3 Laws of Robotics

My three laws of robotics.

The companies that I have founded have sold 50+ million real robots to real customers; research robots, home cleaning, nuclear power plant inspection, military ground robots, upper body humanoids in factories, and now at http://Robust.AI, intelligent carts in warehouses and factories. I'm aiming to get to 9 digits of robots rather than a mere 8, and in thinking about that I've reviewed my own implicit three laws of robotics that have guided me, and now have written them down explicitly. Here they are:

1. The visual appearance of a robot makes a promise about what it can do and how smart it is. It needs to deliver or slightly over deliver on that promise or it will not be accepted.

2. When robots and people coexist in the same spaces, the robots must not take away from people’s agency, particularly when the robots are failing, as inevitably they will at times.

3. Technologies for robots need 10+ years of steady improvement beyond lab demos of the target tasks to mature to low cost and to have their limitations characterized well enough that they can deliver 99.9% of the time. Every 10 more years gets another 9 in reliability.

-Rodney Brooks, CTO & Founder