Rodney Brooks has spent his entire life at the intersection of robotics, computers, and AI. When the Roomba vacuum cleaner launched in 2002, his company, iRobot, brought all three into millions of people’s homes.

iRobot had already succeeded with robots for space exploration, mine detection, search missions, and military applications. However, after the Roomba came out, it went public with a valuation of $600 million. By then, Rodney had been working on AI and robots for decades alongside the original creators of AI at Stanford and MIT. On today’s episode, we discuss: