lab at MIT. He was even the subject of a major documentary by legendary filmmaker Errol Morris.
I first posted the full episode to my podcast’s feed on March 19th, and we’ll run the show in three installments here on Ars. In our opening installment today, Rodney talks about getting tech news by steamship as a kid (yes, really)—living on the southern fringe of the inhabited world, with nothing on the (very) far side of the water but Antarctica. From there, we trace his journey to Stanford, then MIT, and through his creation of three companies—one of which had fourteen failed business models before finally hitting paydirt.
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