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The roboticist Rodney Brooks, featured in Errol Morris’s 1997 documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control along with a lion-tamer, a topiarist, and an expert on the naked mole rat, was described by one reviewer as “smiling with a wild gleam in his eye.” But that’s pretty much true of most visionaries.
A few years later in his career, Brooks, as befits one of the world’s leading roboticists, suggested that “we overanthropomorphize humans, who are after all mere machines.” He went on to present a warm-hearted vision of a coming AI world in which “the distinction between us and robots is going to disappear.” He also admitted to something of a divided worldview. “Like a religious scientist, I maintain two sets of inconsistent beliefs and act on each of them in different circumstances,” he wrote. “It is this transcendence between belief systems that I think will be what enables mankind to ultimately accept robots as emotional machines, and thereafter start to empathize with them and attribute free will, respect, and ultimately rights to them.”
That was in 2002. In these pages, he takes a somewhat more jaundiced, albeit narrower, view; he is alarmed by the extent to which we have come to rely on pervasive systems that are not just exploitative but also vulnerable, as a result of the too-rapid development of software engineering—an advance that seems to have outstripped the imposition of reliably effective safeguards.

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